University of Akron Press Publications

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  Written on the Hills: The Making of the Akron Landscape

  Frances McGovern

  In warm and lively prose, Written on the Hills explores the natural and human history of Akron, Ohio. Drawing on geological studies, state and municipal records, local histories and personal reminiscences, Frances McGovern shows how the landscape has influenced the development of Akron, and how the layers of Akron's history are revealed in its modern landscape.

  This midsize city, shaped by its rugged environment of steep hills, ravines, rivers, and wetlands, began life in 1825 as a service settlement on the Ohio and Erie Canal, flanking a staircase of locks over the North-South Continental Divide. The early 1900s saw the spectacular rise of the rubber industry, giving Akron a sudden flood of workers, a hierarchy of millionaires, and a new national identity.

  From bedrock to corporate boardroom, Written on the Hills reads the evolution of Akron in its parks and street patterns,its houses and factory walls. Its raw edges refined by the ancient beauty of its setting, Akron has weathered many changes in its history, redirecting its economy and institutions to become the very livable city among the hills that it is today.

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  Internal Strategies

  Anita Feng

  Anita Feng imposes her own voice as an overlay, but not until she has made for her husband this gift of immersion. And not until she has made for us a first book so exciting we can only look to it as portent. —The Georgia Review

  This is the poetry of necessity, drawn from a searing yet gentle vision of human tragedy and nobility. Anita Feng's poems articulate quiet courage, humility, subtlety and authentic grace in a seamless book, the voice calm and wise as the proverbial ch'an master who, nose-to-nose with the tiger, does not blink. I shall cherish her gift for many years. —Sam Hamill

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  Strong in the Broken Places: A Theological Reverie on the Ministry of George Everett Ross

  Leonard I. Sweet

  George Everett Ross was at once a brilliant preacher who could move his listeners with the gospel of transfiguring grace and a deeply flawed human being who stirred controversy among his parishioners. Not only a crusader for the addicted and the homeless, but also an alcoholic who presided over the church where Alcoholics Anonymous was founded, Ross was both revered for his good works and reviled for his personal failings. Strong in the Broken Places is a portrait of ministry at its most gifted and most wounded, as well as a story of faith shining more brightly because of the constant darkness that threatens it.

  This book is poignantly pleasurable, and all pastors can benefit from it for reasons both personal and professional. It is one to which you will return often.—Journal for Preachers

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  How the Dead Bury the Dead

  William Greenway

  With reverence and exasperation and good humor, the poems in William Greenway's book, How the Dead Bury the Dead, evoke the pain of loss and celebrate the ways we transform our losses into strength. Dislocated from his native Georgia to the rust belt of the Midwest, haunted by the ghost of his father, by memories of his mother, and by dreams of his own mortality, Greenway turns his warm wit on every problem that life has set for him, a stand-up Hamlet with a soft Southern accent and a feel for the power and pathos in Richard Wilbur's line, "I dreamt the past was never past redeeming." In poems that bring back, without nostalgia, the people and places of his early years, he reconciles the ache of absence with deep, persistent richness of this world, finding in the practices of the Shona, an African tribe, an artistic and philosophic model for his own approach to life.

  The book's organization testifies to Greenway's care, allowing his individual poems to grow into larger shapes and visions. . . . It is Greenway's breakthrough. —Eclectic Literary Forum

  William Greenway is a poet because what he writes lingers, repeats itself in the mind long after the reader has finished reading, prompts questions, hints at answers, creates something lastingly beautiful. —Juilene McKnight, Vindicator

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  The Comma after Love

  Raeburn Miller

  From more than nine hundred poems left behind at the poet's death, Donald Justice has chosen the seventy-four representative works that comprise The Comma After Love. By turns rueful and amused, intimate and restrained, these poems speak movingly about the difficulties of love and faith, the pleasure of friendship and poetry, the loneliness and disappointments of the solitary life. In his introduction to this volume, Donald Justice calls Raeburn Miller "a natural poet who found writing a thing he did simply as a part, an important part, of staying alive," and discovers in these poems an "expansive and unshakably romantic spirit that drives the work and in the end proves exhilarating."

  Raeburn Miller continued to work in his own quiet way, convinced, surely, that his work was worth the effort and that someday, perhaps after death, a larger reading public would come to recognize its value. This volume provides that opportunity for those who knew his work and those who were denied that privilege. —W. Kenneth Holditch, Louisiana Literature

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  The Waters of Forgetting: The Poems of Barry Seiler

  Barry Seiler

  In The Waters of Forgetting, Seiler brings together poems that spring from the tensions between memory and forgetting, the past and the present, the daily and the eternal. Whether he is writing about his family or popular music or the violent horrors of our age, Seiler's poems are always concerned with time, the difficulties of living in it and living with it. Moving through these various histories, both personal and public, Seiler juxtaposes small moments with great events, trying to find the connecting threads that will pull the pieces into a form we can make sense of and live by. By the end of the book, he has immersed himself in the memories that trouble and sustain us, seeking comfort and wisdom in "The Bath of Peace, the Waters of Forgetting"

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  Summit's Glory: Sketches of Buchtel College and the University of Akron

  George W. Knepper

  Summit's Glory is George Knepper's eloquent personal history of The University of Akron. In this series of vignettes, he draws on 40 years as student, faculty member, administrator, and University Historian to discuss the University's evolution over a century and a quarter. Summit's Glory will appeal to readers with ties to The University of Akron and to others who enjoy the reflections of a mature scholar.

  [G]raceful, informative and timeless. -Margot Jackson, Akron Beacon Journal