Poetry / poems by individual poets

Book Synopsis“Few people read Poetry any more, but I still wish to write its seedlings down, if only for the lull of gathering: no less a harvest season for being the last time,” writes Clive James in his epic poem, The River in the Sky. What emerges from this lamentation is a soaring epic of exceptional depth and overwhelming feeling, all the more extraordinary given its appearance in an age when the heroic poem seems to have disappeared from contemporary literature. Among James’s many talents is his uncanny ability to juxtapose references to early twentieth-century poets with “offbeat humor and flyaway cultural observations” (Dwight Garner, New York Times), or allusions to the adagio of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony contrasted with references to “YouTube’s vast cosmopolis.” Whether recalling his Australian childhood or his father’s “clean white headstone” in a Hong Kong cemetery, James’s autobiographical epic ultimately helps us define the meaning of life.Trade Review"Clive James’s book-length poem The River in the Sky is superb, an epic lament, written in late life, filled with exact and moving observations about life and culture." -- Dwight Garner, New York Times

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Book SynopsisThe poems in The Breathing Place, Calvin Bedient’s fifth collection of poetry, take in and move through three areas of consideration. Focusing first on the turmoil of an imperfect world before turning to raging social concerns, the poems finally come to find a refreshed sense of hope, offering spaces to pause and breathe in the world around us. First the poet addresses “the limits of the containing air,” the atmosphere of a world that moves along a journey ever-farther from whatever Eden it began in. He walks us through the fear and bewilderment, the dips and bumps, the guilt of gazing and desire along a path pointed away from paradise. These poems take in the deep—even if unadmitted—resentment at having to live and breathe in an uninviting world, amid scorched earth, and in a human body that feels the burning of precariousness, anxiety, and grief. The second space calls us to breathe in the now, bringing attention to a troubled world where the atmosphere is filled with strongmen hungry for rivalry, with the stink of age-old inequalities, and where looming climate emergency and nuclear war hover over the waters. The poet finally leads us to green nature, to a space of freshness that somehow survives under threat. Here is the living flow of the senses, the wonders of art, and a renewed feeling of sublimity that thrills from earth to the heavens.Trade Review"[W]holly accessible and bracing." * Library Journal *“‘What is a song without excess?’ Bedient asks in his latest book of odd odes, eddying odysseys, antsy still lifes, and abstract memos on various acts of kindness, cruelty, panic, grief. Accompanied under the ‘standoffish stars’ by Elvis and Eros, Rossini and Ceres, Billy Budd and Bobby Kennedy, the fire- and flower-tongued voice of these poems—chthonic, muscular, debonair—endeavors to overflow limits with lyric, while its elemental ‘song with Rogue shadows’ rebuffs official national power and its tweeting twit-in-chief. Governed by thunder and lightning and birds, by a gravitas of red, The Breathing Place suggests that beauty may be a seismic, even cosmic disorder.” -- Andrew Zawacki, author of UNSUN : f/11"Cal Bedient's poetry has always been singular and I can happily attest that the The Breathing Place is as sui generis as his other books. Dazzling, peculiar, piquant, Breathing Place is bold and picaresque, with dashes of the Western. His kaleidoscopic play on these dark times tickles the ear, drenches the senses, and saturates the mind. I absolutely love this book and you should too." -- Cathy Park Hong, author of Minor Feelings and of Engine Empire"At once galloping and exact, Cal Bedient’s newest volume is a work of energy and invention; I found myself racing down the staircase of these poems, eager to bring each phrase-shaped wonder into view. This world is familiar in its unlikeliness and lit up by paradox, by O’Hara’s erased orange hanging in the sky like the sun. Like tomorrow’s sun today. It’s shrewd and it’s tender. It stuns me a little, and it makes me feel religious, as if I were French." -- Joyelle McSweeney, author of Toxicon and Arachne"Teeming with utter, gem-cut particulars but vast as the 'ever-more-enormous material world' itself, The Breathing Place titillates with radical specificity as it stretches one’s perception to the limits of what it can hold. Bedient has always been drawn to what glimmers, shudders, sizzles and combusts; his poems blister with a beauty rooted in turbulence, defiance, and 'the rage to be extravagant,' as if each of them—even the most elegiac—were, at heart, an argument that all true poetry should emulate 'the Blast that got us here in a Perfect Offense to reason.' Coming to us late in history and late in the poet’s own life ('at eighty-three,' he writes, 'I am past caring'), these new poems persist in celebrating the 'furious blunder of creation,' but do so with extra measures of tenderness, poise, and self-reflection, situating Bedient among the very best and boldest of our 'grasshopper-quick troubadours,' who still spin 'cosmic splutter' into song." -- Timothy Donnelly, author of The Problem of the Many"Cal Bedient's new book is a ruminating, visionary work, the power of which draws from a fierce attending to the element of water. 'Living water' and 'planetary water'--the element connecting the local mountain wilderness rivers to global rising seas--mark the passage of time where new 'currents in the currents' become familiar returns from the past: 'the chafing of limits in the fashion of water’s pulsing pliancy.' The Republic reels with white fascism and from wall-building and from withdrawal from climate accords and from lead in the water system--from all of these 'millions of White Accidents' against which Cal Bedient's laments are wholly unprecedented in their primal sublimity and startling pragmatism." -- Richard Greenfield, author of SubterraneanTable of Contents1. Limits of the Containing AirCoupling6How Live, How Love?7The Breathing Place 9Bluely Boundless Sea11Beethoven’s Metronome12There Are the Old Grand Things Still13Retrieval14Bus15Ferns, Fingers, Gorges17Ovid on the Lake18Breathless19What Was to Be an Elegy for Emily Dickinson20Herds of Stags Among Fir Trees21Self-Portrait as Absence of Days 22Winds from the Wilderness242. The EraObscenity the First Language of Soldiers28The Era30No Leaf Will Shade 32Sat Down and Wept by Lake and Cloud Gear33Birds of Washington35 I Am a Circle until I Become a Power36Supervising the Woods37Thin Bible-Paper Skies393. Green Water Los Vientos de Mi Vida42Absalom in the Flower’s Throat43Solo Rip44Seven of My Sweet Loves Drove off of Cliffs46Like a Waterfall Seen from the Lip, More Felt than Seen47Singing in Octaves with the Breakfast Robins48The Persistence of the Particular: a Letter to the Painter Brian Shields49And I After So Many Words . . .50Blessed Disorder51Sunny Flow from Little Barks52I Want to Walk with You in the Roaring Gardens 53Canoeing a Worn River55Notes60Acknowledgments61

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Book SynopsisIn times fraught with ecological and individual loss, Claire Marie Stancek’s wyrd] bird grapples with both the necessity and apparent impossibility of affirming mystical experience. It is at once a book-length lyric essay on the 12th-century German mystic Hildegard of Bingen, a dream journal, a fragmentary notebook, a collection of poems, and a scrapbook of photographic ephemera. Stancek follows Hildegard as she guides the poet through an underworld of climate catastrophe and political violence populated by literary, mythical, and historical figures from Milton’s Eve to the biblical Satan to Keats’s hand. The book deconstructs a Western tradition of good and evil by rereading, cross-questioning, and upsetting some of that tradition’s central poetic texts. By refusing and confusing dualistic logic, wyrd] bird searches for an expression of visionary experience that remains rooted in the body, a mode of questioning that echoes out into further questioning, and a cry of elegiac loss that grips, stubbornly, onto love.Trade Review"Don’t miss outrageously word-hungry Claire Marie Stancek’s wyrd] bird." * Library Journal *"This really is a stunning collection, one that works a unique complexity and depth through such dark, amid the searching, stretching and attending." * rob mclennan's blog *“wyrd] bird immerses us in a world of disproportionate amounts of pain and beauty. This book wants equity but won’t settle for a pat response. Through intermittent states of dream, wake, and the in-between, along with a channeling of the medieval mystic Hildegard von Bingen, and a panoply of other writers (Marvell, Donne, Milton, Keats), wyrd] bird is dream journaling, resistance writing, chant and meditation; the work goes deep. Stancek has a careful, gorgeous eye and ear, and her lines will make you stop in your tracks. Words here are frenetic, alive and ‘honey red-burning.’ Stancek asks, ‘What would it mean to write an utterly embodied book?’ To read this is to know.” -- Jennifer Firestone, author of Story“The tremendous and multi-faceted range—historical, thematic, formal—of this book-length poem creates a new structure, one that might best be called a wander, through which we’re led by Hildegard of Bingen and a constantly transforming and transformative host of birds. The birds become a way of interrogating corporality, their wings offering an anti-gravitational counterpoint to the round solidity of body. Haunted by recurrent characters—shattered glass, a recent death, or simply the color green—Stancek’s language-machine cuts and splices normative syntax into sparkling patterns, juxtaposing clarity with a marvelous opacity, an opacity that gives her language reflective properties.” -- Cole Swensen, author of Gravesend"'What would it mean to write an utterly embodied book?' asks Claire Marie Stancek, in the midst of writing one (this one). Which makes me wonder: 'What would it mean to write oneself into becoming a musical instrument?' Because that is one of several things I thought while reading wyrd] bird: that the poet’s orientation—and Stancek’s waking magic—is the presence and precision of an instrument constantly positioning—fashioning, embodying, availing—itself so as to best receive what is being offered of the withering yet still somehow possible world and to convert it into something that both is and is beyond music." -- Brandon Shimoda, author of The Grave on the Wall"Destiny enters our lives—we do not like to say so—and wyrds them—. That is, the destination that is a life grows strange when, as if fated, we wake up into this life that is, I’m told, my own. But life isn’t only a daylit realm—it’s dusk, it’s dawn, the half-lit all. The tight weave of the will unwinds, the self is a selvage fraying at its edge apart, and the mind learns again it is a thinking dream, learns to ask, as Claire Marie Stancek knows it must, 'what / is a green thought?' To read wyrd] bird is to become its student. And so I’ve learned, in part, that the 'green thought' is the vital, mystic tendril that threads together opposites into union more profound: God and Satan, sun and moon, night and day, dream and waking. The mystic knows paradise is not conclusion, but is found only in the 'vigor of the unfinished thought,' where song undoes mere fact, and the world becomes again the poem of love. It is not an easy poem. Love here is difficult because it is so true. Includes the riots. Includes the police. Includes guns. But also includes the wish that 'the song could take some pain away,' and indeed the song does. When the intimate inverts into the infinite we have the mystic’s book and balm—which is this very book’s deepest nature. Not that it heals all our harms; it doesn’t, and shouldn’t. This book serves a deeper need: to let us behold the wound, our helpless openness, that lets us love the world that wounds us all the more dearly for bearing its mark." -- Dan Beachy-Quick, author of Variations on Dawn and Dusk

