BOOK NEWS: Centennial edition of Robinson Jeffers poems in wide format

Roan Stallion, Tamar and Other Poems, Centennial Edition

By Robinson Jeffers
Foreword by Elliot Ruchowitz-Roberts, Afterword by Tim Hunt 

Tor House Press, 2025

https://www.torhouse.org/tor-house-press/p/the-echo-vase-7drbh

Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962), a contemporary of Pound and Eliot, was in the 1920s and 1930s viewed as one of the most significant American poets. His explorations of narrative poetry and his long verse line contributed to several of the major New Critics dismissing his work when the classroom canon was initially formulated in the 1940s and 1950s, but his rejection of Imperialism, critique of modern mass society, and advocacy for environmental matters are leading to renewed interest in his work. A new edition of Roan Stallion, Tamar and Other Poems (1925), the collection that initially made his reputation, attempts to re-present his work in a manner that invites additional reappraisal of his craft and artistry.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

The pages of this centennial edition of Roan Stallion are landscape rather than portrait so that none of the long verse lines are doubled back because of the right margin. Also, the edition uses the corrected punctuation from The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers (Stanford UP) and thus removes the additional layer of punctuation the typesetters added when the book was first published. These adjustments provide a clearer record of the momentum, modulations, and inflections of the poetry. 

“The publication of the Roan Stallion/Tamar volume a century ago was a major event in American letters. It not only announced the arrival of a major poet, and a poet from the west far from, the eastern establishment; it also proclaimed and enacted a poetics antithetical to the modernist poetics of Pound and Williams. A different sense of poetic form, but also, more essentially, a different sense of the sources and ends of poetry. The wide format of William Everson’s hand press volume of Granite and Cypress some years ago was a revelation because it released Jeffers’s free verse line to run with full sweep and force without line-breaks. This centennial edition of Jeffers’s breakthrough volume gives us the poems at last in their full form.” —Albert Gelpi

“One can't fully understand the force and originality of Robinson Jeffers’s poetry until one sees his lines laid out exactly as they were written without the line breaks made necessary by commercial formats. I remember the startling clarity I experienced when I saw William Everson's Granite and Cypress. The new Tor House Press edition of Roan Stallion, Tamar & Other Poems makes it possible to see (as well as hear) the strange, tragic music that made Jeffers famous. I can't think of a better way to celebrate the centennial of Roan Stallion than to allow us to see the texts, clear and unbent, for the first time.” —Dana Gioia 

“After The Waste Land and the early Cantos of Pound, or perhaps Marianne Moore’s Poems, Roan Stallion, Tamar and Other Poems was the second or third shock of modernist aesthetics to transform American poetry. This edition is the perfect way to recover that shock and its energy for a new generation of readers.” —Robert Hass

 

As a resource for instructors, Jeffers's first four trade collections are now available as PDFs from the Robinson Jeffers Association at https://robinsonjeffersassociation.org/his-writing/poetry/ 

BOOK NEWS: Contemporary Mexican literature's representations of sapphic desire

Lenchitudes: Sapphic Representation in Contemporary Mexican Narrative

By Alejandra Márquez

SUNY Press, 2026

ISBN: 9798855805154

https://sunypress.edu/Books/L/Lenchitudes2

Shows how representations of sapphic desire can subvert or sustain prevailing norms of gender, sexuality, and power in Mexican texts from the 1980s to the 2010s.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

Drawing inspiration from the 2020 Marcha Lencha—"Lesbian March"—in Mexico City, Alejandra Márquez expands the concept of lenchitudes into a critical framework for thinking about gender and sexuality more expansively and inclusively, beyond essentialist identity categories. Assembling a lesbian archive that stretches from the publication of Rosamaría Roffiel's cult classic Amora in 1989 to the 2010s, Lenchitudes argues that sapphic representation in contemporary Mexican narrative subverts but also reinforces patriarchal norms. Sapphic narratives, Márquez argues, are not inherently queer but rather can uphold binary gender roles, heteronormativity, and monogamy. Bridging literature and activism, and putting theorists such as Judith Butler, Jack Halberstam, and José Esteban Muñoz into conversation with Latin American scholarship, Lenchitudes boldly joins ongoing debates about the place of queerness, or lo cuir, in Latin America.

