UA News

"Odalisque in Pieces" and "The Archaeology of Environmental Change" are among the most recent books to be published by the UA Press.

Latina identity and environmental lessons from the past are the focuses of two of the newest releases from the University of Arizona Press.

In her debut poetry collection, Carmen Giménez Smith speaks about Latina identity within the context of postcolonial history, feminism, myth and the fragmentation of modernity.

From these disparate elements, she fashions a female persona – "clairvoyant with great shoes" – who is both bracingly modern and movingly vulnerable in her newly published collection of poems, "Odalisque in Pieces."

The UA Press just published the 80-page collection by Giménez Smith, an assistant professor of English at New Mexico State University. She is also publisher of Noemi Press, a nonprofit literary arts organization based in New Mexico. 

Giménez Smith's poems traverse the landscape of a woman's life –  girl, mother, lover – navigating a terrain tinted with mythology and relic, yet still fresh and uncharted.

The poems revolve around issues of identity and the ways in which identity is both inherited and constructed or reconstructed.

As one poem puts it, "The planet floating backwards / whirling some of us older than the stars, some of us nascent and bare."

Although she employs techniques of avant-garde poetry, Giménez Smith shades and deepens the New World landscape into a territory of rare lyric intensity and energy.

In these poems, the reader encounters such strange beauties as a girl assembling and disassembling, a moth trapped in a glass of water, new-age fairy godmothers, and a lark who sings for the milkman.

Yet the reader is also made aware of how these beauties reflect the speaker's troubles – her effort to employ, in the words of one of her most memorable poems, "Only the invisible post where she writes the encounters / with air's lusters. Only the imagined hour / with which she's made a fragile craft."

The UA Press also has published "The Archaeology of Environmental Change: Socionatural Legacies of Degradation and Resilience."

The book – edited by Christopher T. Fisher, J. Brett Hill and Gary M. Feinman – addresses issues related to water management, soil conservation, sustainable animal husbandry and other topics. 

Fisher is an associate professor of anthropology at Colorado State University; Hill is a visiting assistant professor in the sociology/anthropology department at Hendrix College in Conway, Ark.; Feinman is the curator of Mesoamerican anthropology at the Field Museum in Chicago.

The authors note that because such socioenvironmental challenges have been faced throughout history, lessons from the past can often inform modern policy.

The book features case studies from a wide range of times and places reveal how archaeology can contribute to a better understanding of humans' relation to the environment.

Contributors draw on archaeological research in multiple regions – North America, Mesoamerica, Europe, the Near East and Africa – from time periods spanning the Holocene, and from environments ranging from tropical forest to desert.



Through such examples as environmental degradation in Transjordan, wildlife management in East Africa and soil conservation among the ancient Maya, the contributors demonstrate the negative effects humans have had on their environments and how societies in the past dealt with these same problems.

All call into question and ultimately refute popular notions of a simple cause-and-effect relationship between people and their environment, and reject the notion of people as either hapless victims of unstoppable forces or inevitable destroyers of natural harmony. 



These contributions show that examining long-term trajectories of socionatural relationships can help to better define concepts such as sustainability, land degradation, and conservation, and that gaining a more accurate and complete understanding of these connections is essential for evaluating current theories and models of environmental degradation and conservation.

Their insights demonstrate that to understand the present environment and to manage landscapes for the future, the historical record of the total sweep of anthropogenic environmental change must be considered.