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Book SynopsisAnswering a call to go feral, these poems are part invocation and part prayer, re-imagining the form of the confessional poem by exploring the nature of confession from a feminist and anti-colonial perspective. In This Red Metropolis What Remains, Leia Penina Wilson composes a mysteriously stark and playful pop-surreal romp through a mythic apocalypse. Dropping in and out of this mystic narrative are voices of characters who are trying to survive and to reconcile their own belonging. These poems reckon with what happens in the aftermath of brutality, questioning what anyone can or should do after tragedy, questioning everything until they begin to break down even their own authority. The landscape in the world of This Red Metropolis What Remains is itself deeply unsettled. Each form varies and reflects an endless transformation of embodiment and interrogation. These poems ask what can be recovered, if anything, through an uninterrupted interrogation of memory, category, and language and with an unbroken attention to the speaker’s own power. Creating shifting architecture and landscape that reveals both the disintegration of cultural time and the eternity of interior time, confession and lyric wrap both speaker and listener together. Trade Review“I enjoyed the fabular vibe of This Red Metropolis What Remains, the way that exacting loss and neon pleasures combine with a light yet complex tone. ‘[I] want to be wild/in the wilderness,’ exclaims the narrator-poet, as a centaur canters past or stamps its hoof in sudden anger. And what would it be to step over the boundary of ‘red salt’? How do ‘menace’ and ‘extinction’ speak to each other across zones of human and animal comfort, or desire? Leia Penina Wilson conjures her magic as a poet in service of questions that, themselves, form during the act of reading itself. All of this feels quite generous and free, optimistic, while at the same time speaking to survival. How ‘something must come’ no matter how ‘beastly’ the experience is.” -- Bhanu Kapil, author of How to Wash a Heart"In our riven American moment, one which Leia Penina Wilson rightly sees as reeling between apocalypse and carnival, what can cure us? Not a poem. And certainly not a poem like all the other poems. We need something more like poetic fury and mythic rage. We need words drawn from the wounds of those violated bodies and gas-lighted souls now suffering among us. And we need not a poet, but a witch, a ghoul, a nighthag, a demigorgon, some darkly feminine spirit with the ferocity and will to 'unwound' us. This is exactly what Wilson strives to be and do. Through her epic upendings, her feral incantations, and her savage heart, she conjures up for us the specter of our post-wounded selves." -- Eric LeMay, author of In Praise of Nothing: Essays, Memoir, and Other ExperimentsTable of Contentscontentsapocalypse & carnival—3 longing to be held—46 #mercy #mercy #mercy—78

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Book SynopsisWith sharp focus and startling language, the poems in Maw Shein Win’s second book, Storage Unit for the Spirit House, look through physical objects to glimpse the ephemeral, the material, and the immaterial. Vinyl records, felt wolverines, a belt used to punish children, pain pills, and “show dogs with bejeweled collars” crowd into Win’s real and imagined storage units. Nats, Buddhist animist deities from her family’s homeland of Burma, haunt the book’s six sections. The nats, spirits believed to have the power to influence everyday lives, inhabit the storage units and hover around objects while forgotten children sleep under Mylar blankets and daughters try to see through the haze of a father’s cigarette smoke. Assemblages of both earthly and noncorporeal possessions throughout the collection become resonant and alive, and Win must summon “a circle of drums and copper bells” to appease the nats who have moved into a long-ago family house. This careful curation of unlikely objects and images becomes an act of ritual collection that uses language to interrogate how pain in life can transform someone into a nat or a siren that lives on. Restrained lines request our imagination as we move with the poet through haunted spaces and the objects that inhabit them.Trade Review"To enter the spirit houses, storage units, and myriad spaces Maw Shein Win opens for us in the pages of her new collection Storage Unit for the Spirit House is to enter a universe where familiar objects and structures take on new shapes and significance. The poems are tight, condensed, and without digression, and the result is transporting. Shein Win sets scenes with particularity and immediacy to fully immerse the reader in each storage unit or sky, water, or physical space, and her sparing use of punctuation, along with lineation that includes short lines and ample white space, dictate a slow, thoughtful pace." * Women's Voices for Change *"It is as though Win operates a time machine, moving through the experiences of her life with great alacrity, erring always on the side of self-awareness and wisdom. Win longs for memory the way some people long for wealth or fame. One has the sense that it is an essential component of her daily life. So too is the belief that optimism and joy are vital to human existence, which we see whether she is 'riding her wooden bicycle along the dust path,' or listening to the 'sound of coworkers arguing in the bathroom.' From these simple moments, the poet derives a sense of peace, however fleeting it may be." * LA Review of Books *“There’s a lot here that will encourage gluttonous readers to consume more of Win and others in her league. . . . Storage Unit for the Spirit House is brave and multifaceted. It smolders and sings.” * The Rumpus *"Longlisted" * PEN America/Pen Open Book Award *Finalist, Poetry * Northern California Book Awards *"In a dense and sketched-out lyric, Win's is a poetic of accumulated dailyness, a lyric journal of dreams and domestic composed via shorter units of precision around ordinary extraordinariness. She writes portraits of medical appointments, local landmarks, storage units and strange dreams, a litany of family and subconscious images, children who won’t sleep and a house on the lake." * Rob McLennan's Blog *“These spare poems are haunted. With a blown-up heart, Win writes about possessions and flashes that hark back like ghosts to our before’s. In Storage Unit for the Spirit House prisons, tombs, portals, bottles, storage units are memorials. I would call these poems luminous and gorgeously darkly-edged, bellowing as they do with the knowledge that we never truly depart from all of our departed things.” -- Ingrid Rojas Contreras, author of Fruit of the Drunken Tree"Poetry has long been a vessel, a container of history, emotion, perceptions, keepsakes. This piercing, gorgeous collection stands both inside and outside of containment: the porcelain vase of stargazer lilies is considered alongside the galley convicts, the children sleeping on the cement floors of detention cells, the nats inside their spirit houses; the spirit houses inside their storage units. 'The soft part of the brain fits into a clear jar.' One observes, in these nestings and inclusions, dioramas and offices, the human eye peering out and peering in: 'I witness each body through the missing bricks.' These poems are portals to other worlds and to our own, a space in which one sees and one is seen. A marvelous, timely and resilient book." -- D A Powell"This book is a gem. Maw Shein Win's compact lines have the power of haiku. She is mistress of the acute, quietly searing detail, of precisely calibrated shifts between the vast and the tiny, of haunting flashes of overlapping worlds, and of her own lyrical-telegraphic style. Constructed from shards of what can only be remembered or recounted in fragments, these poems are startling stream-of-consciousness mosaics in which childhood is 'a burning kingdom,' the moon is a 'lucent coin' and the future might be a 'birthmark on forehead in the shape of a flame.'" -- Amy Gerstler"Maw Shein Win has no weaknesses nor restraints in this collection that might map how thought and memory were meant to exist. Poems that sharpen the soul. Cosmic architecture made from and into the simple organs of small places. And while an afterworld owes her for its articulation, she won’t kick the ghosts while they are down." -- Tongo Eisen-Martin, author of Heaven is All Goodbyes"In Maw Shein Win’s second poetry collection, Storage Unit for the Spirit House, we enter various portals, from Burma to California (and beyond), emerging in pieces with 'directions to the otherworld.' Each poem is a small offering, a look at certain illnesses and violence within family, including land and the bodies they occupy. To honor these spaces, Win writes 'we wore bright colors to disorient the animals.' These poems are crafted with such precision that these travels teach us how 'to mark the now' even when we feel trapped by sunsets, cinemas, or reliquaries. This is a beautiful book." -- Khaty Xiong, author of Poor AnimaTable of ContentsCONTENTS 6 Spirit House (one)ONE8Storage Unit 2029Storage Unit 20210Storage Unit 20211Water Space (one)12Water Space (two)13Water Space (three)14Sky Space (one)15Sky Space (two)16Sky Space (three)17Vase (one)18Vase (two)19Vase (three)TWO 21Spirit House (two) 22Which gives the outer pair the heavy look of bronze clothes on statues23When the galley convicts clanked out of the prison in their chains24Desolation appears greater when pinpointed by light25The eye may allow some confusion26Cinema27Theater in Four Acts28Spectre Show29Theater in Three Acts30Hippodrome31Reliquary32Tomb33Tower 34Halls35Storage Unit for the Spirit HouseTHREE37 Spirit House (three)38 Bone (pantoum)39MRI Scan40Bottle41Imaging Center42Hospital43Room Tone44A State of Mind45The Soft Part of the Brain46BoneFOUR 48 Spirit House (four)49Huts50Phone Booth51Factory52Restaurant53Diorama54Shops55Eggs56 The Parlors FIVE58Spirit House (five)59Convention Center60Office in Lovelock, Nevada61Container62Relationship63Cave 64Portal65 DenSIX67The Cellars: A One-Act Play70Spirit House (six)71Notes72Acknowledgements

