By Steve Seepersaud
July 12, 2018
Relaxing with a good book at the beach, a local park or on your patio can be a great way to spend a summer afternoon. Looking for something to read? Our alumni community has tons of authors. Here are a few of the newest releases.
Lisa DeSiro ’92 wrote Labor (Nixes Mate Books), a collection of poems about life in today’s urban communities, particularly Boston. DeSiro said she developed the book from many separate pieces she had written during the 25 years she has lived in Boston and Cambridge, Mass. Labor contains her observations on everyday happenings; across the book, the common thread is people laboring through race, gender and equality issues. The book uses a variety of poetic forms such as acrostics, free verse, prose, sonnets, haiku and an elegy.
“Anyone who has experienced less-than-ideal employment may relate to the ‘Odd Jobs’ section,” DeSiro said. “Readers who have experienced city life may especially appreciate the poems of place. Most are set in and around Boston, while a few reference places in Syracuse, where I grew up. One poem is based on a laundromat I went to in Binghamton. I know readers can be intimidated by poetry. My style is more straightforward and uses accessible language.”
Elephant Mountain, the first novel by Linda Johnston Muhlhausen ’71 (Blast Press), is based on her time as a Peace Corps volunteer teacher in Uganda in the early 1970s, when the brutal dictator Idi Amin had just risen to power. The main character is Laurel Bittelson, a 21-year-old recent college grad who jilts her man at the altar. Being a wife in Boston just didn’t seem as fulfilling or impactful to her as serving in the Peace Corps. Her life becomes exciting in an unintended way when she falls in love with an African man in a country quickly heading into chaos under a despot.
“When I graduated from Binghamton, like my character Laurel, I was looking for a direction that would help heal the general sense of distress that had invaded college campuses all over the country in 1970-71,” Muhlhausen said. “Yes, even quiet Binghamton had anti-Vietnam protests and student demonstrations that rocked our otherwise idyllic campus. Like Laurel, I decided to do something real in the world by joining the Peace Corps and went with my then-husband to teach in Uganda. Many years later, I put Laurel in the same place and time and let her go her own fictional way.”
Mary E. Paniccia Carden, MA ’92, PhD ’97, chair of the English and Philosophy Department at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania, wrote Women Writers of the Beat Era (University of Virginia Press). Her work is the only book-length study of Beat women’s autobiographical practices. Carden examines their methods of self-definition by focusing on their encounters with representations of themselves produced and conveyed by others. Seeking to convey female difference in excess of the masculinist Beat paradigm, the female writers reconstruct the meanings and possibilities of “Beat” and of “Beat women.”
“When I was a grad student at Binghamton, I happened across an autobiography by Diane di Prima in the course of some research on Beat writers,” Carden said. “It stood out to me because most commentators seemed to assume Beat writers were all men and because it was a strange book – in some ways a parody of popular assumptions about ‘Beat chicks.’ I pursued other projects over the years, but that book kept bothering me. When I came back to it, I found other female Beats – women who lived brave, creative, unconventional lives – and felt that those lives should be accounted for in the larger story of the Beat movement.”
