Books by WMU Authors from 2020-2024

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Twice There Was a Country

Alen Hamza

Poetry. "Alen Hamza is a lyric poet of the first order, and TWICE THERE WAS A COUNTRY proves it with poems that alchemize past and present, personal and political, and grief and celebration in a way that leads to absolute stillness: 'Silence has a mother in it and summer / refuses to move on.' Throughout this volume, Hamza acts as an Adam of sorts, naming people and places and events with the exactitude that allows him to reclaim all that was ever lost: 'Those under us are not dead. / They are dancers. We are the music.' This is a brilliant debut."--Jericho Brown "Alen Hamza writes poems that oscillate between forgetting and remembering, between the two gods of his soul--Bosnia and Herzegovina and America--between two languages, and between the life that passed and the life that is passing... His poems face you with your own life and hurt and cure you with the same intensity."--Lidija Dimkovska "With these darkly magnetic poems, Alen Hamza locates us in a world of political upheaval, personal dislocation and emotional fracture with a stunning balance and decorum. Reading TWICE THERE WAS A COUNTRY, I feel like I am being guided by a gentle firm hand while bombs are exploding around us, and surely this is one of the best things poetry can do."--Dean Young "TWICE THERE WAS A COUNTRY explores Hamza's identity as a Bosnian refugee attempting, and equally resisting, to assimilate to the cultural politics of the United States. Hamza's poems are playful and often surreal; their examination of how language shapes both our political and cultural identities is timely and nuanced. Here, the legacy of wartime trauma is approached with an ironist's touch and a fabulist's sense of play, paying exquisite attention to the ways in which both English and Bosnian get used--or misused--by speakers desperate to remake but also preserve their sense of self. '[I]n the end I realize I really wanted / to be a poem,' Hamza writes, and it is in the beauty of these poems that the many contradictions inherent to the immigrant's identity come to life."--Paisley Rekdal "Alen Hamza delicately shows us what happens to the internal psyche during exile and during its aftermath. There's longing, displacement, absurdity, yes; but oh there's also humor, surprise, and joy... Hamza acknowledges that 'this age calls for chewing,' and in this brilliant debut, he gives us 'American-chewed words.'"--Javier Zamora
Killing Kanoko; Wild Grass on the Riverbank

Itō Hiromi and Jeffrey Angles

A landmark dual collection by Ito Hiromi, one of the most important contemporary Japanese poets, in a “generous and beautifully rendered” translation by Jeffrey Angles.

Now widely taught as a feminist classic, Killing Kanoko is a defiantly autobiographical exploration of sexuality, community, and postpartum depression, featuring some of Ito’s most famous poems.

Set simultaneously in the California desert and Japan, Wild Grass on the Riverbank focuses on migration, nature, and movement. At once grotesque and vertiginous, this later collection interweaves mythologies, language, sexuality and place into a genre-busting narrative of what it is to be a migrant.
Secularization, Desecularization, and Toleration: Cross-Disciplinary Challenges to a Modern Myth

Vyacheslav G. Karpov

This book challenges the modern myth that tolerance grows as societies become less religious. The myth inseparably links the progress of toleration to the secularization of modern society. This volume scrutinizes this grand narrative theoretically and empirically, and proposes alternative accounts of the varied relationships between diverse interpretations of religion and secularity and multiple secularizations, desecularizations, and forms of toleration. The authors show how both secular and religious orthodoxies inform toleration and persecution, and how secularizations and desecularizations engender repressive or pluralistic regimes. Ultimately, the book offers an agency-focused perspective which links the variation in toleration and persecution to the actors of secularization and desecularization and their cultural programs.
Elementary mathematics curriculum materials: designs for student learning and teacher enactment