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Book SynopsisA poet and a book artist take a train across the United States, creating and conversing along the way. Late in the fall of 2017, poet C. S. Giscombe and book artist Judith Margolis boarded an Amtrak train in New York City and, four days later, stepped off another train at the edge of San Francisco Bay. Giscombe was returning home to California to address an all-white audience on the problem of white supremacy, and expatriate Margolis, accustomed to a somewhat solitary existence, was visiting the United States and making collages. Traveling together, they each turned their train quarters into writing and drawing “studios” where they engaged in conversations and arguments and shared experiences of the discomforts and failures of recent times. Their original intention had been to travel west and document, in journals and sketchpads, the complex, charged American landscape, but as the trip progressed—and in the months afterwards—the project took on a new shape. Train Music, the book that resulted, recollects and explores the century’s racial and gendered conflicts—sometimes sensually, sometimes in stark images, sometimes in a “mixed economy” of poetry and prose.Trade Review“Giscombe and Margolis compose their travelogue in the present-absence of tender doubt. ‘Power’s always locatable on the other side of the mountain, distant,’ but Giscombe activates the line and the sequence to articulate poems that range far while simultaneously enfolding near. Margolis answers with sketches that are always more than their figures, because the seen bring their own annotations to their rendering. See that, the artist says. Hear that, the poet says. But they know the trains come and go like italics on the says.” -- Farid Matuk, author of The Real Horse“Reading Train Music, the collaboration between the African-American poet Giscombe and the Jewish-American artist Margolis, I find myself swaying in tune with the train on the curving irregular tracks. The book is an account of the friends’ four-day journey from New York to San Francisco. While Giscombe evokes cultural and personal history in the passing geography, Margolis wrestles a moody insomnia with layered collages and drawings of the very landscape that Giscombe catalogs. The divergent responses of the poet and the artist to their shared experience create a tantalizing and graphic mix of poetry, image, and prose but what feeds the creative explorations of both Giscombe and Margolis is their unknowing. Discovery is deferred and the book flows forward.” -- Gilah Yelin Hirsch, California State University, Domingues Hills“In Train Music, Giscombe’s narrative disjunctions and Margolis’ figurative abstractions crisscross at a roundhouse (‘I’m not a white girl, you said,’ ‘How do I get away with it, you wanted to know’) as they cut yard, heading West. For Giscombe, on his way to either ‘shake things up’ or ‘furnish comfortable words’ for a white audience about to hear his lecture on white supremacy, the ironies are hardly unique. Margolis’ moody, dark drawings evade easy definition by swaying back and forth, from depictions of a woman asleep in a bed and a woman wearing a house as her head to women standing on the roof of a house (upright coffin, empty coffer). Her vertical spirituality (the moon is one of her motifs) serves as counterweight to Giscombe’s horizontal zig-zag agnosticism, laying low like the Greenland shark that ‘runs those seminars/ way down under that ice,/ unconsumable/ maybe/ alive a thousand years/ down there.’ Train Music celebrates the survival of two artists selected by two histories for extermination. Together though, Giscombe and Margolis dance to the singing wheels of their cross-country trains, ‘A foot in one car, / a foot in another, passing from one to the next one.’” -- Tyrone Williams, author of As iZ “Hauntingly exquisite and powerfully prescient, Margolis and Giscombe’s, collaborative, Train Music is a tour de force of diasporic poetics. Between destinations, and dreams, desire and displacement, it both literally and figuratively dances through an interwoven collage of identity, history and culture, celebrating the exilic performativity of being.” -- Adeena Karasick, author of Checking in“A Jewish woman and a Black man, long time friends (but not lovers). Children of the 60’s. Self-sustaining adults in the real world. Collaborators. What can they make together that they can’t do alone? Dreams and nightmares. Asking questions and shaking things up. Two travelers on a journey of friendship looking for creative sparks. Art and life, life and art. Crossing America, awake and asleep. Waking dreams and sleeping dreams. Keen mental observation combined with intuition. Giscombe’s poetry is like a map, with references worth investigating. Follow the cues. Maps of the heart, maps of the mind, marking time. Margolis’ artwork is a perfect counter point to the writing. Dream like and rich in color and emotion, giving you clues and a tone, but leaving much to fill in from your own imagination and experiences. This book is all about Train Music. The devil may care or not, but not all sharks are alike.” -- Victor Raphael, artist"Train Music is a venturesome alliance of poetry with artwork, each moving the other onward. The poems are filled with vibrancy and momentum, the pictures with heart and solicitude – together they make train music." -- Mary Felstiner, author of To Paint A Life: Charlotte Salomon in the Nazi Era"In this radiant collaboration—C. S. Giscombe’s explorations of various possible paths through poetry and identity, Judith Margolis’ deft drawings and collages—Train Music traces the travel and friendship of the alternately colored, Negro, cold-water Negro poet Giscombe and the artist Margolis ('raised amidst Yiddish endearments') across the land by rail, tunneling through histories by word and image. 'Poetry’s fightin’ words' that train the reader for navigating in 'the unsounded ocean in that gasp that is life.' This collection invites us right on board." -- Tonya M. Foster, author of A Swarm of Bees in High Court"Train Music is a guide, not only a poem. It is a song, a journal, a biography, and a graphic score. Like a map, its words and drawings trace the journey of two friends crossing the US: C.S.Giscombe’s words are verbal images, while Judith Margolis’s collages and drawings playfully morph into text, prose and verse alike. Each of the two parts accompany the other, while contrasting the dynamic conversation between a black American and a Jewish American voice. . . . Take this ride. It’s worth it." -- Luisa Muhr, interdisciplinary performer, founding director of Women Between the Arts"It’s the long train ride from New York City to San Francisco—two friends with notebooks, sketch pads, questions, speculations, conversations about poetry wars, race, family and place—four days and nights with eyes and ears open to create a sound track—a kind of railroad music as accompaniment to the vast American landscape that crawls or flashes by. . . . But this is just a hint of the complexity and overall context of this wonderful book." -- Barry McKinnon, author of The Centre"Train Music is an inspiring synthesis of words and visual images. Friends, African American poet C. S. Giscombe and Jewish American artist Judith Margolis, have seized upon their fascination with train travel in order to create a narrative that is both deeply felt and almost metaphysical in scope. . . . For the poet, trains are redolent with history—they call up the physical construction of the railroads, the Great Migration, and Jim Crow and its aftermath. Meanwhile, Margolis’s drawings, paintings, and collages evoke a different story, paralleling the poem, but not in illustration of it. Her diaristic, and richly colorful artworks depict a mysterious female dreamer as an alternate point of reference for her audience. Taken together, Train Music anchors readers to the specificities of everyday life, but then frees them to fly amidst the percussive meditative sound of the rails." -- Joel Silverstein, artist, co-founder of Jewish Art Salon

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Book SynopsisWritten as a conversation, 100 Words is an exchange of ideas, dialogues, burdens, and ideals between someone White and someone Brown. Two poets, Damon Potter and Truong Tran, write to each other about one hundred powerful words—like “proximity, “shame,” and “hope”—each of which is an abstraction rife with socially inscribed beliefs and denials. They turn to each other in an exchange, a negotiation, and a series of discoveries as they write of their individual histories, share their burdens, and learn to carry weight together. ​ Tran explains this project, saying “it is occurring to me even as I am writing this now that this is not an experiment, or case study or collaboration or partnership. Damon is not the subject nor am I. This is a shared endeavor, a lived experience between two very different lives trying to understand what it means to be, to see the other.”Trade Review"In the engaged and perceptively engaging 100 Words, white poet Damon Potter and gay Vietnamese poet Truong Tran hold a conversation about the import of explosive words like proximity and hope." * Library Journal: Poetry Titles To Watch 2021 *“To enter this book is to witness in stark rarity and beauty, intimacy built by and between two strangers. Word by word, line by line, a shelter, a burden, a shared knowing is constructed by their hypnotic, addictive volley and an instruction manual/ode to the dismantling of systemic racism is assembled in the spaces in between. Tran and Potter write defiantly, tenderly into the most raw and private moments, which when made public, light and flash to show us the way to breaking through any facade to get to what’s really burning inside.” -- Jennifer Hasegawa, author of La Chica's Field Guide to Banzai Living“In 100 Words, Tran and Potter enter into a pact of vulnerability. Tran approaches Potter, an acquaintance in a café, with a proposition: share this burden. The burden of consciousness, pain, desire, survival. Tran, a gay man from Vietnam whose family fled the war when he was a child, asks Potter, a straight white man born a decade after the war, to collaborate in a call-and-response project. Tran sends Potter a list of 100 words—shame, home, family, weight—and the two trade off responding to the words in short passages. Each writer searches himself and the other to enact what Tran calls a ‘transference of consciousness,’ about race, privilege, othering, belonging, being. What began for Tran as an effort to ‘see this weight on someone else’ becomes a form of shared subjectivity. As Tran remarks in an afterword, ‘This is a shared endeavor, a lived experience between two very different lives trying to understand what it means to be, to see the other.’” -- Mary Burger, author of Then Go On“Language as a way of seeing, of reading, the other. A coming to terms with what one is, and is not, in the world. ‘this weight, this shame, it is not mine to carry.’ A simple statement through which the American-Vietnamese poet and visual artist Truong Tran, extends an invitation for the writer Damon Potter to help carry the weight of our shared existence in the world, of being in it, with words. A challenge to become past, memory, identity; to share a difficult sense of intimacy: ‘I have this overwhelming desire to clean your kitchen but I can’t. You would know that it was me.’ Intersected between poetry and conversation, 100 Words reveals a process defined by Truong as ‘the practice of doing,’ writing words, chasing them as they appear.” -- Jessica Diaz, author/translator of Happy Endings “100 Words begins with an uneasy conceit: two poets each deeply committed to linguistic precision and nuance, each with a visceral terror of how language obfuscates and betrays, enter into ‘honest’ conversation in order to ‘shift the weight’ of white bodied supremacy, to excavate the racist legacies of their lived engagement--word by word. . . . As each poet works through curiosity, rage, desire, refusal, despair, confusion, and reckoning 100 Words stunningly exceeds its conceit to become intimate communion ~ devastating, feral and luminous.” -- Rebekah Edwards, author of Then’s Elsewhere