"Sure to become a reference point for research and teaching in LGBTQ+ studies in and about Latin America, Lenchitudes challenges the dominant focus on gay male representation in cuir studies without simply adding lesbian culture to the existing scholarship. In dialogue with both the epistemologies of Mexican social movements and Latin American lesbian, marica, and travesti thinkers, Márquez moves beyond an identity-based approach to gender and sexuality, exploring the entanglement of multiple sapphic representations, desires, and experiences." — Patricio Simonetto, author of A Body of One’s Own: A Trans History of Argentina

"A very important contribution to the study of Spanish-language LGBTQ+ literature and culture from Mexico. Márquez incorporates a deep knowledge of queer/cuir approaches, skillfully connecting concepts from Anglo-American theory to related, though distinct, Mexican cultural schemes to produce readings that transcend the identity politics of Mexican lesbian-feminist circles. Lenchitudes is poised to help visibilize Mexican sapphic cultures in the English-speaking world." — Brandon Bisbey, author of Between Camp and Cursi: Humor and Homosexuality in Contemporary Mexican Narrative

Alejandra Márquez is an assistant professor of Spanish at Michigan State University.

BOOK NEWS: Reading Irish women's writing through a queer, postcolonial lens

Queering Twentieth-Century Irish Women’s Writing: Uneasy Moderns

By Naoise Murphy

Edinburgh UP, 2025

ISBN: 9781399547468

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-queering-twentieth-century-irish-women-s-writing.html

A queer, postcolonial reading of twentieth-century Irish women’s writing

• Advances queer studies debates about resistance, progress and ‘bad feelings’ from a peripheral, postcolonial location
• Provides a new reading of canonical Irish women writers that challenges reductive celebratory narratives
• Intervenes in Irish public culture and feminist/LGBT+ history, advocating queer modes of thought as a response to the difficulties of a traumatic past

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

Bringing together a group of untimely, queerly-oriented writers – Dorothy Macardle, Kate O’Brien, Elizabeth Bowen and Molly Keane – this book unsettles the conventional narratives of modern Irish culture. Despite attempts to impose a linear narrative of progress, feel-good accounts are clearly inadequate to the realities of contemporary Ireland. Guided by a queer refusal to move on from bad feelings, Naoise Murphy disrupts common-sense narratives of modernisation, gender, sexuality and race in the postcolonial state. Lingering with unease and discomfort in the work of mid-twentieth-century women writers and the spaces they occupied, this book pays close attention to inadmissible feelings of loss, anxiety, hauntedness and melancholia. By embracing discomfort, it moves towards a less idealising form of queer studies that is more responsive to the complexity of queer history, and offers a new story of Irish culture in the twentieth century.

"Naoise Murphy considers the fate of several ‘uneasy moderns’ – women whose recalcitrance and knotty attachments to the past rendered them out-of-step with their historical moment. This brilliant analysis of haunted texts and spaces speaks back to the narrative of Ireland’s progressive and secular modernity, pointing instead to the ongoing legacies of colonialism, sectarian violence and patriarchal authority." – Heather Love, University of Pennsylvania

Naoise Murphy is a researcher specialising in twentieth-century literature and queer studies and has taught at the University of Cambridge, Maynooth University and the University of Oxford.

BOOK NEWS: Rediscovering misplaced queer history in Irish literature and film

Queer Possessions: Creative Criticism and Modern Irish Literature

By Patrick R. Mullen

Syracuse UP, 2026.

ISBN: 9780815612131

https://press.syr.edu/supressbooks/9432/queer-possessions/

Too often, fleeting moments rooted in queer experience have appeared in popular fiction, only to be little remarked upon, often noted only as a sign of continuing neoliberal social advances. In Queer Possessions: Creative Criticism and Modern Irish Literature, Patrick Mullen makes the case for a more personal analysis of these moments, finding ways for readers to create new meaning and explore closer readings of key texts.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

Queer Possessions is divided between close readings of modern Irish novels and films and creative readings of the same texts, to give readers the tools to engage more deeply with the process of analysis and criticism. In the first mode, Mullen examines how modern Irish literature has frequently featured comedy to represent queer sexuality and economic crisis in the twenty-first century. This analysis allows for the second mode, in which the text helps readers to assume a critical role, encouraging their own creative readings of texts and imagining more of the works.

Equal parts critical and playful, Queer Possessions works to rediscover misplaced queer history, encourage new forms of experiencing text, and empower readers to create new interpretations and works.

"What sets this book apart is its innovative approach to critical and creative reading. It doesn’t just offer theoretical insight, but delivers practical strategies for engaging with texts in imaginative, politically attuned, and meaningful ways, which is now more crucial than ever in the classroom. Queer Possessions is invaluable resource for scholars, educators, and students seeking new ways to approach and interpret literature."—Páraic Kerrigan, author of Reeling in the Queers: Tales of Ireland’s LGBTQ Past

Patrick R. Mullen is an associate professor of English at Northeastern University. He is the author of The Poor Bugger’s Tool: Irish Modernism, Queer Labor, and Postcolonial History.