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Alternately described as a “city upon a hill” and “an organized system of hatreds,” Massachusetts politics has indisputably exerted an outsized pull on the national stage. The Politics of Massachusetts Exceptionalism offers a collection of essays from public policy experts that address the state’s noteworthy contributions to the nation’s political history.

Looking to a wide range of high and low visual media, from Steven Spielberg’s Jaws to Animal Planet’s Fatal Attractions, Stacy Gnall ponders human-animal connections and divisions in this book of poems, exploring those moments when human voices blend with “silent” beasts to exceed the limits of language. In Dogged, animals emerge as the highest aspiration of poetry.

Scarred by nuclear smokestacks, oil wells, and surging floodwaters, and haunted by the legacies of slavery, racism, and French rule, the Louisiana of Landscape with Bloodfeud is disenchanted but still exerts an undeniable pull. Reckoning with displacement, ancestral guilt, and centuries of human and environmental exploitation, Wendy Barnes’s poems dissect the state’s turbulent past—as a microcosm of colonial oppression, westward expansion, and the birth of global capitalism.

Sitting at the intersection of literary studies, genre studies, fan studies, and studies of the book and publishing cultures, Genre Worlds considers how contemporary genre fiction is produced and circulated on a global scale. Attuned to both the pleasure and the profession of producing genre fiction, the authors investigate contemporary developments in the field—the rise of Amazon, self-publishing platforms, transmedia storytelling, and growing global publishing conglomerates—and show how these interact with older practices, from fan conventions to writers’ groups.