Poetry Books

Book SynopsisNational Book Award-winner Arthur Sze presents a one-of-a-kind anthology that vividly traces Chinese poetry from its centuries-old lyrical traditions up to the present day.In The Silk Dragon II, National Book Award-winning poet Arthur Sze presents a sophisticated vision of the vitality, diversity, and power of the Chinese poetic tradition. Traveling over one and a half millennia, Sze guides readers through a luminous history of verse, from the contemplative insights of fifth century poet Tao Qian, through Tang dynasty poets such as Wang Wei and Du Fu, and into subsequent centuries in which lived such innovative artists as Li Qingzhao and Bada Shanren, among many others. Extending the work from the original 2001 volume, The Silk Dragon II then traces classical Chinese poetry’s eruption into the free verse of the modern and contem

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Book SynopsisFilled with “moving water” and intuitive leaps, The Theory and Practice of Rivers is an elegy for Harrison’s sixteen-year-old niece. This new edition of The Theory and Practice of Rivers, by Jim Harrison, returns to print—as a stand-alone volume—a classic poetry title. In a heartfelt and powerful introduction, Rebecca Solnit calls this collection both elegy (inspired by the death of his sixteen-year-old niece) and “loose memoir” (filled with language that leaps intuitively across subjects, recalling various experiences, place, and memories). Beautifully adrift in the long poem sequence seated at the heart of this book, The Theory and Practice of Rivers is filled with “moving water, the search for consolation and meaning in the sublime rightness of wild landscape” (Outside). Harrison speaks to the rivers and leaps in all of us, leaving us profoundly changed.

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Book SynopsisIn her most intimate poetry collection yet, Lightsey Darst considers the many facets of maternal power and whether it might guide us toward healing in the wake of history’s horrors. In the nebulous space between collective and autobiographical memory lies family memory—the rituals and routines, places and plants, that bind us to the generations before. In The Heiress/Ghost Acres, Lightsey Darst examines her Southern ancestry and the legacy of white womanhood. As she navigates pandemic isolation and political upheaval, Darst reflects on how history—familial and national—shapes parenting, and interrogates that history in search of more ethical, transformative ways to mother. The Heiress/Ghost Acres points toward a tenable and connected future, one that acknowledges past evils while finding present, potent ways for love to counter violence.Trade ReviewPraise for The Heiress/Ghost Acres “‘Why was I unprepared to be so loved?’ Where parenthood is the catalyst to politics, Lightsey Darst’s conjoined book grows question after question. How might we survive in a motherland designed to purchase motherlessness? How can we—connected in both silence and radiance—be worth our children’s light? In the bloody midst of a magicless empire, ‘What magic empire might I still build from my blood?’ Dissenting what’s given, she asks and asks and asks. And every so often an answer flowers out: ‘My child is climbing my everything, / climbing the tree of my mind / so I must furiously grow / this apple she’s seeking.’ In other words, Darst is offering us the seeds we need most: restlessness, honesty, awe, and reckoning.” —Chris Martin Selected praise for Lightsey Darst “[Darst] has the unique ability to express motion with words.” —MPR “This is a vital poetry of the Deep South ripe with bones, blood and bogs . . . a harrowing stew of lust, dusk and summer.” —The New York Times “Simultaneously vulnerable and self-assured, Darst’s verse will have you clamoring for everything she’s ever written.” —Bustle “For Darst, to remember is to claim ownership of one’s pain and, by extension, one’s humanity.” —Publishers Weekly “As they carve their way through this markedly contemporary landscape, Darst’s readers will likely have trouble separating the dreams, desires, and fears the speaker expresses from their own—the text of these poems is everything you might catch yourself thinking, and everything you might hope someone else could share with you.” —The Arkansas International “[Thousands] has an intimacy about it that speaks to the tenderness inside the reader. . . . Don’t be surprised if there’s a catch in your throat when you read." —Signature Reads “Dear fear, dear darkness, dear misunderstandings, dear life, dear lost-in-myself, I am no longer afraid of you. Now I have this book. I have Lightsey Darst’s amazing and ecstatic meditation on being a person in the world, I have these poems to guide me, I have her bravery and wild mind, I have her spells and wisdom, I have these incredible poems to carry with me wherever I go.” —Matthew Dickman

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Book SynopsisFrom the author of MyOTHER TONGUE comes a new collection of prose poetry exploring the intergenerational inheritance of gendered violence.Rosa Alcalá choreographs language to understand the body as it “gathers itself over time to become whole,” recovering the speaker’s intuition while unraveling memory to pinpoint the aches, anxieties, and lessons of a woman''s survival. Ruminating on daughterhood, mothering, and the body''s cumulative wisdom, YOU traces a jagged line through fears and joys both past and present.

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Book Synopsis“We waited for Word to arrive/ like a messiah in a stagecoach/ or a sheriff riding a thundercloud.”From acclaimed poet Elaine Equi comes her latest provocatively playful collection. “Thoughtful, witty, curious” (The New York Times), Equi’s subversive voice delicately refracts human experiences from the colors of weather to the strange ways we make sense of our bodies, from the emptiness of family homes to the flow of time itself.