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Book SynopsisTwo books bound together that interrogate race—one from the perspective of a man of color, and the other from the perspective of a white man. This book brings together different perspectives under two titles, considering the lives and experiences of two friends, one Vietnamese American and one white. Looking And Seeing is a poetic work of yearning, regret, and righteous indignation. In Truong Tran’s poetry, what is said and what is written reveal our complexities. Composed as an investigation of his own being and body as a brown person moving through white spaces, this collection moves alongside Tran’s friend and collaborator Damon Potter. Seeing and Looking offers a record of Potter’s perspective as a white man examining who he is and wants to be and the complications of trying to be good while also benefiting from histories of oppression. Potter considers death—both his own future death and the deaths of his friends—while grappling with how to witness horrors, wonders, and his self. Trade Review"If Book of the Other: small in comparison, was Tran’s navigation through the darkest part of the forest, Looking and Seeing is the continuation of the map in the ongoing case study to bring one’s existence to the forefront in communication with whiteness. Tran transitions his proximity to whiteness, showcasing the progression of one’s positionality within his ongoing journey in self-proclamation. In this book, we gain a more intimate understanding of the intention of the other. I made this art for you not in the hopes that you will hang it on your wall but in the sense that you will hold its consciousness that you will see yourself as others see you as question as subject as metaphor as conflict that art as human is conflicted and confronted. Tran requires us to sit with his examinations, with his witnessings, his confrontations, and his consciousness. we look, but Tran reiterates 'do we see?' and if seeing was the precursor to understanding, what can you do to shift your positionality in the ongoing struggle against whiteness as a threat? whiteness as inherent. whiteness as the standard. whiteness as the goal. whiteness as dominance. Whiteness as foe. whiteness as illness. whiteness as dismally & unimpressively; whiteness. by taking on this joint project with Potter, Tran showcases the possibility and intimacy of engaging with whiteness without the doldrums of performance. placing brown and white together on a conversational canvas to enrich the complexity of solidarity and truth." -- Mimi Tempestt, author of "the delicacy of embracing spirals"“Tran’s newest book is a new kind of contraption, a language chamber that splits the infinities of Belonging and Accountability (and Rage, and Memory, and many other concepts besides) into the refracted light that is the Poem in its most beautiful and affecting shape: the form of survival. I always applaud Tran’s bravery in the face of this world we molded out of chingazos, vast and unruly. This book screams and bites and protects all the people who think of themselves as the smallest dot.” -- Raul Ruiz, author of "Mustard"

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Book SynopsisA new translation of Rilke's groundbreaking volume, following the formal properties of the original poems, especially meter and rhyme, as closely as English allows. Rainer Maria Rilke, the most famous (and important) German language poet of the twentieth century - a master to be ranked with Goethe and Heine - wrote the New Poems of 1907 and 1908 in transition from his late-nineteenth-century style. They mark his appearance as a lyrical, metaphysical poet of the modernist sensibility, often using traditional forms like the sonnet to explore the inner essence, the deep heart, of things - often, quite literally, things. Influenced by his time spent as Rodin's secretary, Rilke turned to quotidian life and sought to artistically redeem it in all its possibilities. His exquisite use of meter and rhyme marks him as a "formalist" and yet a contemporary of Eliot and the later Yeats, so this translation follows, as closely as English allows, the formal properties of the original poems, in a line-for-line version, while trying to capture the spare diction and direct idiomsof modernism. Len Krisak is a recipient of the Richard Wilbur, Robert Penn Warren, and Robert Frost prizes in poetry. He has published more than five hundred poems, including translations from the Latin, Greek, Spanish, Italian, Russian, and German.Trade ReviewKrisak's translation of the New Poems offers readers a fresh opportunity to consider not only Rilke's poetry but also Rilke himself. * JOURNAL OF AUSTRIAN STUDIES *[Rilke's poetic project] was an ongoing, constantly shifting enterprise, a significant stage of which is rendered admirably in Len Krisak's new bilingual edition of New Poems . . . . The poems themselves [are] rendered . . . with careful attention to the experience of the original. . . . [This is] a sober and meticulous translation, which allows the poems' light to shine . . . by seeking out its source in the words themselves. -- Jack Hanson * PN REVIEW *Though not the first to render Rilke's work into English, Krisak-in striving especially to imitate Rilke's form, rhymes, and meter-succeeds in conveying both the force and subtleties of the original. . . . Highly recommended. * CHOICE *Table of ContentsPart II. Der neuen Gedichte anderer Teil / New Poems: The Other Part Translator's preface by Len Krisak Introduction by George C. Schoolfield Part I. Neue Gedichte / New Poems Part II. Der neuen Gedichte anderer Teil / The New Poems: The Other Part Index of Titles and First Lines in German Index of Titles and First Lines in English

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Book SynopsisA ground-breaking study of the musical and literary priorities, professional practices and creative interactions that shaped one of the most adventurous artforms of the Belle Époque. French art song, or mélodie, was one of the most radical and exploratory artforms of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was also among the most intimate, a genre of experimentation, hesitation and unfiltered artistic conversation. In this landmark history, Emily Kilpatrick charts the compositional preoccupations and literary stimuli, the friendships and rivalries, critical narratives and performance practices that shaped French art song between 1870 and the First World War. She traces the expanding horizons of an essentially new musical idiom, moving from the lively debates of the avant-garde to the social and artistic contradictions of the salons, the pedagogy of the Paris Conservatoire, and the eventual accession of song to the concert platform and a central place in the world's musical imagination. The mélodie of the Belle Époque flourished amidst a culture of creative collaboration, and through the musicianship and advocacy of performers as well as composers. Setting key works by Fauré, Duparc, Chausson, Debussy, and Ravel alongside historical curiosities and hidden gems, French Art Song: History of a New Music probes composer-performer relationships and the shaping of performance traditions and addresses the challenges faced by the twenty-first century interpreter. Kilpatrick twines cultural history with musical insight and a wealth of previously unpublished source material in a wide-ranging and richly detailed account of the public and private faces of musical invention.Trade ReviewBalances musical analysis with historical narrative and philosophical speculation...[and] deserves the highest praise. Kilpatrick emphasises the hitherto neglected roles of the composer Pierre de Bréville and his partner the tenor Maurice Bagès, and is at her most entertaining in describing the arrival of Fauré as director of the Paris Conservatoire in 1905 and his campaign against the sloppy, narrow-minded voice teaching he found there. A major contribution. * BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE *This landmark study...explores the musical and literary ethos, professional practices, friendships and rivalries, and creative interactions of composers, poets, singers, and painters. Extensively annotated and illustrated. A valuable resource for performers, teachers, and music lovers. Readers can sit by the piano as they read this book loaded with musical extracts from scores. * AMERICAN RECORD GUIDE *A rich, multifaceted study of the mélodie in its 'golden age'...Combines meticulous philology and archival research, poetic and musical analysis, and approaches from social history, feminist critique, and reception studies. Offers close studies of works not treated elsewhere (like Chausson's early songs or Strohl's Bilitis), models of word-text analysis, and rare insights. * MUSICOLOGY AUSTRALIA *Table of ContentsPreface Acknowledgements Part I: Poet 1 Baudelaire's Invitation to Composers 2 Song and Memory in the "Terrible Year" 3 "To the Depths of the Unknown in Search of the New!" 4 Interlude: The Poet Sings Part II: Singer 5 Mélodie at the Crossroads 6 Song, Salons, and the "Society Singer" 7 Collaboration and Creative Process 8 Interlude: The Voices of Fêtes Galantes Part III: Public 9 Singing Histories 10 Reimagining Song at the Conservatoire 11 Mélodie Centre Stage 12 Postlude: Philosophies of Composition Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisThe poems of Sarah Cortez flex lean muscles to build lyric intensity and a gripping edginess often backlit by an incandescent, controlled eroticism. Cortez reveals the hidden underworld of her fellow police officers, whose lives comprise the thin blue line and whose blood sometimes splashes and blackens on summer concrete.

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Book SynopsisStill Life with Timex chronicles a mother's loss. These poems explore the unsightly aspects of grief and the survivor's guilt of outliving a child. In the hospital with her son, the speaker directs her bitterness toward institutions and faith that do not do enough. Within this collection there are discoveries of life in its decay and remembrance. Blame indicts everyone-most especially the speaker herself, as she struggles to cope with shame as enduring as loss.from 'On His Own' I stroke his shoulders, squared as they entered the world, my son bold as a cardinal's wing against the white flames of magnolias.

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Book SynopsisThe poems in Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine take part in many of the traditions of lyric poetry, including elegies for lost loved ones, odes to the beauty of family and the natural world, expressed through a range of poetic forms and techniques.The 10th Anniversary Edition includes twelve new poems and an introduction by Matthew Wimberley.from “Emissaries”Some mornings when I’m readingearly, no light yet but the table lamp,my left hand will run through scalesalong the spine of the open book.My hands keep their own remembranceburied in fine grooves of flesh.The fingers turn over ignitions, faucets,always attuned to their proper force,knuckles never breaking thingsunless my brain overpowers them.They’ve discovered spectacular terrains,soft enclosures I can never enter again.I send them ahead as scouts for survey,emissaries that flip the lightsin every dark hallway of the future.

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Book SynopsisSarah Audsley’s debut poetry collection, Landlock X, joins a growing body of adoptee poetics. By examining the consequences of the international transracial adoptee experience—her own—Audsley’s collection finds more questions than solid answers. Employing a variety of poetic forms, co-opting the pastoral tradition to argue for belonging to the rural landscape—despite the inheritance of displacement and removal from a country of origin—Landlock X tries to solve for all of the (adoptee’s) variables and knows it is an impossible task that the “I”, “you”, and “we” of the poems only approximate. ...From “The Black Cows in the Foreground” it is unknown where the bones of your mother turned to fragments none in the painting of the black cows so where to grieve her body no parcel of land to plant sorrow in furrowed rows the black cows grazeTable of Contents [ untranslated ] ix I. F I E L D In the X Pastoral 1 Crown of Yellow 2 Greenhousing 4 Case Number: K83-5XX 5 Primary Color 6 On Creating False Memory 7 Swarm 8 Letter to the Woman on the Plane 10 Moonface Phases 11 Origins & Forms: Eight Sijos 12 While in Miryang, Searching 14 Still Life with Watermelon Seeds, Mannequin, Dead Mouse 16 [ translation/1 ] 17 II. D R E S S Confessional 20 On Not Fitting In 21 It Was a Yellow Light 22 Lament for Some Other Saigon 23 Letter To My Adoptee Diaspora 25 Broken Palette :: a retrospective in panels 26 On Meeting My Biological Father 33 Korea Doll Box 34 [American] Sampler 35 Dear Connie Chung 36 Beauty Being Beauty 37 Continuum 38 Field Dress Portal 39 [ translation/2 ] 40 III. P O R T A L Six Persimmons 44 Anti-Pastoral 45 Initial Gestures 46 “Now, where are you from?” 49 Adoptee Citizenship Act of 2018 50 We (or in the Blue House) 51 Planet Nine, a primordial black hole, new research suggests— 52 The Black Cows in the Foreground 53 The Half-Sister, Unmet 55 Fishheads (or Fuckheads) 56 Caspian Lake 57 Notes on Garnets 61 [ translation/3 ] 62 When My Mother Returns as X 63 Waiting Children 64 Notes 66 Acknowledgments 68 With Gratitude 69