Ok-Kyeong Kim

The book presents comparative analyses of five elementary mathematics curriculum programs used in the U.S. from three different perspectives: the mathematical emphasis, the pedagogical approaches, and how authors communicate with teachers. These perspectives comprise a framework for examining what curriculum materials are comprised of, what is involved in reading and interpreting them, and how curriculum authors can and do support teachers in this process. Although the focus of the analysis is 5 programs used at a particular point in time, this framework extends beyond these specific programs and illuminates the complexity of curriculum materials and their role in teaching in general. Our analysis of the mathematical emphasis considers how the mathematics content is presented in each program, in terms of sequencing, the nature of mathematical tasks (cognitive demand and ongoing practice), and the way representations are used. Our analysis of the pedagogical approach examines explicit and implicit messages about how students should interact with mathematics, one another, the teacher, and the textbook around these mathematical ideas, as well as the role of the teacher. In order to examine how curriculum authors support teachers, we analyze how they communicate with teachers and what they communicate about, including the underlying mathematics, noticing student thinking, and rationale for design elements. The volume includes a chapter on curriculum design decisions based on interviews with curriculum authors.
Carbon Criminals, Climate Crimes (Critical Issues in Crime and Society)

Ronald C. Kramer and Rob White

Carbon Criminals, Climate Crimes analyzes the looming threats posed by climate change from a criminological perspective. It advances the field of green criminology through a examination of the criminal nature of catastrophic environmental harms resulting from the release of greenhouse gases. The book describes and explains what corporations in the fossil fuel industry, the U.S. government, and the international political community did, or failed to do, in relation to global warming. Carbon Criminals, Climate Crimes integrates research and theory from a wide variety of disciplines, to analyze four specific state-corporate climate crimes: continued extraction of fossil fuels and rising carbon emissions; political omission (failure) related to the mitigation of these emissions; socially organized climate change denial; and climate crimes of empire, which include militaristic forms of adaptation to climate disruption. The final chapter reviews policies that could mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, adapt to a warming world, and achieve climate justice.
Extraño No-Amor el Tuyo : María Luisa Puga, Historia de una Pasión

Irma López

Extraño no-amor el tuyo traza la afición de Puga por la escritura y su desarrollo artistico en base a sus 327 diarios; se adentra en espacios intimos y recorridos geográficos nunca antes visitados y que se inician en la infancia al morir la madre y continuan cuando viaja a Londres en busca de Virginia Woolf. Este peregrinaja existencial ileno de sorpresas inusitadas y anécdotas convomedoras y humoristas revelan la imagen de una joven resuelta y curiosa que se volcó intensa y desinteresdamente al mundo literario creando un estilo propio. La lectura nos descubre el origen de sus reflexiones intelectuales y de una creacion aun por ser divulgada en México, pais del cual habló con perseverancia y pasion en su escritura.
Fixing Niagara Falls: Environment, Energy, and Engineers at the World’s Most Famous Waterfall

Daniel Macfarlane

Since the late nineteenth century, Niagara Falls has been heavily engineered to generate energy behind a flowing facade designed to appeal to tourists. Essentially, this natural wonder is now a tap: huge tunnels channel the waters of the Niagara River around the Falls, which ebb and flow according to the tourism calendar.

Fixing Niagara Falls reveals the technological feats and cross-border politics that facilitated the transformation of one of the most important natural sites in North America. Daniel Macfarlane details how engineers, bureaucrats, and politicians conspired to manipulate the world’s most famous waterfall. During the first half of the twentieth century, the United States and Canada explored various ways to maximize hydropower from the Niagara River while “preserving” the falls. Decades of environmental diplomacy and transborder studies led to a 1950 treaty that allowed new hydro-electric stations to funnel most of the river’s water to generate power. To facilitate these diversions and lessen the visual impact of redirecting so much water, the two nations cooperated to install a range of control works while reshaping and shrinking the Horseshoe Falls. This book offers a unique perspective on how the Niagara landscape embodies both the power of technology and the power of nature.
Introduction to Photonic and Phononic Crystals and Metamaterials

Arthur R. McGurn

Introduction to Photonic and Phononic Crystals and Metamaterials, by Arthur R. McGurn, presents a study of the fundamental properties of optical and acoustic materials which have been of recent interest in nanoscience and device technology. The level of the presentations is appropriate for advanced undergraduates, beginning graduate students, and researchers not directly involved in the field. References are given to guide the reader to more advanced study in these fields.