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Book SynopsisIn this remarkable debut, which marks the beginning of Multiverse—a literary series written and curated by the neurodivergent—Hannah Emerson’s poems keep, dream, bring, please, grownd, sing, kiss, and listen. They move with and within the beautiful nothing (“of buzzing light”) from which, as she elaborates, everything jumps.In language that is both bracingly new and embracingly intimate, Emerson invites us to “dive down to the beautiful muck that helps you get that the world was made from the garbage at the bottom of the universe that was boiling over with joy that wanted to become you you you yes yes yes.” These poems are encounters—animal, vegetal, elemental—that form the markings of an irresistible future. And The Kissing of Kissing makes joyously clear how this future, which can sometimes seem light-years away, is actually as close, as near, as each immersive now. It finds breath in the woods and the words and the worlds we share, together “becoming burst becoming / the waking dream.”With this book, Emerson, a nonspeaking autistic poet, generously invites you, the reader, to meet yourself anew, again, “to bring your beautiful nothing” into the light.Trade ReviewPraise for The Kissing of Kissing“This expansive and ecstatic debut, by a nonspeaking autistic poet who calls on ‘prayer to let all of / language answer me,’ inaugurates the publisher’s ‘Multiverse’ series of books by neurodivergent authors.”—New York Times Book Review“Fierce and energetic . . . [The Kissing of Kissing] makes a remarkable statement, both visually and verbally.”—Shelf Awareness"[The Kissing of Kissing] is beautiful to behold and even more refreshing to see pleasure so central to neurodiversity because of how often mainstream literature erases this fact."—Shondaland“A testament to the idea that poetry is truly the root of human connection via language is The Kissing of Kissing, a groundbreaking collection from neurodivergent poet Hannah Emerson. The raw beauty of each individual poem — and the entire book — is stunning and absolutely confident in its structural integrity.”—Washington Independent Review of Books“The first entry in Milkweed’s Multiverse series of books focused on neurodivergent and disabled writers, Hannah Emerson’s debut is utterly beguiling, her poetry an indescribable combination of interior monologue and public address. ‘Please try/ to become the breath that gives/ helpful thoughts that are floating / towards you yes yes,’ she writes with characteristic longing and confidence. Reading this beautiful book, I felt as though Emerson’s words had always been in my head.”—Craig Morgan Teicher, NPR, “Books We Love”“Emerson, a non-speaking, autistic writer, communicates a sublime personal cosmology in poems vibrating with an energy that derives, in part, from surprising repetitions, especially of the words kissing and yes . . . Unforgettable.”—Poetry Foundation’s “Harriet Books” blog"The Kissing of Kissing is the most original collection of poetry I've read in years . . . [Emerson's] ability to transmit the full-body experience of joy is rivaled only by Whitman. Please, please read this book. Your mind and your poetry and your life will be better for it."—Arkansas International“Inventive . . . Images repeat on a scale that shifts from the immediate, worldly, and intimate to the cosmic. ‘Please try// to imagine how big you are yes yes,’ Emerson suggests, challenging the reader to expand their perception and vision through this unusual and intriguing approach to form.”—Publishers Weekly“I have never read a book like The Kissing of Kissing . . . Hannah Emerson has exploded cultural assumptions about how we should write, how we should communicate, and what it means to be alive . . . Emerson [draws] the reader out of their trance and into the real world, which to her is grander, vaster, and freer than we all might realize.”—Luna Luna Magazine“This book feels personal and inviting at the same time–it’s very much Emerson’s story and perspective on display, and yet her work regards the reader not as a distant observer but as a partner in experiencing this big weird world we find ourselves in. The Kissing of Kissing makes the complicated feel comfortable and vice-versa, and that makes it a book worth settling down with and reading again and again.”—Anomaly“[The Kissing of Kissing] articulates nascent worlds anxiously awaiting their opening . . . Emerson, as an autistic poet, is not broken in the face of neurotypical linguistic norms, but rather an agent in the breaking and rebuilding of alternative ways to know the world.”—Barrelhouse Reviews“There is a ‘yes yes’ magic spell ‘yes yes’ in these pages, as this planet’s most extraordinary poems will cast. Yes, and more ‘yes yes,’ Hannah Emerson’s The Kissing of Kissing deserves a cult following—I’M IN! You, too, will fall in love with these poems that are coming at life in angles we never knew we needed to imagine!”—CAConrad“The Kissing of Kissing is incantatory and ecstatic. Ideas and images rooted in the natural world appear and swirl; the patterns and deviations they create combine to form a lush soundscape. In the vibrant heart of this woods of Hannah Emerson’s words, we are implored to embrace gestures that are straightforward and not—to ‘try to dive / down to the / beautiful muck’ or ‘to get to the flake of / snow that indescribable thing / that we need to know if we are to melt.’ The Kissing of Kissing is spectacular in its cadences and in its call to embrace longing, desire, intimacy, and (yes yes) love.”—Michael Kleber-Diggs “Hannah Emerson’s The Kissing of Kissing is one of the most accomplished poetry debuts I’ve come across in recent memory. There’s something of Molly Bloom’s final soliloquy in these poems, that deep rush of deep ecstasy made full by having touched deep loss: ‘I sound / each prayer to let all of / language answer me. / Teach our water its art. / Use questions.’ You can feel echoes of Walt Whitman, Gertrude Stein, and Ross Gay in Emerson’s truly singular and unforgettable voice. This is one of those rare miraculous books that, having read, I want to immediately share with everyone I love.”—Kaveh Akbar“‘Look very hard to find / the place between / the pillow and hell,’ Hannah Emerson writes in The Kissing of Kissing. Half entreating, half commanding, with an expansive approach to syntax and the urgent repetition of a heart beating with greater and greater intensity toward self-realization through language, these poems demonstrate a poetics of deep listening and deep feeling, of care, that suggests an alternative to the cruelty and carelessness that often take center stage in our historical moment. Hell is always proximate, Emerson’s poems remind us, but through attentiveness to ‘little things,’ so is the possibility for transformation—which is the work of poetry.”—Lauren RussellTable of ContentsContents My Name Begins Again Becoming Mud Kissing Tendrill Mind Peripheral Just Happy That Lovely Children Are Dancing Keep How the World Began A Blue Sound The Path of Please I Live in the Woods of My Words Please Try to Go to the Road Giveness The Underworld Connemara Pony To Go To The Sun Another Free Blue Vortex The Beautiful Beautiful Beautiful Dreaming Beast Throught Language of Leaves To Burrow Between Center of the Universe The Other World Love is Orange Irises Fill Your Arms Bring the Spring Animal Ear Pow Pow Pow Pow Into the Towards Teach Hannah Is Never Only Hannah The Edge The Reason You Became Human Come Home Lovely Burst Sugar Beat Cicadas Our Feet Become the Music Musibility Keep Yourself at the Beginning of the Beginning Sacred Grove The Listening World

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Book SynopsisAn exuberant collection celebrating the body and the soul of language, wringing delights and amazements out of the latter years of life.In his seventh decade and seventh full length collection, poet James P. Lenfestey dazzles with a suite of odes to parts of the body—heart, belly, ankle, teeth, ears, and more—and astonishment at the powers of language: “the sound of ‘n,’” our ancient alphabet, “the terror of publishing.” Known for his exuberant Chinese-style lyrics, now inspired by Neruda’s cascading Elemental Odes, Lenfestey praises Hewlett and Packard, Bruce Springsteen, “the language of crow,” fruit flies, and cabbages while recalling the “forgiveness of the Catbird” and random acts of kindness, all with his superb ear for sound, rhythm, and leaping figurative language.Rhythmic, jovial, and eminently approachable, this collection embraces the Cetacean mind and the fearless left hand. Here, Lenfestey writes love songs to the world “as it really is: bizarro, curious, inelegant, unclean, / unfaithful, filled with delight.”

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Book SynopsisSir Thomas Browne is one of the supreme stylists of the English language: a coiner of words and spinner of phrases to rival Shakespeare; the wielder of a weird and wonderful erudition; an  inquiring spirit in the mold of Montaigne. Browne was an inspiration to the Romantics as well as to W.G. Sebald, and his work is quirky, sonorous, and enchanting. Here this baroque master’s two most enduring and admired works, Religio Medici and Urne-Buriall, appear in a new edition that has been annotated and introduced by the distinguished scholars Ramie Targoff and Stephen Greenblatt (author of the best-selling Will in the World and the National Book Award–winning The Swerve). In Religio Medici Browne mulls over the relation between his medical profession and his profession of the Christian faith, pondering the respective claims of science and religion, questions that are still very much alive today. The discovery of an ancient burial site in an English field prompted Browne to write Urne-Buriall, which is both an early  anthropological examination of different practices of interment and a profound meditation on mortality. Its grave and exquisite music has resounded for generations.

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Book SynopsisDiane Arnson Svarlien's translation of Euripides' Andromache, Hecuba, and Trojan Women exhibits the same scholarly and poetic standards that have won praise for her Alcestis, Medea, Hippolytus. Ruth Scodel's Introduction examines the cultural and political context in which Euripides wrote, and provides analysis of the themes, structure, and characters of the plays included. Her notes offer expert guidance to readers encountering these works for the first time.Table of ContentsIntroduction; Translator's Preface; Map; Andromache; Hecuba; Trojan Women; Endnotes & Comments on the Text; Suggestions for Further Reading.