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Book SynopsisThis collection is compiled from the unpublished poems of Karl Shapiro at the University of Texas in Austin and elsewhere. They are largely as Shapiro left them, in a desk drawer in his apartment in uptown Manhattan."Proposition" When we’re old lovers, sitting in separate chairs Silently, will you think our love has faded Though we smile richly and are still unaided By doctors, accountants and presumptuous heirs? Though talk has frozen in geologic layers Of long alignment of the loved and hated And even our sexuality is jaded And we have settled all our private cares Including death, listen to me, adored, Words cannot fail us ever, no matter how The fates brighten their implements to prove That even gods and geniuses get bored With marriage, fucking and poetic love, Because, beloved, we call each other thou.Table of Contents Foreword by Robert Phillips vii LOVE POEMS The Dinner Party 1 Waiting for Takeoff 2 Moving In 3 Homework 5 Interior 6 German 7 Sea Dance 8 Letter-Poem 9 A Kind of Gift 11 A Thank-You 13 Poems Like Flowers 14 The Meaning 15 "I'll Get Back to You" 16 Spate 17 An Exorcism 18 Archaeology 19 God 20 Proposition 21 Lost and Found 22 The Bestower 23 Total Immersion 24 Torso 25 Torso Fetish 26 The Legs 28 The Walk-Through 29 Talisman 30 No Doubt 31 The Spear 32 Rights 33 ROSE POEMS Late Bloomer 37 Hothouse Flower 38 Harvest 39 Prepositions 40 Vase of Dead Roses 41 VARIOUS POEMS The Day That Painting Died 45 The Camera 46 Ballpoint Pens 47 The Sacred Blue 48 Landscape 49 I Declare Peace 50 The Soldier 51 After the Surrender 52 Trajectory 53 Feminist Poem 54 Proverbs 55 The Tenses 56 Second Opinion 57 An Apology to a Bulldog 58 Karl Shapiro 59 Bar Mitzvah 60 The Jewish Problem 62 Again, for Sophie 64 About the Author 67

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Book SynopsisIn questioning the boundaries between the world and oneself, Scrape the Velvet from Your Antlers unflinchingly explores the dark eddies of coming of age and coming out. Kelly McQuain’s poems are far roaming in setting and far ranging in style, depicting the richness of a rural West Virginia upbringing as well as contemporary adulthood in the big city and abroad. Glints of humor and glimpses of pathos abound in the imaginative leaps these poems take as they tackle such subjects as LGBTQ sexuality, homophobia, domestic abuse, and racism. Unafraid to push the limits of contemporary sonics, McQuain’s work is rich in music and varied in form, with new riffs on the sonnet, the villanelle, and the persona poem. Accessible and lyrical, this debut collection deftly explores the homes we come from and the homes we create—all the while shining with wonder and resolve. Several of the poems won contests including the Bloom chapbook prize, the Glitter Bomb Award, Best New Poets 2000. ...From “No Trespassing”It’s me who worries about her mini-strokes and falls, the knot on her head from where she stumbled picking blackberries on the bank. She watches the bees come, stippling themselves with pollen, flowers bending in the breeze. This world is hers, for now—all she covets. Tonight it is a black bear and three cubs up against her window, spilling seeds from a bird feeder hung against the house. My mother stands in the dark by that window, her thin hand, the chill of ghostly glass.

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Book SynopsisThis selection of Hassan Najmi’s poems, translated by Mbarek Sryfi and Eric Sellin, provides an excellent introduction to the work of one of Morocco’s foremost poets and to a school of modern verse emerging in the Arab World. Scenes of late night cityscapes, lonely interiors, awe-inspiring desert wastes, and seaside vistas are found within the exquisitely subtle lyric moods and nuances of Najmi’s ars poetica, providing insight into the geographical, political, and linguistic ferment that have made Morocco an exciting hub of creative activity in the twenty-first century.

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Book SynopsisThe men who recur as characters throughout Jess Williard’s Unmanly Grief perform their masculinity in a variety of ways: boxing, theater, brotherhood, labor, and familial and romantic love. Marked by a sharp nostalgia, Williard’s poems move from Wisconsin to New York City and back, tracing the geographic movement of the speaker and his family: a teenage sister who disappears and returns, changed irrevocably; an older brother dismantled in adulthood; an ever-sacrificing father. Woven through the musculature of this varied and exciting collection, music appears as readily in dexterous formal verse as in lean, scrappy storytelling. What results is a crooning celebration of struggle and tenderness in this world, “where to be small and furious is enough.”Trade ReviewJess Williard’s powerful debut sings the stories of the workaday world into the realm of the epic. With a vision that moves beautifully between the horrific and the sublime, and voice that yawps as brightly as it yearns, Williard’s poetry moves us to take a second look at the fringes and see both ‘the battered and battering’ among us. Self-deprecatory and sometimes ashamed, elegiac and often celebratory, these poems dance around the poet’s own eloquent question: ‘Measured against the beautiful-/brained and impermanent, how can we not be a little grotesque?" —Dean Bakopoulos, author of Please Don’t Come Back from the Moon"In Unmanly Grief, the pale apostles of youth lead us through a childhood of corn and cement. Jess Williard shows how quiet some violences can be, how our incorrect heaven communicates through bats and waves, as well as what to believe in—the low pools of mourning where ‘formal nouns will stack their spines on any ground.’ This book knows the before and after of loves that don’t ask us to hurt for them; this book is that kind of love, the kind you keep." —Traci Brimhall, author of Saudade and Our Lady of the Ruins"Jess Williard’s Unmanly Grief is a journey into an unsung and often unseen America—and a love song to all those working just to get by. Here are poems of the people, told not in the elevated register of so much poetry, but in the rough and beautiful, guttural music of plain speech." —Patrick Phillips, author of Elegy for a Broken Machine"Unmanly Grief intersperses narratives of the body’s specificity, vulnerability, and perseverance with feats of lyrical reflection and music enough to bridge the gap between the personal and shared nature of those narratives. The tension between the stories of the poems (grounded in family, work, place) and what can be made of such reverent, yet unflinching observation gives the poems their power. There’s grounding in detail, voice, and careful observation, but also room, occasion, and audacity enough to leap from boxing to roofing to Hamlet and back." —Max Garland, author of The Word We Used for It

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Book SynopsisWinner of the 2019 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize.Inside the dodo bird is a forest, Inside the forest a peach analog, Inside the peach analog a woman, Inside the woman a lake of funeralsThis layering of bird, woman, place, technology, and ceremony, which begins this first full-length collection by Zaina Alsous, mirrors the layering of insights that marks the collection as a whole. The poems in A Theory of Birds draw on inherited memory, historical record, critical theory, alternative geographies, and sharp observation. In them, birds-particularly extinct species-become metaphor for the violences perpetrated on othered bodies under the colonial gaze.Putting ecological preservation in conversation with Arab racial formation, state vernacular with the chatter of birds, Alsous explores how categorization can be a tool for detachment, domination, and erasure. Stretching their wings toward de-erasure, these poems-their subjects and their logics-refuse to stay put within a single category. This is poetry in support of a decolonized mind.Trade Review"A Theory of Birds opens with phrases stitched with commas that are both light and startling: a grammar-flux that produces the effect of something falling out of or off the page. Zaina Alsous: ‘I entered through the empty cage, hips first.’ Zaina Alsous: ‘Can the map eat?’ The questions that follow invert their cardinal nouns, reverting to zero each time the next one is asked. I became curious about the nothing-everything of the book itself, the logic of voids and flight. A book that proposes a ‘collaboration with the dead’ but also a paradise of solar pathways and outcomes (intense joy). Alsous offers the reader a ‘previously’ as much as an ‘almost.’ A jar in France, a blonde hair in Fez: foreignness composes fragments in the shape of an ibis, a harp, a broken lantern, pinning them on a sky-red space: the page, which also shakes—shakes so hard that letters lose their place. And what would it be to write anyway? To love anyway? Zaina Alsous: ‘When I say home, I mean origin as a transitive verb. / When I say love, I mean these miracles are work.’"—Bhanu Kapil "Gabriel García Márquez wrote that Christopher Columbus’s Diario, ‘a book that speaks of fabulous plants and mythological lands,’ was the first example of magical literature in the Caribbean. This ‘magic’ is the colonizer’s ability to falsify a history, to rename what has already been discovered, to create taxonomies and eradicate the epistemologies of entire peoples. Zaina Alsous’s A Theory of Birds makes another kind of magic. Alsous writes, ‘While invading the New World, Columbus writes of sirens in / his notebooks, evoking the half-women, half-birds of Jason’s / Argonauts. Every time I look for women, I become more bird.’ Here is the magic of decolonization, the way it reconnects us past the romanticized past of the noble savage, past the Orientalist hybrids of an unimaginative colonial fiction, all the way to a poetics born of solidarity, of struggle, and pushing through the fissures that will eventually break apart empire. ‘Listen, next time, the flowers are naming themselves.’" —Raquel Salas Rivera

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Book SynopsisFinalist, 2020 Miller Williams Poetry Prize Inspired by Matsuo Basho's writings and teachings on poetics and haiku, the interrelated lyric poems in Sky of Wu investigate work and marriage, the question of becoming a parent while watching a parent age into dementia, and the realities of wrestling with inequality, pollution, and habitat loss while navigating everyday life in Oakland, California. Simultaneously, they converse with Chinese poets from the eighth century and Japanese writers from the eleventh and seventeenth centuries. From these disparate sources, Halebsky weaves together small moments, stolen phrases, and images of beauty, allowing them to reveal their own sly humor and unvarnished truth.Trade ReviewHalebsky likes the unleashed energy of poetry, and in the poems gathered here, she delivers." - Billy Collins

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Book SynopsisFinalist, 2022 Miller Williams Poetry PrizeFrom cities and cross-country bus rides to swamps and fern forests, Michael Mlekoday’s All Earthly Bodies celebrates the ungentrifiable, ungovernable wildness of life. This is anarchist ecology, nonbinary environmentalism, an earthbound theology against empire in all its forms. These poems ask how our lives and language, our prayers and politics, might evolve if we really listened to the world and its more-than-human songs.“Sometimes I wish I could / peel myself from myself / without discarding the shell,” Mlekoday writes. Through a kind of lyric dreamwork, Mlekoday sounds the depths—of ancestry and identity, race and gender, earth and self—to track the unbecoming and re-membering of the body.

