Front Table 6/2/23

On This Week's Front Table, connect with the lives of three artistic giants through their writings, photographs, and letters; explore new histories of ourselves and our planet; and breathe the free air of inspired poetry. Browse these and more at semcoop.com. 

Always Reaching: The Selected Writings of Anne Truitt
(Yale University Press)
Anne Truitt

Spanning more than fifty years, this comprehensive volume collects the letters, journal entries, interviews, lectures, reviews, and remembrances of the groundbreaking twentieth-century artist Anne Truitt (1921-2004). Like Truitt's published journals, these writings offer a compelling narrative of her development as an artist and efforts to find her voice as a writer. They show that Truitt's creative impulse to translate the inner workings of her mind into a symbolic language, so important to understanding her sculpture, predates her art.


Ralph Ellison: Photographer
(Steidl)
Ralph Ellison

Ralph Ellison is a leading figure in American literature, hailed for his seminal novel Invisible Man (1952). Lesser known, however, is his lifelong engagement with photography. Photographer is the first book dedicated to Ellison's extensive work in the medium, which spans the 1930s to the '90s. During his formative years in New York City in the 1940s, he keenly photographed his surroundings—at times alongside fellow photographer Gordon Parks—with many images serving as field notes for his writing. In the last decades of his life, Ellison turned inward, and he studied his private universe at home with a Polaroid camera. At all times his photography reveals an artist steeped in modernist thinking who embraced experimentation to interpret the world around him, particularly Black life in America. 


Whatever's Forbidden the Wise
(Canarium Books)
Anthony Madrid

In Anthony Madrid's fourth book, Whatever's Forbidden the Wise, the poet appraises this world "full of ancient things whose shapes and colors have changed," as his singular, unforgettable voice resonates in ghazals, rubai, ditties, and "gnomic stanzas." A polymath and iconoclast, Madrid knows the names of the stars and turns their light into astonishing music.


The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality
(Pantheon Books)
Andy Clark

Widely acclaimed philosopher and cognitive scientist Andy Clark unpacks this provocative new theory that the brain is a powerful, dynamic prediction engine, mediating our experience of both body and world. Exploring its fascinating mechanics and remarkable implications for our lives, mental health, and society, Clark nimbly illustrates how the predictive brain sculpts all human experience. Chronic pain and mental illness are shown to involve subtle malfunctions of our unconscious predictions, pointing the way towards more effective, targeted treatments. Under renewed scrutiny, the very boundary between ourselves and the outside world dissolves, showing that we are as entangled with our environments as we are with our onboard memories, thoughts, and feelings.


perennial fashion presence falling
(Wave Books)
Fred Moten

Much like the poems found in The Feel Trio (Letter Machine 2014), which was a National Book Award finalist, and All That Beauty (Letter Machine, 2019), the poems here present Moten's "shaped prose" on the page and the dizzying brilliance of both polyphonies and paronomasia. Within this collection, the poems hold an innate quantum curiosity about the infinitude of the present and the ways in which one could observe the history of the future. Poems beget poems, overflowing and flowering, urging deeper etymological investigations. In perennial fashion presence falling, Moten approaches the sublime, relishing that intermediary space of microtonal thought.


The Letters of William Gaddis
(New York Review of Books)
William Gaddis, ed. Steven Moore

Now recognized as one of the giants of postwar American fiction, William Gaddis shunned the spotlight during his life, which makes this collection of his letters a revelation. Beginning in 1930 when Gaddis was at boarding school and ending in September 1998, a few months before his death, these letters function as a kind of autobiography, and also reveal the extent to which he drew upon events in his life for his fiction. This newly revised edition includes clarifying notes by Gaddis scholar Steven Moore, as well as an afterword by the author's daughter, Sarah Gaddis.


A World Without Soil: The Past, Present, and Precarious Future of the Earth Beneath Our Feet
(Yale University Press)
Jo Handlesman 

A celebrated biologist's manifesto addressing a soil loss crisis accelerated by poor conservation practices and climate change. Writing for a nonspecialist audience, Jo Handelsman celebrates the capacities of soil and explores the soil-related challenges of the near future. She begins by telling soil's origin story, explains how it erodes and the subsequent repercussions worldwide, and offers solutions. She considers lessons learned from indigenous people who have sustainably farmed the same land for thousands of years, practices developed for large-scale agriculture, and proposals using technology and policy initiatives.