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Book SynopsisLooking back, within, and ahead-while ultimately focusing on the here and now-Kristin Brace traverses landscapes of memory, dreams, and the imagination, exploring the fragments and shifting perspectives that shape experience and identity and reinvigorate the creation of meaning. With tenderness and wonder, these poems build their own stepping stones for the journey, moving from connection to disconnection, frailty to strength, and fierce love to intense isolation, depicting a whole that is enlivened by the coexistence of seemingly opposing forces, emotions, and experiences. Despite the darkness and uncertainty they embody, the poems in this collection insist on their existence, forever traveling toward moments alive with color and light. The poet draws from the riches of art, nature, and the quiet moments of every day in reflections often startling in language and content and unified by their voice-driven musicality. Fraught with illness, longing, and loss, these poems guide readers through the intricate geographies of the heart, sometimes hurtling, sometimes dancing, sometimes feeling their way through the dark toward the wild abundance of each new day.Trade ReviewKristin Brace's Toward the Wild Abundance is a painterly book, not just in its evocations of Bonnard, Matisse, and Cassatt, but in the quality of light that threads the poems. It's an intimate light that 'blurs' and 'whirs,' 'streams' like a ribbon from a chickadee's beak. The light here goes absent at the mouth of a cave, comes to us in snow light, drips like butter. We might ask, as the speaker of one of these poems does, 'Who tilted the room to let the light spill so?' And does our world really shine back with such beauty? This book says yes, points us toward and toward." - Laura Donnelly, author of Watershed, winner of the 2013 Cider Press Review Editors' Prize"Kristin Brace possesses a marvelous delicacy of attention, tuned to the stillness deer carry with them-sheen of light through an insect's body- ferns / patient as dinosaurs-mouse / with a pulse like wishing'! I love her imaginative possession of the moment, of joy, and of sorrow, by way of the dear infinitesimal." - Nancy Eimers, author of Oz"Notice that easily missed 'Toward' in the title of Kristin Brace's elegantly down-to-earth collection. Through her unpretentiously precise language, she is taking us 'toward,' and along the way drawing our attentiveness to all that matters. These poems of the numinous reveal a world vacant of mere theory and speculation. Brace longs for lives where we love wastefully and stand in awe, whether it be before a work by Bonnard, a basil plant, or a clumsily played accordion. In 'A Pomegranate, or a Rhyming Couplet,' the speaker says, 'And this tablecloth / is a garden where I / could lose myself / and maybe find / us.' It is an abundant walk, this with the gently fierce Brace Toward the Wild Abundance." - Jack Ridl, author of Saint Peter and the Goldfinch

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Book SynopsisOne of the foundational texts of Western literature, the Oresteia trilogy is about cycles of deception and brutality within the ruling family of Argos. In Agamemnon, queen Clytemnestra awaits her husband’s return from war to commit a terrible act of retribution. The next plays, radically retitled here as The Women at the Graveside and Orestes in Athens, deal with the aftermath of the regicide, Orestes’ search to avenge his father’s death and his ceaseless torment. A powerful discourse on the formation of democracy, The Oresteia illuminates the tensions between loyalty to one’s family and to the community. In this classic for future generations, Oliver Taplin captures the lyricism of the original.Trade Review"... this brilliant Taplin version reads like a working stage-script, making a foundational work of Western drama feel completely urgent and unpredictable." -- The Best Books of 2018: Works in Translation! - Open Letters Review"Oliver Taplin's new translation of Aeschylus' Oresteia is a gripping version of one of the most celebrated works of Greek literature... This is a bold, striking and accessible translation... Clear and poetic at the same time, Taplin's language maintains the grandeur of Aeschylus' verse without sacrificing intelligibility to a contemporary ear." -- Times Literary Supplement

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Book SynopsisPoems that address cultural pressures placed on women and girls. This is a book for those who were raised to be girls and expected to become women, for those who were told they were too girly and not girly enough, and for those who were ogled, talked over, touched, fed, imagined, and indoctrinated in ways they didn’t want. Angela Hume writes directly about the experience of womanhood, addressing the boundaries and pressures imposed from childhood on. She considers the persistent instructions to smile, be quiet, and act happy, all administered with the promise that this forced behavior would make everything better. The poems address rigid social norms and, ultimately, walk through the uncomfortable realizations about the bigger systems at play and call on us to examine our own complicity in them. Trade Review“Hume’s profoundly intimate collection imagines how the porous interiors of women’s bodies are harmed and sickened by sexual violence, the industrial food system, racist fascism, climate change, and environmental contamination. In the middle of everything, Hume rehearses acts of tenderness, empathy, courage, and desire in order to protect and ‘love the body in its / one life its singular intensity after all.’” -- Craig Santos Perez, author of Habitat Threshold

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Book SynopsisA poem in conversation with literature and written during a durational performance. Written in loose sonata form, Pink Waves is a poem of radiant elegy and quiet protest. Moving through the shifting surfaces of inarticulable loss, and along the edges of darkness and sadness, Pink Waves was completed in the presence of audience members over the course of a three-day durational performance. Sawako Nakayasu accrues lines written in conversation with Waveform by Amber DiPietro and Denise Leto, and micro-translations of syntax in the Black Dada Reader by Adam Pendleton, itself drawn from Ron Silliman’s Ketjak. Pink Waves holds an amalgamation of texts, constructing a shimmering haunting of tenderness, hunger, and detritus. Trade Review"Perhaps everything about her work can be described as through water: from waves, eddys and ripples. Throughout Pink Waves, Nakayasu’s poems explore boundaries both physical and temporal, as well as the edges of grief..." * rob mclennan’s blog *"Pink Waves is multiple things at once. As a performance art piece, Sawako Nakayasu’s newest poetic composition considers the shifting roles the reader, writer and spoken-word performer take on in relation to a piece of work; as a written recording of performance artistry, it offers a fresh and moving study on grief and otherness." * The Japan Times *"Pink Waves is a glowing poem of ninety pages. . . gently staying, for a moment, with method and arrangement. . . [t]hen the lines shrink and recede." * Colorado Review *“Pink Waves deepens my immense admiration for Nakayasu’s poems and translations. Expansive, working across genres, she always pushes her writing into new places. In Pink Waves, she has found another way to rigorously clear a space for herself or, perhaps more accurately, her many selves, attaining a fresh perspective. Registering the world crashing into her life, we hear and learn the different languages that flow around her, as well as encounter references to–and echoes of –Adam Pendelton’s collage text Black Dada, Valerie Solanas’s radical feminist SCUM Manifesto, Sol LeWitt’s ‘Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,’ and Ron Silliman’s groundbreaking Ketjak. She uses collage to give a resilient, changing shape to our relentless influx of chaos, and the resulting feelings of anxiety, passion, anger, and love stirred up in us. Turning detritus into sensuous music, Nakayasu’s greatness arises from [undertaking] ‘Experiments in Joy,’ à la Gabrielle Civil, to find a way to live in the here and now.” -- John Yau, author of Genghis Chan on Drums“Nakayasu’s Pink Waves is an experience of questions becoming artifacts. The speaker asks: ‘how will i locate expansiveness in touch’? By ‘dreamlight’, a reader is trained, by this speaker, in a process of listening that’s both a ‘pledge of silence’ and the recognition that ‘we come to a limit and stop where it fits.’ Is this ‘genre trouble’? Nakayasu has written a book a writer could read, orienting to the desk, to the ‘passing moment,’ in turn. This is grounding. This is beautiful.” -- Bhanu Kapil, author of How To Wash a Heart"In a deliberate lyricism of regathering, tethering, and receding precedence, in a perpetual canon that keeps spilling and sifting and replenishing what feels like dancing, in a series of breaks weaving wave and snap into writing that listens, Sawako Nakayasu takes the measure of the enjoyment we derive from sensing and making sense of this wasteland of bandwidth and access. Pink Waves is a delicate instrument. Its spare beauty picks up everything." -- Fred Moten, author of The Universal Machine (consent not to be a single being)