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Book SynopsisWinner, 2022 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize The divine and the digital achieve a distinct corporality in Maya Salameh’s How to Make an Algorithm in the Microwave, winner of the 2022 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize. Layering prayer with code, Salameh brings supposedly unassailable technological constructs like algorithm, recursion, and loop into conversation with the technologies of womanhood, whether liner, lipstick, or blood. Exploring the relationships we have with our devices, she speaks back to the algorithm (“a computer’s admission to blood”), which acts simultaneously as warden, confidant, and data thief. Here Salameh boldly examines how an Arab woman survives the digitization of her body—experimenting with form to create an intimate collage of personal and neocolonial histories, fearlessly insinuating herself into the scripts that would otherwise erase her (“a code & a homily are both instructions”), and giving voice to the full mess of ritual.

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Book SynopsisTo Be Named Something Else, winner of the 2023 Miller Williams Poetry Prize, is a high-spirited celebration of Black matriarchy and lineage—both familial and literary. Centering the coming-of-age of Black femmes in Harlem, Shaina Phenix’s debut collection, in the words of series judge Patricia Smith: “enlivens the everyday—the everyday miraculous, the everyday hallelujah, the numbing everyday love, the everyday risk of just being Black and living. There is absolutely nowhere these poems aren’t—we’re dancing and sweating through our clothes, terminating a pregnancy in a chilled room of white and silver, finally gettin’ those brows threaded and nails did, practicing gettin’ the Holy Ghost, sending folks to their rest, having babies, listening carefully to the lessons of elders, and sometimes even talking back. . . . To Be Named Something Else is a book of reason and reckoning, substance and shadow. It’s tender and wide-aloud and just about everything we need right now, when both reason and reckoning are in such woefully short supply.” Phenix’s full-throated poetry, with its “superlative combination of formalism and funk,” is assuredly something else.Trade Review“To Be Named Something Else is a collection that at once seems to have arrived from another world and is yet, clearly and deliberately, built from the incandescent materials of Black social life. These poems speak to the ancestors we know and love, the undaunted bards still walking among us, the sites and sounds of the Black quotidian rendered more surreal by Shaina Phenix’s honed attention. This book lives in a space all its own. It is a song of grief, flight, and ongoing overcoming."—Joshua Bennett, author of The Sobbing School"This is the kind of poetry collection I ache for. Shaina Phenix’s invigorating debut alchemizes the properties of human spirit and generational circumstance to challenge perceptions about the contemporary American Black femme experience. Through a process of transmutation, the poems blend the personal with cultural criticism in a way that feels sacred, holy—like something a priestess-type could manage. Phenix refuses to forget from where and whom she comes. From biblical verse to new verse, poetic form to poetic deconstruction, in lyric and shape, this collection feels like a masterfully creative study of artistry, politic, inheritance, and sexuality in Black American Lit."—Faylita Hicks, author of HoodWitch"Shaina Phenix’s expansive practice flourishes at the intersections of many things. Here is a book of poems, a book of prayers—part choreopoem, part lineage song—a trace of Black femme becomings. Phenix ferries such sonic multiplicities into the blackest ink of this gathering ground steeped in Black feminist practices and reminds us of the discipline of imagining that some prayers can be. Virtuosic, lush, mystical, vexed, ablaze. To Be Named Something Else is fierce with the urgency of survival and also so in touch with its inner starlight, as in: ‘I find myself thinking, that girl is something else. Find myself / thinking that girl is a little mouth of God."—Aracelis Girmay, author of The Black Maria

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Book SynopsisYour Blue and the Quiet Lament records the textures of grief after a cousin's murder at the hands of the Syrian state reaches the poet through a long-distance phone call. The poems trace a narrative of arrest, imprisonment, and torture in Syria and interweave the difficulties a family experiences in the diaspora.Shifting between the death of poet Federico García Lorca and that of her cousin, Lubna's poetry contends with personal loss by distancing the meaning of one death through the proxy of another. Yet the distortion of distance is already there—in the language, in the geographic space, in time, in the grief itself—tinged with blue.As she recalls childhood memories and imagines conversations with her dead cousin, Lubna's poetry whispers, calls out, sings, laments, pens letters, photographs, sketches, paints, and prays in an attempt to exhaust grief.

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Book SynopsisWater is a collection of poetry, watercolors, and pen-and-ink drawings from poet and author Susan Brind Morrow. Water is the organizing concept; it is also the urtext of the artistic process, the window between the natural world and our representations of it. The interplay between the media creates a unique reading experience that will appeal to readers of poetry and art books. Morrow’s award-winning work on Egyptian poetry and religious texts manifests here in transcriptions of hieroglyphs and accompanying ink drawings. Water is a unique ars poetica for one of our most singular contemporary American voices.

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Book SynopsisA rare glimpse of a young C. S. Lewis. Spirits in Bondage reveals the earliest published thoughts of C. S. Lewis. However, we find an unfamiliar Lewis--not the mature Christian but the young atheist cynic, who fought in the harrowing Great War. In these poems Lewis dreads the dangerous world that keeps us from living meaningful lives. Introduced by Karen Swallow Prior, this beautiful print edition of Spirits in Bondage will nuance our understanding of C. S. Lewis.

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Book SynopsisGoethe is the most famous German author, and the poetic drama Faust, Part I (1808) is his best-known work, one that stands in the company of other leading canonical works of European literature such as Dante’s Inferno and Shakespeare’s Hamlet. This is the first new translation into English since David Constantine’s 2005 version. Why another translation when there are several currently in print? To invoke Goethe’s own authority when speaking of his favorite author, Shakespeare, Goethe asserts that so much has already been said about the poet-dramatist “that it would seem there’s nothing left to say,” but adds, “yet it is the peculiar attribute of the spirit that it constantly motivates the spirit.” Goethe’s great dramatic poem continues to speak to us in new ways as we and our world continually change, and thus a new or updated translation is always necessary to bring to light Faust’s almost inexhaustible, mysterious, and enchanting poetic and cultural power. Eugene Stelzig’s new translation renders the text of the play in clear and crisp English for a contemporary undergraduate audience while at the same time maintaining its leading poetic features, including the use of rhyme. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.Trade ReviewStelzig's translation is an excellent and unusually accessible introduction to Goethe's text for college students. Its dramatic prose with occasional rhyme catches the basic tone of Goethe's play and loosely follows the lineation of the original. Accurate and clear enough to stand on its own with minimal annotation, lively enough to keep students reading and to read aloud in class, it is a superb choice for world literature courses or for departmental courses in translation. -- Jane K. Brown * University of Washington *This exciting new translation of Goethe’s Faust brings the text to life for a contemporary audience. Stelzig’s 'flexible' approach to poetic translation is eminently successful: the complexity of the text is allowed to emerge without completely sacrificing its poetry. I highly recommend it--especially for the classroom and first-time English readers of Faust. -- Astrida Tantillo * University of Illinois at Chicago *"The renewing potential of translation—indeed, of any act of cultural transmission—lies at the heart of so many of Goethe’s works, and Stelzig has succeeded in crafting a vibrant English version of this masterpiece." * Eighteenth-Century Studies *"This translation successfully captures the power of the text and maintains, as best as possible, fidelity to the original, even as the author has made many choices to produce a readable and quite modern Faust." * The Wordsworth Circle *"Stelzig’s translation succeeds in establishing this desired rapport between Goethe’s German text and English-speaking readers of the twenty-first century. By using contemporary but not overly colloquial language, by conveying some of the range of Goethe’s explicit and implicit meaning, and by creating a text with sonorous, poetic qualities, Stelzig has produced a translation that will make Goethe’s work accessible to a range of readers. It would certainly be appropriate for undergraduate literature courses; the scholarly apparatus (introduction and notes) is informative without being pedantic. The translation would, I think, also lend itself to use in theatrical performances." * European Romantic Review *"Stelzig has provided a solid, readable text of Faust I that should remain enjoyable and useful for a long while." * Goethe Yearbook *Stelzig's translation is an excellent and unusually accessible introduction to Goethe's text for college students. Its dramatic prose with occasional rhyme catches the basic tone of Goethe's play and loosely follows the lineation of the original. Accurate and clear enough to stand on its own with minimal annotation, lively enough to keep students reading and to read aloud in class, it is a superb choice for world literature courses or for departmental courses in translation. -- Jane K. Brown * University of Washington *This exciting new translation of Goethe’s Faust brings the text to life for a contemporary audience. Stelzig’s 'flexible' approach to poetic translation is eminently successful: the complexity of the text is allowed to emerge without completely sacrificing its poetry. I highly recommend it--especially for the classroom and first-time English readers of Faust. -- Astrida Tantillo * University of Illinois at Chicago *"The renewing potential of translation—indeed, of any act of cultural transmission—lies at the heart of so many of Goethe’s works, and Stelzig has succeeded in crafting a vibrant English version of this masterpiece." * Eighteenth-Century Studies *"This translation successfully captures the power of the text and maintains, as best as possible, fidelity to the original, even as the author has made many choices to produce a readable and quite modern Faust." * The Wordsworth Circle *"Stelzig’s translation succeeds in establishing this desired rapport between Goethe’s German text and English-speaking readers of the twenty-first century. By using contemporary but not overly colloquial language, by conveying some of the range of Goethe’s explicit and implicit meaning, and by creating a text with sonorous, poetic qualities, Stelzig has produced a translation that will make Goethe’s work accessible to a range of readers. It would certainly be appropriate for undergraduate literature courses; the scholarly apparatus (introduction and notes) is informative without being pedantic. The translation would, I think, also lend itself to use in theatrical performances." * European Romantic Review *"Stelzig has provided a solid, readable text of Faust I that should remain enjoyable and useful for a long while." * Goethe Yearbook *Table of ContentsTranslator’s Note IntroductionFAUST, PART I Further Reading Contemporary English Translations of Faust, Part I Acknowledgements Authorial Note

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Book SynopsisDonetsk, the black gem of Ukraine—Eden and Sodom in one, a stew steaming with coal fever, Manifest Destiny of Europe’s east: Svetlana Lavochkina sends readers on a double odyssey with two adventurers, the fiery blacksmith Alexander and the elusive linguist Lisa, whose paths are destined to cross on the cusp of the war in the Donbas. Only one of them fathoms that their encounter goes far beyond its face-value purpose. A thriller, a romance, a CV, a rose of historical winds, a song of crafts, an ontology of Eastern-Ukrainian mind in one, Carbon is told in polyphonic verse—a prayer for the beloved, anguished city.

