Books
Field Language
The Painting and Poetry of Warren and Jane Rohrer
Field Language presents the work of an extraordinary couple who together left the rural lifeways of their Mennonite upbringing to go “into the world” to create forms of modern art that reflected on the places and culture they came from. Published on the occasion of a retrospective exhibition devoted to the working relationship between abstract painter Warren Rohrer and his wife, poet Jane Turner Rohrer, this sumptuously illustrated book explores the Rohrers’ painting and poetry in relation to their biographies and to the nature of modernism and modernity.
Edited by Julia Spicher Kasdorf, Christopher Reed, and Joyce Henri Robinson
Shale Play
Poems and Photographs from the Fracking Fields
“The long sleep of the Appalachians has been dramatically interrupted by the sudden discovery of the Marcellus Shale. This book helps us see and understand what that has meant for the region. It’s a classic tale, with echoes of the region’s past—and deep implications for the planet’s future.”
—Bill McKibben
“Rarely have I read a work that so strongly, profoundly, and empathically characterizes the history of a region through those who have labored hardest to make a decent life in a beautiful yet ravaged land. These polyvocal poems are rooted in a documentary sensibility but lift into higher registers of aesthetic experience, and along with the arresting photographs, they juxtapose the beautiful and the ugly, the natural and the industrial, the tracks of labor on the land and in the faces of the residents.”
—Alison Hawthorne Deming
“A collage of voices, drawing in the testimonies of activists, residents, industry lawyers, and workers. Kasdorf explores the nuances and tensions of her home state without allowing any one perspective to dominate.”
—Rosa Furneaux, Mother Jones
Poetry in America
“Sounds every note on the scale of tones, forms, and intensities. There are notes of toughness and tenderness, notes of witness and experience—all the notes, to my ear, in tune.”
—PoemoftheWeek.org
Eve’s Striptease
“...a significant work by a brilliant young poet…it is a book about coming to terms with one’s sexuality and how that affects one’s place in the world. As with Sleeping Preacher, Kasdorf’s new work moves through the dichotomous worlds of rural and urban, tradition and innovation, innocence and experience.”
—The Pittsburgh Quarterly
Sleeping Preacher
“Kasdorf chronicles her difficult journey from the Mennonite community into which she was born to a secular life in New York City. The material presents an interesting and unusually close portrait of the Amish people-for the most part without sentimentality…Paradoxically, the speaker justifies her new way of life by citing the lessons she learned as a child.”
—Publishers Weekly
The Body and the Book: Writing from a Mennonite Life
“The practice of writing is at once spiritual and political for Kasdorf. It is a way of drawing close to the truth of her life without allowing that truth to destroy her, a way of bearing witness to the pain and truth of others, and a way of both transgressing and honoring her community, of transcending and remaining rooted in her body.”
—Religious Studies Review
Fixing Tradition: Joseph W. Yoder, Amish American
“Kasdorf...has provided a fascinating analysis of Yoder’s life and work. Her book makes use of material acquired through many personal interviews with those who remember Yoder as well as his own extensive correspondence. Her analysis of his various books in light of this new research is penetrating and thought-provoking and will be of interest both as a window into the Amish community and as an insight into one man’s struggle to balance tradition with the right to intellectual liberty.”
—Library Journal
Acquiring Land: Late Poems
by Jane Rohrer
Broken Land: Poems of Brooklyn
edited with Michael Tyrell
The House of the Black Ring
by Fred Lewis Pattee
Rosanna of the Amish
by Joseph W. Yoder