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Book SynopsisPoems that navigate the complexities of human relationships, personal ethics, and religious tradition. Wind moves through this collection, opening the poems to the dying beauty of the natural world, to the weathers inside the psyche and without, and to the connections between a family and between the speaker his mentor, the great poet Jack Gilbert. The collection navigates the intimacies of human relationships with others, the challenges of working as a lawyer trying to maintain integrity as others fall prey to corporate greed, and the complexity of holding a Jewish identity while being awake to tradition’s hold on the mind and its cost. Steven Rood offers a powerful account of how to be a human in dynamic relationships while also holding respect for the non-human beings that comprise most of the life on our planet. Rood employs structures and forms that directly relate to the content of the poems themselves. Spontaneous breaks and starts reflect the writer’s turns of mind, offering readers insight into the meaning and measure of the work. Trade Review"In Steven Rood’s brave and lyrical debut collection, Naming the Wind, the quixotic project of naming the wind is a metaphor for how we struggle to make sense of what is beyond our control. This is the work of a mature poet, one who makes the details of everyday life luminous and gives meaning to suffering while offering a glimpse of the sublime." * Colorado Review *“Tender, curious, yearning, and full of astonishment, Rood’s poems reside in the wondrous entanglement of place and self, present and past, body and mystery. Rood’s poetry bears the marks of a life lived, of experience understood, just as his intimately observed California landscapes bear traces of geologic time. Insight awaits here, as a cache of ‘harder, ocean-smoothed pebbles’ emerges shining from a spine of ‘soft sandstone’ on Mount Diablo. Of such a pebble, Rood writes: ‘It is where art lives, and I can rub it in my palms.’ His poems, too, are where art lives. This book is a force of tenderness, a visitation of wisdom.” -- Liza Flum, Francois Camoin Fellow, University of Utah"Late in this ranging and wild book, this Naming the Wind, Rood offers—this in response to an older poet’s challenge—'I have power, depth, fear/ as my tones, and uncertainty as my shape.' And the beauty and the multiplicity of uncertainties—that call, that calling forth—is what this book stakes its being on; and partnered to that is the acknowledgment, throughout these pages, of the profound power of intervals, of how sound’s suspended 'until a silence glows around it.' But I would be remiss if I failed to note how the book’s populated too with visitations (sightings and sittings) and that its praises include, among others, dybbuks, Dinobots, the 'ten or fifteen turkeys eating quietly amid the/ wild oats' of Twin Peaks, as though—rising or not rising off these pages—they were the storied wild birds of heaven; and other locations named into being, places equally unlikely—'Weedlot I’ve kept my eye on for thirty years,' e.g.—as well as the tantalizing possibility of a 'walk off the path into Hallelujah.' Steven Rood writes, 'Maybe I’ll turn to dust and befriend the wind.' Read this book." -- C. S. Giscombe, author of Ohio Railroads

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Book SynopsisWinner of the National Book Award for Poetry, this collection of experimental and visual poems dives into the history and culture of the poet’s homeland, Guam. This book is the fifth collection in Craig Santos Perez’s ongoing from unincorporated territory series about the history of his homeland, the western Pacific island of Guåhan (Guam), and the culture of his indigenous Chamoru people. “Åmot” is the Chamoru word for “medicine,” commonly referring to medicinal plants. Traditional Chamoru healers were known as yo’åmte; they gathered åmot in the jungle and recited chants and invocations of taotao’mona, or ancestral spirits, in the healing process. Through experimental and visual poetry, Perez explores how storytelling can become a symbolic form of åmot, offering healing from the traumas of colonialism, militarism, migration, environmental injustice, and the death of elders. Trade Review"Perez uses this volume of poetry, his fifth in the unincorporated territory series, to ponder what healing looks like. What medicine can serve as a remedy for post-colonialism, environmental and climate collapse, rising extremism, and late-stage capitalism? Perez seems to offer answers in community, heritage, connection . . . He alternates a softer yearning for family and community with nods to the fraught legacy of Guåhan’s colonization. It’s a powerful framework, this back and forth — this poetry both slaps and slaps back: Rice becomes a motif, but so does rampant abuse at the hands of the Catholic church; so does military destruction. In this way, the work of remembering, of holding together the collective experience of trauma, becomes an active practice." * Vox *"Perez's ongoing project is one of the longest-running and most rewarding literary engagements with Pacific Islander and Indigenous poetics of the twenty-first century." * Booklist starred review *"Say you want poetry that both innovates and accumulates, something with brainteasing difficulty and world-building breadth—part modernism, part Marvel Cinematic Universe. One sure bet, for 15 years and counting, is the ongoing series from unincorporated territory by Craig Santos Perez, an indigenous Chamoru poet-scholar from Guåhan (Guam). . . . In this fifth installment, that Chamoru word is [åmot], meaning 'medicine'; the word commonly refers to plants, but as Perez explains, specialists in åmot employ a plethora of healing practices, including massage, dietary advice, and 'prayers, chants, and the invocation of i taotao’mona, or ancestral spirits'—centuries-old rituals undergirding Perez’s verbal arts." * Harriet *"A rich and expansive collection of fragments, fractals, family stories and archival material, from unincorporated territory [åmot] holds elegies for the past and present around a land and people still in flux; of occupation and mourning, loss and family, flora and fauna, documenting the visual literacies of an island and its people, examining what erodes and what holds, and what might already be lost." * rob mclennan's blog *“Perez continues to expand visual literacies of Pacific literature as he grapples with the question: what does it mean to write the ocean? Here are handwoven, blessed nets of intergenerational Chamoru stories. If a poem could unstitch a barbed wire fence, throw net, play bingo, unshipwreck Indigenous youth, care for elders, or heal a broken heart with Spam, that poem is in these pages. Propelled by gratitude, this book is a call to defy and protect, a sea of poetic innovation and care.” -- No'u Revilla, author of Ask the Brindled“In from unincorporated territory [åmot], Perez sings down healing for the speaker who asks, ‘isn’t that too / what it means to be / a diasporic chamorus // to feel foreign in your own homeland.’ Each poem probes this question against the continued disenfranchisement and militarization of Guåhan and the CHamoru people. From elegies for loved ones, continual rewriting of prayer, and eating rice with the grandmother, the rituals in this collection bear the histories of family, of the church’s spiritual abuse, and of the colonization of the island. But for endurance and renewal there is hope; each poem-story is itself a plant that yields a seed the speaker gathers. Each seed bursts its casing to branch into a meeting place for inter-generational memory and wisdom. What was deemed unworthy, flowers wildly, coded in the name of the plants reclaiming their CHamoru names banking these pages. In this collection Perez’s vital poems prove yet again that his necessary and clear voice is one that shakes the foundations of nation and demands of the reader to consider their complicity in the machinations of Empire.” -- Rajiv Mohabir, author of Cutlish“[åmot], the fifth stunning collection of Perez’s series from unincorporated territory combines Guåhan’s natural and cultural histories, as well as CHamoru visual and oral literacies, to create a poetic form of healing that Édouard Glissant might have hailed an aesthetic of the Earth. Like the banyan tree that expands and strengthens through aerial roots, the poetry of [åmot] is a ‘medicinal plant’ that seeds from the diasporic roots of Guåhan, from its histories fragmented by imperialisms, from CHamoru ancestors and elders, from the egg of an exiled Micronesian Kingfisher, to radiate back to their center: Guåhan. With this fifth opus, Perez accomplishes a tour de force by literally fusing Guåhan’s natural and cultural forms with the poetic fabric, and by mapping a CHamoru ecology of healing, between home and displacement. A literary achievement carried out through lyricism, communality, humor, gratitude, and responsibility.” -- Beatrice Szymkowiak, author of Red Zone"Craig Santos Perez’s multi-volume from unincorporated territory is one of the great poetic sequences of our decolonial time, and this latest installation åmot is an urgent meditation on dispossession in the face of ecocide and a celebration of poetry’s eccentric, medicinal power to counter new and old forms of imperial violence, from military occupation to resource extraction. Against the 'latitudes & longitudes / of empire' and its 'bleached coral,' Perez deploys lyric narratives, family histories, indigenous legends, recipes, hashtags, reading lists, archipelagic calligrams, translingual jokes, (alter)native botanies, and a range of diasporic maps (Spam backwards), so as to center the 'aerial roots' that can attune us to 'the intertextual / sacredness / of all things.' In a small place like Guahån (Guam), Perez finds the oceanic language for a new kind of book that can 're-wild' the word and the world." -- Urayoán Noel

