New Releases by Jay Wright

A tongue-in-cheek book for guitar players, collectors, and professional musicians who suffer from Guitar Acquisition Syndrome. It contains insights, tips, and tools from well over 200 afflicted enthusiasts from 23 countries.

This work is configured to encourage members of the academic communities to consider initiating a part-time consulting practice in their areas of expertise. The book is designed to be clear, comprehensible, and easily accessible to the scholar seeking to expand his/her understanding of the consulting field with a view to becoming a consultant. Professor Wright provides a step by step program for developing a consulting niche (based on his own successful practice) that will be valuable to clients and competitive with other consultants. The information offered ranges from how to interpret body language during meetings and how to set fees, to how to conduct the project and how to provide feedback to the client at the conclusion of the project. Professor Wright also examines the issues of ethics in the consulting profession, and addresses the specific problems applicable to academics, as well as discussing the future of part time and full time consulting for academicians.

Few poets have as much to tell us about the intricate relationship between the African American past and present as Jay Wright. His poems weave a rich fabric of personal history using diverse materials drawn from African, Native American, and European sources. Scholarly, historical, intuitive, and emotional, his work explores territories in which rituals of psychological and spiritual individuation find a new synthesis in the construction of cultural values. Never an ideologue but always a poet of vision, his imagination shows us a way to rejoice and strengthen ourselves in our common humanity. Here, together for the first time, are Wright’s previously published collections—The Homecoming Singer (1971), Soothsayers and Omens (1976), Explications/Interpretations (1984), Dimensions of History (1976), The Double Invention of Komo (1980), Elaine’s Book (1988), and Boleros (1991)—along with the new poems of Transformations (1997). By presenting Wright’s work as a whole, this collection reveals the powerful consistency of his theme—a spiritual or intellectual quest for personal development—as each book builds solidly upon the previous one. Wright examines history from a multicultural perspective, attempting to conquer a sense of exclusion—from society and his own cultural identity—and find solace and accord by linking American society to African traditions. He believes that a poem must articulate the vital rhythms of the culture it depicts and is dedicated to a pursuit of poetic forms that embody the cadence of African American culture. Defying characterization, Wright has experimented with voices, languages, cultures, and forms not normally associated with African American literature. He is well schooled in the cultures of West Africa, Europe, and the Americas, and—true to his New Mexican birth—he is a powerful synthesizer of human experience. Transfigurations reveals Wright to be a man of profound knowledge and a poet of exalted verbal intensity.

Like Jay Wright''s previous poetry, Boleros provokes in the reader "a passion for what is hidden," emphasizing names--of places, muses, saints'' days--and the imaginative histories behind them. As always, the linguistic surface changes rapidly as Wright''s geographic journeys become explicit explorations of poetic form. Boleros is more than a conventional collection of poems. Each part of the book connects to, engages with, and changes the others, so the book itself becomes a text in motion. These poems perform the creative process itself and succeed exquisitely in making the reader part of that process and its excitement.

The Description for this book, Selected Poems of Jay Wright, will be forthcoming.

Le système mondial fait naître un sentiment croissant de futilité alors que, les pays et les instances internationales s''attaquant de façon répétée aux déficiences de nos systèmes sociaux, les symptômes ne font qu''empirer. On débat sur des législations nationales et des programmes de développement internationaux prometteurs que l''on adopte plein d''espoir, malheureusement ils se révèlent inefficaces. Fréquemment, les résultats obtenus semblent n''avoir aucun point commun avec ceux que l''on espérait obtenir lorsque les programmes ont été établis. Dynamique Mondiale représente en quelque sorte un appel aux armes contre ce sentiment de futilité. L''ouvrage montre les occasions qui nous sont offertes pour amener le monde en équilibre avec les forces qui s''exercent dans l''environnement humain, alors qu''il nous reste encore un peu de temps et d''espace pour manœuvrer. A travers toute son histoire l''homme s''est focalisé sur la croissance : croissance de la population, du niveau de vie, des limites géographiques. Malheureusement, dans notre monde fini, la croissance doit à un moment donné céder le pas à l''équilibre. Malthus a postulé que l''offre de nourriture était le facteur limitatif ultime, le Professeur Forrester, pour sa part, suggère que la pollution, la surpopulation et l''épuisement des ressources naturelles peuvent également avoir un rôle critique à jouer. L''industrialisation peut être une menace bien plus fondamentale que la seule population. Compte tenu des limites de notre environnement, le système mondial dans son entier peut fort bien ne pas être capable d''atteindre le niveau de vie qui a été posé comme norme par les pays industrialisés. Les buts et les aspirations de tous les pays devront être radicalement réajustés lorsque la croissance et l''expansion céderont la place à l''équilibre mondial. Cet ouvrage présente la première étape de l''application des principes de la Dynamique des Systèmes au comportement des forces impliquées dans le processus de transition de la croissance à l''équilibre mondial. Un tel équilibre stable et durable peut nécessiter une combinaison de changements sociaux, économiques et techniques qui contiennent des politiques aussi " anti-intuitives " que celle consistant à réduire l''accent mis actuellement sur la production de nourriture et l''industrialisation.