Synopses & Reviews
There is hardly a struggle aimed at upholding and extending therights embedded in the U.S. Constitution in which the Centerfor Constitutional Rights (CCR) has not played a central role,and yet few people have ever heard of it. Whether defendingthe rights of black people in the South, opponents of the war inVietnam and victims of torture worldwide, or fighting illegalactions of the U.S. government, the CCR has stood ready totake on all comers, regardless of their power and wealth. Whenthe United States declared that the Constitution did not applyto detainees at Guantanamo, the CCR waded fearlessly intobattle, its Legal Director declaring, “My job is to defend theConstitution from its enemies. Its main enemies right now arethe Justice Department and the White House.”
In this first-ever comprehensive history of one of the most important legal organizations in the United States, the Center forConstitutional Rights, Albert Ruben shows us exactly what itmeans to defend the Constitution. He examines the innovativetactics of the CCR, the ways in which a radical organization isbuilt and nurtured, and the impact that the CCR has had onour very conception of the law. This book is a must-read notonly for lawyers, but for all the rest of us who may one day findour rights in jeopardy.
Review
"Hamby's poems are tsunamis carrying you far out to sea and then back to shore giddy and glad to be alive. She roars around the parabola of the time-space continuum, leaping between the past, both ancient and within memory, and the present, then circles the globe all within a single high-octane couplet. Hamby strings words and worlds together with the gravity-defying momentum of a high-flying dancer or a whirling dervish, traveling to Italy, India, St. Louis, the Amazon, Sante Fe, and Hawaii in long zestful exhalations. She rumbas and stomps and shakes her finger in your face as she writes of war and sex, love and hunger, insomnia, drunkenness, the movies, family, the soul, art, and the devil. Her commentary is hilarious. The sudden moments of stillness found unexpectedly within the rush of her rants are radiant and spellbinding, and the clash between her velocity and her specificity creates a sizzling current of electricity that runs through every dashing, piquant, and diva-sung line." -Donna Seaman,Booklist
Synopsis
In this sublime and imposing book of poetry, Barbara Hamby races through the circuitous regions of Heaven and Hell, desire and love, giving shape and significance to the strange and the familiar. Her book ignites with a proclamation, "In the beginning was the word, fanning out into syllables, like a deck of cards on a table in Vegas, lovely leafy parts fluttering into atoms and cells, genus and phylum, nouns and verbs;" an easy metaphor for her intoxicating linguistic machinations.
Hamby's roaming, inquisitive mind reels in the reader, "I'm persuaded the day will come when I'll lie static as a falcon in a hunter's sack, fragments of iron studding my reckless breast." Not limited to the self-referential, Hamby playfully references historic and literary personae, taking stabs at Shakespeare, Jane Austen, the Bible and Casanova. "Who wouldn't," she challenges us, "give anything for the voice of an angel and wings to fly above the rough dirt of birth?"
About the Author
Barbara Hamby has been published in many literary magazines and is the editor of Apalachee Quarterly and director of Apalachee Press. Her first published collection, Delirium, won the 1994 Vassar Miller Prize, the 1996 Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the Poetry Society of America's Norma Farber First Book Award.
Table of Contents
The word -- Millennium rave -- Blood -- The ex-goddess speaks -- The hunter -- The chicken-wire girls -- With Sonya -- Beriberi -- Mr. Pillow -- Paper -- Cut -- Hey, Udine! -- Thinking of Galileo -- The dream of the red drink -- Achtung, my princess, good night -- Beelzebub the prowl -- Cruelty -- Dad, Dave, deluge, death -- Elliot and I discuss Eliot via Macbeth -- Footbinding as a way of life -- Gospel -- Hatred -- Irony waltz -- Jane Austen jambalaya -- Kamehameha Drive-in, 25 years later -- Laudanum for everyone -- Midnight the Piazza della Signoria -- Noli me tangere, stupid -- Origami ragtime -- Pas de deux with incubi -- Quel scandale, darling -- Reichsfèuhrer blues -- So long, Roy -- Trigger tries to explain -- Uccello, Filippo Lippi, Leonardo -- Valentine for Martin Luther -- Woo -- X-ray of your brain at 4 a.m. -- Yellow fever -- Zugzwang amore -- Ode on my wasted youth -- Ode to Italian fruit -- Ode to money -- Ode to public bathrooms -- Ode to insects -- Ode to warts -- Ode to teeth -- Ode to untoward dreams -- Ode to black and white movies -- Ode to breath -- Ode to castrati -- Ode to my bitterness -- Ode to the lost luggage warehouse at the Rome Airport.