Discussions of the physics of photonic and phononic crystals focus on the transmission properties of optical and acoustic radiation arising from their diffractive interaction in these engineered materials. The frequency transmission and non-transmission bands of radiation are explained in terms of the symmetry properties of the photonic and phononic artificial crystal structures. Basic applications of these properties to a variety of their technological applications are examined.

The physics of metamaterials is discussed along with their relationships to the ideas of resonance. Properties of negative index of refraction, perfect lens, and unusual optical effects the new optics of metamaterial media makes available are examined. Related effects in acoustics are also covered.

Basic principles of surface acoustic and electromagnetic waves are explained. These form an introduction to the fundamental ideas of the recently developing fields of plasmonics and surface acoustics.
Kitāb Dustūr Al-Gharāʼib Wa-Maʻdan Al-Raghāʼib Wa-Nuṣūṣ Ukhrá: Murāsalāt Muḥammad Al-Bakrī Al-Ṣiddīqī, 1524-1586

Mustafa Mughazy

This is the first publication of the official correspondence of the leading religious scholar and literary figure, Shaykh Muhammad ibn Abi al-Hasan al-Bakri al-Siddiqi al-Shafi'i Sibt Al al-Hasan. It provides a window into the world of an influential religious scholar in sixteenth century Cairo and his network of contacts in the Ottoman Empire and beyond. Muhammad al-Bakri corresponded with Sultan Murad III, the grand vizier Sokollu Mehmed Pasha, and with various officials in Mecca, including the sharifian ruler of Mecca, al-Hasan ibn Abi Numayy. The collection also contains two letters addressed to Sa'di rulers of Morocco and one to the Mughal Emperor Akbar, as well as letters to a variety of lesser Ottoman officials. It is an important source for the history of Ottoman Egypt and the Hijaz.
Muslim American City: Gender and Religion in Metro Detroit

Alisa Perkins

In 2004, the al-Islah Islamic Center in Hamtramck, Michigan, set off a contentious controversy when it requested permission to use loudspeakers to broadcast the adhān, or Islamic call to prayer. The issue gained international notoriety when media outlets from around the world flocked to the city to report on what had become a civil battle between religious tolerance and Islamophobic sentiment. The Hamtramck council voted unanimously to allow mosques to broadcast the adhān, making it one of the few US cities to officially permit it through specific legislation.

Muslim American City explores how debates over Muslim Americans’ use of both public and political space have challenged and ultimately reshaped the boundaries of urban belonging. Drawing on more than ten years of ethnographic research in Hamtramck, which boasts one of the largest concentrations of Muslim residents of any American city, Alisa Perkins shows how the Muslim American population has grown and asserted itself in public life. She explores, for example, the efforts of Muslim American women to maintain gender norms in neighborhoods, mosques, and schools, as well as Muslim Americans’ efforts to organize public responses to municipal initiatives. Her in-depth fieldwork incorporates the perspectives of both Muslims and non-Muslims, including Polish Catholics, African American Protestants, and other city residents.

Drawing particular attention to Muslim American expressions of religious and cultural identity in civil life—particularly in response to discrimination and stereotyping—Perkins questions the popular assumption that the religiosity of Muslim minorities hinders their capacity for full citizenship in secular societies. She shows how Muslims and non-Muslims have, through their negotiations over the issues over the use of space, together invested Muslim practice with new forms of social capital and challenged nationalist and secularist notions of belonging.
Advanced Calculus: Theory and Practice

John Srdjan Petrovic

Advanced Calculus: Theory and Practice, Second Edition, expands on the material covered in elementary calculus and presents this material in a rigorous manner. The text improves students' problem-solving and proof-writing skills, familiarizes them with the historical development of calculus concepts, and helps them understand the connections among different topics. The book explains how various topics in calculus may seem unrelated but in reality have common roots. Emphasizing historical perspectives, the text gives students a glimpse into the development of calculus and its ideas from the age of Newton and Leibniz to the twentieth century. Nearly 300 examples lead to important theorems.
The Evolution Of The Critical Theory Of Religion And Society : Union, Disunion And Reunion Of The Sacred And Profane