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Book SynopsisThe poems in Polly Buckingham’s debut collection, The River People, move through both dream and natural landscapes exploring connection and loss, abundance and degradation, the personal and the political. The speaker in these poems is often in a state of not knowing that can be both terrifying and revelatory. It is a state in which windows and doors connect the living and the dead and the inner and outer worlds. Organized in four sections that move from Florida to the Pacific Northwest, the poems are heavily imagistic and reminiscent of deep image poetry and Spanish surrealism.

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Book SynopsisIn Memory of a Banyan Tree is a collection of poems relating to nature, ecology, and ecopoetics, selected from the expanse of Rothenberg's writings over the past thirty-five years. Rothenberg's many years as a horticulturist and his engagement in the environmental movement inform his work. These poems are a watershed account of an intimate relationship with the outside world.

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Book SynopsisA story in verse chronicling the misadventures of a recently divorced Lebanese woman dating in America. Laila Halaby’s second collection of poetry, why an author writes to a guy holding a fish is a story in verse. This honest, sensual, and often funny series of narrative poems chronicles the author’s decision to leave her two-decades-long relationship with her Palestinian husband. Halaby suddenly finds herself in the world of American dating where she searches for idealized love and genuine connection. Always treated as an “other” and having never dated a white man or an American before, Halaby writes about misadventures and heartbreak amid misread cues and lost nuances. Halaby reassesses her role as a woman, a mother, and a writer, and she learns how to dispense with labels and imagined expectations. In the process, she becomes reacquainted with her womanhood and power.

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Book SynopsisPublic Poetics is a collection of essays and poems that address some of the most pressing issues of the discipline in the twenty-first century. The collection brings together fifteen original essays addressing "publics," "poetry," and "poetics" from the situated space of Canada while simultaneously troubling the notion of the nation as a stable term. It asks hard questions about who and what count as "publics" in Canada. Critical essays stand alongside poetry as visual and editorial reminders of the cross-pollination required in thinking through both poetry and poetics. Public Poetics is divided into three thematic sections. The first contains essays surveying poetics in the present moment through the lens of the public/private divide, systematic racism in Canada, the counterpublic, feminist poetics, and Canadian innovations on postmodern poetics. The second section contains author-specific studies of public poets. The final section contains essays that use innovative renderings of "poetics" as a means of articulating alternative communities and practices. Each section is paired with a collection of original poetry by ten contemporary Canadian poets. This collection attends to the changing landscape of critical discourse around poetry and poetics in Canada, and will be of use to teachers and students of poetry and poetics.Table of ContentsIntroduction: Public Poetics; Public Poet, Private Life: 20 Riffs on the Dream of a Communal Self; The Threat of Black Art, or, On Being Unofficially Banned in Canada; The Counter/Public in Pain: The Making & Unmaking of Poetry in Canada; Writing the Body Politic: Feminist Poetics in the 21st Century; Rewriting & Postmodern Poetics In Canada: Neo-Haikus, Neo-Sonnets, Neo-Lullabies, Manifestoes; The Ingeminate Eye: Peter Sangers Public Poetics; Reading for a Civic Public Poetic: Toronto in Raymond Sousters Ten Elephants on Yonge Street & Dennis Lees Civil Elegies; To the Bone: The Instrumental Activism of Dionne Brands Ossuaries; Rearticulate, Renovate, Rebuild: Sachiko Murakamis Architectural Poetics of Community; "We jimmied the radio": Gillian Jerome, Brad Cran, & the Lyric in Public; Formal Protest: Reconsidering the Poetics of Canadian Pamphleteering; Radio Poetics: Publishing & Poetry on CBCs Anthology; The Public Reading: Call for a New Paradigm; We Are the Amp: A Poetics of the Human Microphone; Canadian Public Poetics: Negotiating Belonging in a Globalizing World; Nota Bene; or, Notes toward a Poetics of Work...

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Book SynopsisNelson Ball has had a significant impact on contemporary Canadian poetry not only as a poet but as an editor, with his Weed/Flower Press in the 1960s and 70s. Certain Details provides a major overview of the breadth and many paths of Ball's poetry over six decades. This selection of his work includes his trademark minimalist poems in addition to longer works and sequences; it spans nature poems, homages, meditations, narratives, found poems, and visual poems. The book contains selections from all of Ball's major collections as well as works that have previously appeared only in chapbook or ephemeral form. In a generous and thoughtful afterword, and for the first time in print, Ball discusses his processes, influences, and aesthetics. The book is introduced by editor and poet Stuart Ross, who offers a personal entry point into Nelson Ball's extraordinary oeuvre.

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Book SynopsisWith compassion, humour and sharp-eyed irreverence, Ronna Bloom's work has made a significant impact on Canadian poetry. A Possible Trust is selected from her work to date.Bloom writes concisely of the precarious, the ephemeral, the epic, and of the fragility and determination of people in daily life and extraordinary health crises. Throughout her six collections, she is attentive to suffering, as well as to spontaneous connections and gestures of love.Her poetry has been used by teachers, architects, spiritual leaders, and in hospitals across Canada. This is poetry engaged with spontaneity, presence, work, and health care. There is a tenderness here where living matters, as does dying, a valuing of the incident, the encounter, the unexpected, the sorrow and the bowl-me-over delight.Bloom speaks to us about how vulnerability, suffering, and the release into joy, can combine as an ongoing, never-ending life practice. She mines her own experience while looking out into the world with awareness, empathy and the willingness to risk being wide open. These poems stand firm with readers.Editor and poet Phil Hall's Introduction "To Lead by Crying" argues for a poetics of empathy, and is an enthusiastic retrospective of Bloom's work. In the Afterword, Ronna Bloom traces the relevance of photography, psychotherapy, and meditation in her work. Defiant, comical, revealing, impolite yet respectful, A Possible Trust is a retrospective and celebration.

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Book SynopsisWorking within a postmodern style, this rhythmic and melodious collection of poems originally written in Slovenian by Cvetka Lipuš and translated here by Tom Priestly, blends the real with the surreal, dull urban lives with dreams. Lipuš, known for the lexical beauty of her work, dwells on topics of time and space which she handles in an almost revolving, irreverent manner. Priestly captures the maze-like characteristic of her verse and carefully reconstructs the sonoric beauty of the work in its original language.

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Book SynopsisIan Kinney fell seven stories, and he survived. In Air Salt Kinney (un)writes his hospitalization and recovery, using poetry as neuro-rehabilitation. A memoir written by an amnesiac, this collection stitches splintered narratives with projective verse, cutting up and reassembling found text from Get Well Soon Cards, emails between friends, excerpts from personal journals, written records of eye witnesses, the police and EMS reports, relevant Real Estate listings, nurses' charts, doctors' notes, hospital brochures, and Kinney's Neuropsychological Assessment: all increasingly recombinant, all increasingly in chorus. Kinney re-sorts the writing to etch in itself a more essential expression, Air Salt.A challenging, prototypic piece of posttraumatic writing, Air Salt accommodates narrative discord and juxtaposes heterogenous voices. It reflects the lived experience of trauma, continually (re)arranging distorted phrases, interrogating and (re)forming itself, and (re)fusing to compromise. Air Salt reintegrates a shattered body of local narratives and presses on.

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Book SynopsisSophie grew up in Veslefjord, deep in the Norwegian North, where the ice stretches to the horizon and the long Arctic night is filled with stories about the animals of the sea, ice, and sky. Now the ice is melting and the animals are dying. Sophie's mother is also dead, leaving behind a daughter and a lover on the melting permafrost.An Orchid Astronomy is the story of Sophie, of her personal trauma and of climate catastrophe, told in striking experimental poetry. Crossing poetic styles and genres, words and sentences flow and break, twist into images, and cluster together like the Arctic stars. Coming together in a sustained narrative, these poems ask how we grapple with magnificent loss, searching for solutions in science, in mythology, in storytelling and ultimately, in our relived memories.Challenging, powerful, and beautiful, An Orchid Astronomy wrestles with the grief we feel for the loss of those we love and grief for the changing world. In the language of mass extinction and the unknowable sky, Tasnuva Hayden fearlessly explores the nuances of personal collapse, sublimated desire, unfulfilled longing, and the ways we must move forward in the face of the impossible in poetry that dazzles like the moon on a midwinter night.

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Book SynopsisRelic species extinct everywhere else on the planet thrive on a remote archipelago. Evolution requires isolation, and these islands offer the perfect environment for genetic variation to take place, fostering new and unique forms of flora and fauna. Evolutionary biologists Emily and Roland have come on an extended field expedition to this secluded world, eager to expose its unique biosphere.As they work to gather a large dataset of dead specimens for study and description, Emily and Roland experience growing shifts in their perception, in their bodies, and even in the flow of linear time. The environment they have come to quantify acts upon them, the species they collect observe and comment upon them, and the controlled lens of science cannot save them. Succumbing to the dynamic power of isolation, they find themselves irrevocably changed.A poetic novel told through field notes, letters, and scientific data, Refugia is a story of discovery and transformation that shows the hubris inherent in the idea that humans live both outside, and at the center of, the natural world. This is a book that reveals science in all its imperfect beauty, crossing the line between observer and observed, scientist and subject, between what is known and what is unknowable.