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Book SynopsisJames Crews, editor of two best-selling poetry anthologies, How to Love the World and The Path to Kindness, presents an all-new collection of highly accessible poems on the theme of celebrating moments of wonder and peace in everyday life. As Crews writes in the introduction: "[A] deep love for the world is present in every one of the poems gathered in this book. Wonder calls us back to the curiosity we are each born with, and it makes us want to move closer to what sparks our attention. Wonder opens our senses and helps us stay in touch with a humbling sense of our own human smallness in the face of unexpected beauty and the delicious mysteries of life on this planet."The anthology features a foreword by Nikita Gill and a carefully curated selection of poems from a diverse range of authors, including Native American poets Joy Harjo, Linda Hogan, Kimberly Blaeser, and Joseph Bruchac, and BIPOC writers Ross Gay, Julia Alvarez, and Toi Derricotte. Crews features new poems from popular writers such as Natalie Goldberg, Mark Nepo, Ted Kooser, Naomi Shihab Nye, Jane Hirshfield, and Jacqueline Suskin, along with selections from emerging poets. Readers are guided in exploring the meaning and essence of the poems through a series of reflective pauses scattered through the pages and reading group questions in the back. This anthology offers the perfect intersection for the growing number of readers interested in mindful living and bringing poetry into their everyday lives.

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Book SynopsisIn these moving and meditative poems, Adam Kirsch shows how the experiences and recognitions of early life continue to shape us into adulthood. Richly evoking a 1980s childhood in Los Angeles, Kirsch uses Gen X landmarks—from Devo to Atari to the Challenger disaster—to tell a story of emotional and artistic coming of age, exploring universal questions of meaning, mortality, and how we become who we are.Trade Review"Out of memory’s dreamlike whoosh, Adam Kirsch fixes scenes of his Californian boyhood in flowing blank verse, holding each cameo up to the light then setting it back down with 'the reckless joy of getting rid.' Most moving are the child’s deep misgivings about a world he can only begin to know in fits and starts, the unnerving self-doubt that resolves itself into poetry. This is an artist’s coming-of-age for the ages. It took my breath away." —David Yezzi, author of Black Sea “'There is no I,' writes Adam Kirsch, 'to be born or die.' His new collection takes the stuff of selfhood—memories, longings, disappointments—and gives them 'a decent burial in words.' It is an autobiography, a farewell, and a reckoning, best illuminated by his own culminating image of a bonfire—or, perhaps, a funeral pyre—incinerating the fond vestiges of childhood and adolescence. Each act of disposal is an act of composition, and in these poems, Kirsch composes the years of his life into treasures." —Amit Majmudar, author of What He Did in Solitary"The Discarded Life is a wonderfully seaworthy and streamlined vessel that carries us capably through the treacherous straits of youth and the pensive, open seas of adulthood." —Leslie Monsour, The Los Angeles Review of Books"Kirsch writes poetry that is self-effacing but not abject, whose formal audacity is undercut by its sense of perspective. The poet’s mind, Kirsch seems to suggest, grows when it knows its limits."—Anahid Nersessian, The New York Review of Books