Rudolf J. Siebert

This book describes the structure and dynamic of the 'critical theory of religion and society' (CRTS), which my friends and I have developed in Europe and America, since the end of World War II in continual discourse with the 'critical theory of society' of the Frankfurt School, from 1946-2020. The book is rooted in the often personal experience of World War II, the following restauration period, the Cold War, and the conflict between West and the Islamic Middle East, Africa and Far East.
A Fine Canopy

Alison Swan

Alison Swan's collection of poems, A Fine Canopy, illustrates how the natural world envelops and encloses us with so many beautiful things: crowns of leaves, the ubiquitous blue sky, our luminous moon, and snow. So much snow. An ecopoet whose writing shows her advocacy for natural resources, in this collection Swan calls the reader to witness, appreciate, and sustain this world before it becomes too late. These poems were written out of an impulse to track down wisdom in the open air, outside of the noisy world of cars and commerce. Swan seeks insight on shores and in scraps of woods and fields-especially on four particular peninsulas: Michigan's upper and lower, Florida, and Washington state's Olympic-and also inside motherhood, which might be the wildest place of all. These are poems about the interconnection of all things, and "knowing things we cannot see". A journey through seasons with a soundtrack of birdsong, Swan's words are incredibly sensory. The reader is made to feel the weight of muddy jeans, the jolt at the tug of a dog's leash, and to see the bright flash of a cardinal's red plumage. Swan's poems remind us that although we all want to make a mark on our world, the smaller the better: stepping into fresh snow, dashing through forests atop dry leaves, laying wet bodies on warm concrete. These quiet interactions with places are as hopeful as they are harmless. Without necessarily tackling the topics head-on, A Fine Canopy evokes the devastation of climate change and the destruction of natural resources. This book engages deeply with the other-than-human to express and investigate alarm, dismay, anger, admiration, adoration in what feels like the end of the world unless we begin to think outside the box. These poems will carry weight with all readers of poetry, especially those who are interested in ecopoetry and connecting with the world around them.
How to Walk on Water and Other Stories

Rachel Swearingen

In Rachel Swearingen's debut collection, How to Walk on Water and Other Stories, we meet grifters, account executives, waitresses, scientists, and artists who willingly open their doors to trouble. An investment banker falls for a self-made artist who transforms the rooms of her dingy apartment into eerie art installations. A young au pair turns her mundane life into a scene from Key Largo, endangering the child in her care. A down-on-his-luck son moves in with his mother and tries to piece together the brutal attack she survived when he was a baby. A brother helps his wayward sister kidnap her grandson to baptize him in the North Woods. Whether it's a run-down movie theater in Minneapolis, a haunted brownstone in Chicago, a primitive chapel in Northern Michigan, a seedy bar in Seattle, or a tourist hotel in Venice, Italy, Swearingen's powers of observation and suspense show that thoughts as much as place can haunt. The prose is nimble and often heartbreaking. Even as these stories bristle with menace, they soothe with tenderness and humor. The themes of crime and complicity, as well as art and commerce underpin many of these narratives, as does the question of what it means to survive in a world marked by violence and trauma.
Children's and Young Adult Comics

Gwen Athene Tarbox and Derek Parker Royal

A complete critical guide to the history, form and contexts of the genre, Children's and Young Adult Comics helps readers explore how comics have engaged with one of their most crucial audiences.

In an accessible and easy-to-navigate format, the book covers such topics as:

- The history of comics for children and young adults, from early cartoon strips to the rise of comics as mainstream children's literature
- Cultural contexts – from the Comics Code Authority to graphic novel adaptations of popular children's texts such as Neil Gaiman's Coraline
- Key texts – from familiar favourites like Peanuts and Archie Comics to YA graphic novels such as Gene Luen Yang's American Born Chinese and hybrid works including the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series
- Important theoretical and critical approaches to studying children's and young adult comics

Children's and Young Adult Comics includes a glossary of crucial critical terms and a lengthy resources section to help students and readers develop their understanding of these genres and pursue independent study.