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Book SynopsisThe body may be feared. It may be a site of philosophic and theological weakness, a place of fear and contamination. The body may be weak. It is ephemeral and impure compared to what is supposed in an abstracted world of pure intellect. The body may be an obsession, a material concern taken up to the detriment of all else. The body may be a challenge to overcome, an enemy to silence.In this book, dennis cooley sympathizes with the body. These poems celebrate the yearning, laughing, hurting, tender body. Here, the body is neither a site of conflict nor a place of spiritual weakness, but instead a vessel of experience that works in harmony with the intellect. Bodies burble, rejoice, yearn, and suffer. Bodies grow old, they are injured, they hold strength and grow weak in unexpected ways.Rejecting the simplicity of transcendence for a nuanced examination of mortality, time, illness, of the things the body promises and the promises the body keeps, cooley is unafraid to challenge the eternal and the certain. These poems are humorous, intelligent, and poignant. body works is essential reading for anyone who lives inside a body that lives within the world.

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Book SynopsisThe body may be feared. It may be a site of philosophic and theological weakness, a place of fear and contamination. The body may be weak. It is ephemeral and impure compared to what is supposed in an abstracted world of pure intellect. The body may be an obsession, a material concern taken up to the detriment of all else. The body may be a challenge to overcome, an enemy to silence.In this book, dennis cooley sympathizes with the body. These poems celebrate the yearning, laughing, hurting, tender body. Here, the body is neither a site of conflict nor a place of spiritual weakness, but instead a vessel of experience that works in harmony with the intellect. Bodies burble, rejoice, yearn, and suffer. Bodies grow old, they are injured, they hold strength and grow weak in unexpected ways.Rejecting the simplicity of transcendence for a nuanced examination of mortality, time, illness, of the things the body promises and the promises the body keeps, cooley is unafraid to challenge the eternal and the certain. These poems are humorous, intelligent, and poignant. body works is essential reading for anyone who lives inside a body that lives within the world.

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Book SynopsisIn March 2020, Lucas Crawford was quarantined at the Banff Centre for the Arts, coughing like a good fat asthmatic at high altitude, in the middle of a breakup, not knowing when or how he would get home, or where home would be when he got home. What does a depressed professor do, stranded in a dorm room? Write poems.Muster Points is a frank discussion of pleasure, plain, nostalgia, desire, and health from a “fancy academic” who refuses to shy away from the blood and sweat of depression or the glorious fluids of queer sex. These poems bring us on a trans boy’s trips through the sharp-shard runs of heterosexual marriages, into weird rural masculinities and their fraught survival, into the love language of regret and persistent, inconvenient desire.As Crawford packs his two suitcases and bangs into past selves, tenuous futures, and a global emergency, he tracks his collisions toughly and tenderly, documenting every relic and clue. He travels to the core of his sexual politic, through the front door and to the back of his mind. Muster Points arouses thoughts and provokes them, using visceral language and unequivocal vulnerability to conjure a place where all who enter may be seen as they are seen.

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Book SynopsisIn March 2020, Lucas Crawford was quarantined at the Banff Centre for the Arts, coughing like a good fat asthmatic at high altitude, in the middle of a breakup, not knowing when or how he would get home, or where home would be when he got home. What does a depressed professor do, stranded in a dorm room? Write poems.Muster Points is a frank discussion of pleasure, plain, nostalgia, desire, and health from a "fancy academic" who refuses to shy away from the blood and sweat of depression or the glorious fluids of queer sex. These poems bring us on a trans boy's trips through the sharp-shard runs of heterosexual marriages, into weird rural masculinities and their fraught survival, into the love language of regret and persistent, inconvenient desire.As Crawford packs his two suitcases and bangs into past selves, tenuous futures, and a global emergency, he tracks his collisions toughly and tenderly, documenting every relic and clue. He travels to the core of his sexual politic, through the front door and to the back of his mind. Muster Points arouses thoughts and provokes them, using visceral language and unequivocal vulnerability to conjure a place where all who enter may be seen as they are seen.

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Book SynopsisAmal’ezulu (Zulu Horizons) was the second volume of poetry produced by the renowned Zulu author B.W. Vilakazi. First published in 1945, it was written during the ten years he spent living in Johannesburg, having left his rural birthplace in KwaZulu-Natal. The poems in this collection express his yearnings for the beloved land, animals and ancestral spirits of his family home, as well as expressions of deep disillusionment with the urban life he encountered in the ‘City of Gold’, and in particular the suffering of the black miners who brought this gold to the surface but never experienced the benefits of the wealth it produced for the mine owners. Vilakazi was deeply conscious of the subhuman system that held these miners in its grip, and recorded their suffering in many of the poems in the collection.Renowned as the ‘father of Nguni literature’, Vilakazi was both a traditional imbongi (bard) and a forward-looking poet who could fuse Western poetic forms with Zulu izibongo (praise poetry). In these poems he assumes the role of the voice of the voiceless, and gives poignant expression to the stoic endurance of those caught up in the brutalities of the migrant labour system.Table of Contents 1 Ugqozi 2 Imbongi 3 Umthandazo Wembongi 4 OKomhlaba Kuyadlula 5 Imfundo Ephakeme 6 Wo, Ngitshele Mntanomlungu! 7 Yin’ Ukwazi? 8 Wo, Leli Khehla! 9 Ukuhlwa 10 Inyanga 11 Ukuthula 12 Nayaphi? 13 Ngoba ... Sewuthi 14 Izinsimbi zesonto 15 KwaDedangendlale 16 Imifula Yomhlaba 17 UMamina 18 NgoMbuyazi Endondakusuka 19 Ezinkomponi 20 Sengiyakholwa

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Book SynopsisDintšhontšho tsa bo-Juliuse Kesara is a translation into Setswana of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, by the renowned South African thinker, writer and linguist Sol T Plaatje, who was also a gifted stage actor. Plaatje first encountered the works of Shakespeare when he saw a performance of Hamlet as a young man; it ignited a great love in him for the works of the Elizabethan dramatist. Many years later he translated several of Shakespeare’s plays into Setswana in a series called Mabolelo a ga Tsikinya-Chaka (‘The Sayings of Shakespeare’.) Dintšhontšho tsa bo-Juliuse Kesara went to print five years after Plaatje’s death, in 1937.His translations of Shakespeare’s plays into Setswana helped to pioneer and popularise a genre, the drama script, that was previously not well known in Southern Africa. It also showcased the rich range of Setswana vocabulary and served Plaatje’s aim of developing the language.

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Book SynopsisThe African Treasury Series, published from the 1940s onwards, consists of texts written by pioneers of South African literature in African languages. It provided a voice for the voiceless and celebrated African culture, history and heritage. The reissue of these foundational texts with new introductions supports ongoing efforts to highlight the importance of writing in indigenous languages, and to remember and celebrate these early giants of African literature. The African Treasury Series is now available in ebook and print formats. Inkondlo kaZulu (Zulu Poems), the first volume of poetry by B.W. Vilakazi, was first published in 1935. This was the first book of poems ever published in isiZulu; it also marked the launch of the newly established Bantu (later, African) Treasury Series (published by the University of the Witwatersrand Press), a collection of twenty classic works written between 1935 and 1987 in African indigenous languages. It contains superb nature poems and also reflects Vilakazi’s contact with Western modernity. As both a traditional imbongi (bard) and a forward-looking poet who could fuse Western poetic forms with Zulu izibongo (praise poetry), he used his writings to express his resistance to the realities of capitalist exploitation of African labour and the appalling injustices of the migrant labour system. By committing to writing in poetic form what had traditionally been conveyed orally from one generation to the next, he preserves for future generations deep philosophical and emotional experiences of Zulu society. The republication of Inkondlo kaZulu affords the reader the opportunity to reappraise Vilakazi’s intellectual significance and his renown as the ‘father of Nguni literature’ at a time when the need is acutely felt to unshackle ourselves from ethnic boundaries and break the invisible chains of inherited prejudice. Inkondlo kaZulu is part of Wits University Press’ African Treasury Series.Table of Contents1 NgePhasika 2 Inkelenkele yakwaXhosa 3 Ukhamba lukaSonkomose 4 We moya! 5 Inqomfi 6 Impophoma yeVictoria 7 Woza Nonjinjikazi! 8 Khalani maZulu! 9 Umcabango wasekuseni 10 Sengiyokholwa-ke 11 Cula ngizwe! 12 Ma ngificwa ukufa 13 Ngizw’ ingoma 14 Ithongo lokwazi 15 UShaka kaSenzangakhona 16 Ngomz’omdaladala kaGrout 17 Phezu kwethuna likaShaka 18 Aggrey we-Afrika 19 UNokufa 20 Isenanelo eminyakeni engamashumi mahlanu 21 Wena-ke uyothini?

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Book SynopsisMo Motswasele II, terama ya ntlha e e kwadilweng ke Motswana e e ikaegileng ka ditiragalo tsa hisetori, L.D. Raditladi o sekaseka bogosi ka baanelwa ba babedi ba banna ba ba maatla, Moruakgomo le Motswasele. Go ya ka hisetori ya Bakwena, bobedi joo e ne e le dira ka ba ne ba lwela bogosi. Raditladi o kgala mokgwa wa puso wa ga Motswasele, yo o busang ka letsogo la tshipi, a itseela metlhape ya batho ba gagwe mme lefoko la gagwe e le la bofelo. O itikagantse le batho ba ba sa tshepagaleng e bile ba sa itse sepe ka boeteledipele kgotsa sepe se se tsamaelanang le bogosi. Moruakgomo, ka fa go je lengwe, o tlhagelela e le moetapele yo o pelo, wa segatlhamelamasisi, yo o botlhale, yo o ponelopele e bile a kgona go reetsa fa a gakololwa. Mo terameng, Raditladi o lemosa kgosi go se kgopise batho ba e tlaa tsogang e ba tlhoka kamoso, le go se letle dikoma tse a di iteelwang go mo ya tlhogong le go mo tlatsa maikgogomoso. Motswasele II e fatlhosa babuisi ka ga botlhokwa jwa setheo sa bogosi, le botlhokwa jwa kgosi go busa ka botlhale le go rarabolola dikgotlang fa di runya.

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