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Book SynopsisTaking the reader across our country through the varied landscapes of Colorado, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Arizona, Refugee discusses the nature of seeking shelter. We are all refugees looking for a haven from whatever oppresses our lives. What constitutes a refugee is at the heart of the collection. Poems confront and explore xenophobia, sexism, gun violence, domestic violence, corporate greed, and their ties to environmental destruction and political and economic tyranny. An ovarian cancer survivor, the author also writes about her own courageous confrontation with death. These inspiring poems ultimately call for the reader to recognize the refugee condition as a human condition. They call for a change in consciousness in the forms of action and compassion. They call for the reader to thrive. Ranging from short lyric poems to narrative poems, this collection steeped in rich, sensual imagery draws inspiration and healing from the natural world. Truth lies in recognition of the interdependence of all life. Refugee is an odyssey to find grace and unity in a besieged and divided contemporary American society. Trade Review"With tenderness, expansive compassion, and profound gifts of radiant description, Pamela Uschuk considers so many ways people may be estranged and lost in this precious, difficult world. With brave ferocity, her poems in Refugee navigate new vision and reconnection, so desperately longed for right now and always." —Naomi Shihab Nye, author of The Tiny Journalist “There is a position in yoga called “the shining heart.” This is how Pam Uschuk has approached her poems in Refugee. Pam Uschuk is on fire. She has carried her song and vision across deserts and over mountains. Witness and beauty undivided.” —Luis Alberto Urrea, author of House of Fallen Angels "Pam Uschuk’s amazing new book Refugee is the affirmation of a poet at the height of her talent as a writer who has mastered the art of what poetry is about and how a poem connects us through the world. Through interwoven tightness of language, Pam Uschuk brings us imagery that is very much alive, like breathing things we used to know, or forgot, or could not live without. Here, she takes us by the hand through a world that used to be whole, but now, broken and scarred, whether that world is that of the natural world of broken creatures or people or not. Here are poems about loss, survival, and living again, the defiance to dare to feel pain, to hurt, to heal, to relive the life we were not meant to live. In a book where there are hungry children in cages, refugee mothers clinging to their children here in the new America or elsewhere, we are confronted by powerfully crafted images that take on a life of their own. Uschuk brings us the refugee, not the way we know refugees, but the way the word refugee has become transformed in this new day of anti-immigrant sentiment, that rejection a refugee knows. But in Uschuk’s Refugee, we become the metaphor of each refugee, that of the cancer patient, who is both defiant and resilient as in the ghost of the mother who chases her daughter as if alive, where we do not fear the ghost because the ghost has a metaphor of our own survival. "She writes of ghosts as if ghosts were themselves refugees seeking home. In every line, these poems are an empowerment of the survivors’ need to be woman, to be human, child refugee, mother elephant, clinging to, and nurturing its own just as a woman comforts her refugee child despite our new world of border walls and cages. In Refugee, metaphors take on new powers, where everything is woman even after the loss of womanhood, after the bruising by surgery, the pain, the discarding of parts that used to make a woman whole, the affirmation of the power of our womanness. The idea of being refugee, transcending the idea itself of being a refugee since, with Uschuk, being refugee means being all of us. Here is a book of incredible power, anger, and hope in a day when all we need is to know that we are: “Alive . . .” where we “rise/against the constant throb of absence/.” These powerfully crafted poems are urgently necessary."—Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, author of Praise Song for My Children: New and Selected Poems"Pamela Uschuk is, in my view, one of our country’s best poets. Her new book, REFUGEE, shows precisely why. Her poems rise up from careful craft, scattering beauty, detailed descriptions, merged with an anger at injustice and a persistent hope for the world that we could create. Her insistence, that her poems are not just pretty and tasty, puts her in the wide and necessary tradition of American poetry that cannot be silent in the face of human cruelty, America not living up to its own words. Pamela Uschuk’s words, in these poems, share delight at the natural world, at the same time as she laments and “borders on anger” at what we do to one another."—Joseph Ross"Boldy defiant and passionately descriptive, Pamela Uschuk’s Refugee is a documentary in verse of the myriad ways in which brave people become lost in a chaotic world. Its messages about humanity, politics, violence and climate change are stark. Nonetheless, central to the collection’s message is one of transformation — one that will motivate anyone with a shred of humanity to navigate toward a new vision, one of positive social change and the reconnection with each other and with nature the entire world so desperately needs."—Nicole Yurcaba, Southern Review of Books"Uschuk, winner of an American Book Award, here rejects the assumption that nature poetry is apolitical or unengaged with the social realm, instead asserting that climate crisis is inseparable from human crisis, domestic and international. She also rejects the myth of the solitary poet and draws on community, which she defines as an ecosystem of people, flora, and fauna. Through poems that powerfully render a world where individual action holds value and every life is one that matters, Refugee chronicles the many ways in which environmental and political disaster, cancer, and racism affect our ability to exist, live, and thrive." — Tara Ballard, author of House of the Night Watch "A mordantly tender triumph rich with natural imagery." —Kirkus Reviews (starred)"The first line of Pamela Uschuk’s extraordinary new book Refugee throws down the gauntlet to all who are guilty of less than full attention to the blood-drenched, war-torn contemporary world: 'So you think you can live remote…' The poems grow not only from our collective suffering caused by political indifference and greed—war, gun violence, the plight of refugees incarcerated at the border—but also from grief at the loss of a sister and brother, and from her own excruciating fight against ovarian cancer." — Ann Fisher-Wirth, The Orion Review

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Book SynopsisKim Dower’s poetry has been described by the Los Angeles Times as “sensual and evocative . . . seamlessly combining humor and heartache,” and by O Magazine as “unexpected and sublime.” Acclaimed for combining the accessible and profound, her poems about motherhood are some of her most moving and disarmingly candid. I Wore This Dress Today for You, Mom is an anthology of her poems on being a mother—childbirth to empty nest—as well as being a daughter with all the teenaged messiness, drama and conflict, to finally caring for one's mother suffering from dementia. Culled from her four collections as well as a selection of new work, these poems, heartbreaking, funny, surprising, and touching, explore the quirky, unexpected observations, and bittersweet moments mothers and daughters share. These evocative poems do not glorify mothers, but rather look under the hood of motherhood and explore the deep crevices and emotions of these impenetrable relationships: the love, despair, joy, humor and gratitude that fills our lives.Trade Review“What we inherit from our mothers, what we carry forward, what we never receive, and what we choose to leave behind—Kim Dower’s poetry resonates with the echo of a rich and complex mother-daughter relationship that she gently and carefully unravels, line by line. This is a stunning collection from a poet whose wisdom as a daughter and a mother shines through on every page.” —Hope Edelman, author of Motherless Daughters"Featuring gorgeous gems from Dower's four poetry collections and new pieces energized by the sheet power of her wit and irreverent style, I Wore This Dress Today for You, Mom will make readers both groan at and delight in recognition of the everyday absurdities and magical moments that add up to a lifetime of irreplaceable memories." —Shahina Piyarali, Shelf Awareness"[Kim Dower's] fantastic new collection, 'I Wore This Dress Today for You, Mom,' revolves around quotidian details of domestic life – washing dishes, doing laundry – but existential questions are always lurking beneath the surface." —Ron Charles, The Washington Post"Lit up with sudden lyricism ("Her body releasing mist from the hurricane inside her"), Dower's sharply observed quotidian detail will draw in even casual readers of poetry." —Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal“In Chinese, the written character for “mother love” is composed of two elements—”love” and “pain.” Kim Dower understands this universal concept in her bones and captures its meaning in these beautiful and powerful poems.” —Lisa See, New York Times bestselling author of The Island of Sea Women

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Book SynopsisEloise Klein Healy’s A Brilliant Loss is a poetic journey into the loss of language and the reclaiming of it. Healy had Wernicke’s aphasia in 2013 when she was the first poet laureate of the City of Los Angeles, and the virus hit her the night of her reading with Caroline Kennedy at the Central Library. Also called fluent aphasia, Wernicke’s aphasia affects language and the use of words. Healy’s collection shows that her brain has access to its deepest unconscious, and that place is poetry. Her deepest language is poetry. It’s as if a dancer was denied the ability to walk or run, and could only dance. Healy writes of losing her words and finding big love.

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Book SynopsisAs the Sky Begins to Change is a book of poems to wake the world, lyric anthems for earth and kin. In his third poetry collection from Red Hen Press, Kim Stafford gathers poems that sing with empathy, humor, witness, and story. Poems in this book have been set to music, quoted in the New York Times, posted online in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series, gathered in a chapbook sold to benefit Ukrainian refugees, posted online in response to Supreme Court decisions, composed for a painter’s gallery opening, and in other ways engaged with a world at war with itself, testifying for the human project hungry for kinship, exiled from bounty, and otherwise thirsting for the oxygen of healing song.

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Book SynopsisThis collection of spells begins by following the tracks of a mythical creature composed of language and blood across an unblemished field of silence. We can never catch this creature, who perhaps is made real by our pursuit of it. There are glimpsesshadowsmade into a cycle of poetry in a poor attempt to construct the whole from the parts. This book is a brush dipped in flowerscorpsesschoolyardsthe smell of ocean and tears attempting to paint over without erasing the world we've constructed as it is.

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Book SynopsisA debut poetry collection centered on strained family relationships and the search for new homes. Erica Reid's debut collection, Ghost Man on Second, traces a daughter's search for her place in the world after estrangement from her parents. Reid writes, It's hard to feel at home unless I'm aching. Growing from this sense of isolation, Reid's poems create new homes in nature, in mythology, and in poetic formsincluding sestinas, sonnets, and golden shovelscontainers that create and hold new realizations and vantage points. Reid stands up to members of her family, asking for healing amid dissolving bonds. These poems move through emotional registers, embodying nostalgia, hurt, and hope. Throughout Ghost Man on Second, the poems portray Reid's active grappling with home and confrontation with the ghosts she finds there. Ghost Man on Secondis the winner of the 2023 Donald Justice Poetry Prize, selected by Mark Jarman.

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Book SynopsisAn authoritative volume representing the vast oeuvre of one of the twentieth century’s most brilliant and visionary poets.Widely regarded as some of the most important and innovative poetry from postwar Europe, Tomaž Šalamun’s work offers a singularly thrilling reading experience. Sharp and subtle, Šalamun’s rhythms intertwine with an incantatory force; his prescient, liberatory politics and poetics pulse like a heartbeat. In Kiss the Eyes of Peace, the histories of Slovenia, the former Yugoslavia, and Europe are broken into kaleidoscopic harmonies of terror and joy: friends and family talk to each other under the sun as snow, apples, and deer mingle with blood and bones, with salt and cabbage, with gold, silk, and wine, and with God and heaven in the sand and grass.“Love tore apart all my theories,” writes Šalamun. His oracular poems, suffused with mystic pr

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Book SynopsisA ground-breaking collection of poems exploring disability, syntax, and rhythm from a Brooklyn-based Senegalese American writer with cerebral palsy.Latif Askia Ba?an acclaimed poet with Choreic Cerebral Palsy?honors all the things that arise from our unique choreographies. Meeting each reader with corporeal generosity, these poems create space to practice a radical reclamation of movement and the body. Together. In dialogue. In disability. At the bodega, in the examination room, on the move. ?This way. My body looks like a dancing tattoo.? Here, the drum of the body punctuates thought in unexpected and invigorating time signatures.These poems are percussive and syncopated, utilizing a polylingual braid of French, Spanish, Jamaican, Fulani, and Wolof, reminding the Anglophone reader:?I am not here to accommodate you.?Becausethese poems are not so muchforyou as they arewithyou, an accompaniment rather than an accommodation, something to be rather than something to own.With startling nuance, The Choreic Period encourages us to ?relinquish the things that we have. And mark the thing that we do,? all to see and sing the vital ?thing that we be.?

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Book SynopsisIn his anticipated second poetry collection, Doppelgangbanger, Cortney Lamar Charleston examines the performance of Black masculinity in the U.S., and its relationship to family, love and community. With the wit and musicality fitting of a 90s baby raised during the Golden age of hip-hop, Cortney Lamar Charleston grapples with the landscapes of Chicago’s South Side and surrounding suburbs, and the tensions that impact a Black boy’s struggle through self-destructive definitions of manhood. While the language in these poems is playful, Charleston’s vulnerability invites readers to intimately witness the speaker’s journey from adopted persona to an authentic self that defies traditional molds.Trade ReviewWith stunning knowledge and sharp vulnerability, Cortney Lamar Charleston has rendered a classical epic of love, war, and self-discovery, in the tradition of Milton, Homer, and Virgil if they were Bone Thugs-n-Harmony. —Morgan Parker, author of Magical Negro “Cortney Lamar Charleston burns his signature into these stanzas. With an unrelenting intimacy, he dares us into a narrative we think we know—Black boy vs. the scheming wiles of the city vs. the rest of his life—then backhand slaps us toward a singular experience marked by choices that can only guide the life of one man.” —Patricia Smith, author of Incendiary Art “Cortney Lamar Charleston is one of our most necessary observers of Black boyhood in all its beauty and difficulty. These poems sing to us of us.” —Nate Marshall, author of Finna

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Book SynopsisDiamond Sharp’s Super Sad Black Girl is a love letter to her hometown of Chicago, where the speaker finds solace and community with her literary idols in hopes of answering the question: What does it look like when Black women are free? Lorraine Hansberry and Gwendolyn Brooks appear throughout these poems, counseling the speaker as she navigates her own depression and exploratory questions about the “Other Side,” as do Sandra Bland, Rekia Boyd, and other Black women who have been murdered by police. Sharp’s poetry is self-assured, playful, and imaginative, reminiscent of Langston Hughes with its precision and brevity. The book explores purgatorial, in-between spaces that the speaker occupies as she struggles to find a place and time where she can live safely and freely. With her skillful use of repetition, particularly in her series of concrete poems, lines and voices echo across the book so the reader, too, feels suspended within Sharp’s lyric moments. Super Sad Black Girl is a compassionate and ethereal depiction of mental illness from a promising and powerful poet.Trade Review“I’ve never read a collection of writing—poetry or otherwise—that spoke so clearly to what it feels like to live with a bipolar brain. Diamond Sharp has done what has often felt like the impossible: she has translated what so many of us have experienced into something so jaw droppingly familiar and achingly beautiful that you can’t escape the truth of it. More than just merely “feeling seen,” this collection made me feel heard and held and understood. Sharp is a master of her craft and this book is a testimony and a song.” —Bassey Ikpi, author of I’m Telling the Truth but I’m Lying “Deeply interior, alarmingly vivid, and full of dreamlike lyricism, this singular debut invites a reclamation of confessionalism for Black girls living—trying to live—today. Armed with Gwendolyn’s deceptive simplicity and some Henny and anchored by Sharp’s musical, crystalline voice and the subtle comedy of truth, Super Sad Black Girl is a wholly original collection that begs to be read, felt, and read again.” —Morgan Parker, author of Magical Negro “Diamond Sharp’s debut work offers the dazzling, taut simplicity of Lucille Clifton with a voice all her own. Here, the poet mines the interiority of a Black woman perpetually in flight while living with bipolar disorder, flitting smartly between mania, psychosis, stability, social exile and belonging. With Sharp’s stunningly controlled meditation on Black women’s abiding fugitivity while in conversation with Chicago luminaries Hansberry, Brooks, and Walker, as well as Black women slain at the hands of police, Super Sad Black Girl offers the notion that maybe the freest place for Black women is not a definitive physical plane but in the company of one another.” —Erika Dickerson-Despenza, playwright, educator, and organizer “Although Sharp has an extensive background in music criticism, there’s little doubt that poetry is her raison d’être. Her poems are funny, unpretentious, and profoundly self- accepting.” —M.T. Richards, Chicago Magazine

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Book SynopsisSearing in its energies and mysterious in its icy depths, Love is Colder than the Lake is a tour-de-force of the experimental French poet Liliane Giraudon’s power and range. Love is Colder than the Lake weaves together stories dreamed and experienced, fragments of autobiographical trauma, and scraps of political and sexual violence to create an alchemical and incantatory texture that is all Giraudon’s own. In its feminist attention and allusive stylistic registers, Love is Colder than The Lake claims a unique position among contemporary French literature. The heroes (or anti-heroes) in this collection include Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Lorine Niedecker, Emma Goldman, Chantal Akerman, the Marquis de Sade, and the unnamed lake itself. Giraudon’s writing, editing, and visual work have been influential in France for decades, and English-speaking readers will thrill to this challenging, important voice.

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Book SynopsisThe poems in Fuel pick at the weave of oil-soaked world orders to interrogate the ways capitalist death-drive seeps into our unconscious lives. Traversing multivalent intimacies from the underworld of California’s Central Valley oil fields to the quotidian domestic and love’s painful retraction, Stockton’s poems articulate the blurry modes of extraction, fantasy, loss, gender, and labor as they interact and overlap in the shadow of environmental and personal collapse. Between gas station gifts, venmo requests, and nocturnal love letters, Fuel unravels the self and violent systems of domination, longing for a togetherness that transcends its own ending.

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Book SynopsisA series of poems that explores walking, writing, and making as divinatory practices. Documenting (and interrogating) the poet’s daily walks, Which Walks investigates the twin practices of walking and art-making while aging. Gender is also a central concern in this intensely feminist work. Moriarty’s book relates to the endlessly unfinished journeys of Nathaniel Mackey’s long poems, as well as to the dailiness of many writers from Charles Baudelaire to Robert Creeley. These poems are an extension of the author’s visual practice, which she is returning to after a fifty-year break. Here she succeeds in existing—even thriving— in today’s strange, often terrifying, world.

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Book Synopsispenny candy: a confection, which had its acclaimed premiere at the Dallas Theater Center in 2019, follows one family as they seek to balance their responsibilities to their community and to one another. Growing up in a candy house sounds like every kid’s dream. But for 12-year-old Jon-Jon, helping his father run Paw Paw’s Candy Tree out of their run-down one-bedroom apartment isn’t quite a dream come true. As their neighborhood of Pleasant Grove, Dallas sees a surge of violence fueled by epidemic drug use and increasing racial tensions, the business begins to fail and danger looms immediately outside the family's front door.Trade Review“penny candy is a powerhouse—humorous, harrowing, and explosive. With clear-eyed compassion and a naturalistic immediacy, Norton has transmuted the experiences of his upbringing into a profound drama that honors the past while speaking boldly to our present moment.” —Dan O’Brien, author of A Story That Happens“penny candy crackles with razor-sharp dialogue, thrilling plot twists, and complex characters who are written with both unstinting honesty and genuine compassion.” —Kevin Moriarty, Enloe/Rose Artistic Director, Dallas Theater Center“Jonathan Norton is a masterful storyteller! In penny candy, Jonathan Norton brilliantly blends comedy & tragedy, drawing on his own life experiences to shape a wholly authentic narrative. The characters are all well developed and sufficiently complex to keep an audience intrigued as the play unfolds. “penny candy” took me on an emotional ride, while Norton’s always deft use of language firmly situated me in the Pleasant Grove neighborhood that is home to his characters. “ —Vicki Meek, Texas Artist of the Year 2021

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Book SynopsisLiu Zongyuan's remarkable poetry reflects the complex experience of political exile and observes the natural world of his new home in South China with a caring eye. The Poetic Garden of Liu Zongyuan presents poems by the Tang Dynasty cofounder of the Classical Prose Movement written on the Chinese empire’s southern margins. In these remarkable pieces, Liu intertwines South China’s landscapes and plants—such as scarlet canna, banyan, and white myoga ginger—with reflections on honor, duty, banishment, and belonging in ways unique in the history of Chinese poetry. The two translators, Nathaniel Dolton-Thornton and Yu Yuanyuan, one American and one Chinese, preserve and showcase the singular beauty of Liu's poetic garden for the English-speaking world.Trade Review“These new translations by Nathaniel Dolton-Thornton and Yu Yuanyuan are wonderfully redolent, and yet stripped-back with an almost concrete quality. They gain in emotional weight by being quite deliberately kept to their bare bones. The melancholy of Liu Zongyuan’s sustained and powerful work rings true.” —Sasha Dugdale, author of Joy and translator of Maria Stepanova’s In Memory of Memory “‘Thinking of home, my grief sharpens,’ Liu writes. But far from home, Liu’s eye also sharpened, taking in his unfamiliar surroundings and their particular flora. In their translations and accompanying notes, Dolton-Thornton and Yu capture with clarity and sensitivity Liu's complex emotional and material experience of exile.” —Adriana Jacobs, translator of The Truffle Eye “Dolton-Thornton and Yu’s discerning selections, lucid rendition, and scholarly annotations effectively bring home to us not only Liu’s lyrical world but a refreshing vision from afar of our Anthropocene epoch.” —Ling Hon Lam, author of The Spatiality of Emotion in Early Modern China: From Dreamscapes to Theatricality “Like the mystical poems of Wang Wei and the saddest poems of Li Bai in exile, the work of Liu Zongyuan confronts mortality and transience in nature—a nature wholly lived in and truly seen with the sharp eye of a naturalist . . . Through these quietly shining poems, Liu is revealed as a lost jewel of Chinese poetry and is restored to the crown where he belongs.” —Tony Barnstone, translator with Chou Ping of The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry

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Book SynopsisA collection of love poems addressed to an adverb, Anon meditates on the temporal “at once” between desire and language. From the playful verses of Slovenia's Tomaž Šalamun to the brushstrokes of an Edo period painting, Two Gibbons Reaching for the Moon by Japan's Ito Jakuchu, a character for the displaced Beloved emerges in this tapestry of time and art across borders. In Anon, the Beloved reflects: How might translating a human experience, from one language to the next, be an act of longing for the anonymous Other? Or how might this longing for beauty, and the wordless face, heal us both? How might Eros, in exile, respond? With these questions, Vietnam's Mekong delta becomes the book's central force. Endangered gibbons swing from the ruins of ecocide, and each image―rose, ape, and river―weaves itself into an undercurrent of postcolonial time.

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Book SynopsisSince the 2015 publication of The Poetic Edda: Stories of the Norse Gods and Heroes, Old Norse specialist Dr. Jackson Crawford has delighted readers with his English-language translations of Old Norse sagas and poems that tell the tales of Odin, Thor, Loki, dragon-slayer Sigurd, Brynhild the Valkyrie, Hrólf Kraki, and many more. This limited-edition set collects three of Dr. Crawford's Hackett Publishing books, The Poetic Edda (2015), The Saga of the Volsungs (2017), and Two Sagas of Mythical Heroes (2021) in a beautifully designed, hand-numbered, and hand-crafted slipcase box. Each book in the set features smyth-sewn hardcover bindings with new custom artwork for the front covers. The Poetic Edda features a medallion of the wolf Fenrir, The Saga of the Volsungs a medallion of the dragon/serpent Fafnir, and Two Sagas of Mythical Heroes a medallion of a bear. Each volume in the set begins with a phrase hand-written by Dr. Crawford that best exemplifies the text to follow or Dr. Crawford's favorite passage from the book. The quotes in The Poetic Edda and Two Sagas of Mythical Heroes also contain the runic "originals." The Poetic Edda also includes a bookplate personally signed by Dr. Crawford and hand-tipped into the front of the book.

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