Search results for ""milkweed editions""

Trudy’s parents are older than other kids’ parents. As she enters middle school, Ma and Pop are in their sixties and seventies—so old, in fact, that most people mistake them for her grandparents. As if that isn’t complicated enough, Trudy’s also having a hard time at school. Math class isn’t going so well, and Ashley—who she pinky-swore she would always be best friends with—has ditched her for a new crowd. Life at Benavidez Middle School is certainly an adjustment. As the school year goes on, she finds a new best friend, the straight-talking Roshanda; has her first serious crush on a boy; and gets used to life with lockers and class schedules. But just when things are getting better at school, Trudy and Ma notice that Pop is acting funny—he forgets to pick Trudy up from school and starts to put groceries away in the bathroom. Soon, Trudy and her mother embark on a quest to find out what is wrong. Told in a voice that is honest and pure, Trudy tells the story of an eleven-year-old girl who is growing up while her beloved Pop, diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, slips away.

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From Arra Lynn Ross, a tender, generous, and generative extended poem centered on the experience of parenthood.“What is learned? I’ll return for my son; / at school, at three thirty-eight, bells will ring & run / days over years.” Using unpredictable syllabics, rhyme, and syntax, Day of the Child captures the sensation of altered time that accompanies a child’s growth. Seasons come and go. A schoolboy becomes a dreaming infant becomes a five-year-old exploring metaphor for the first time becomes an ultrasound image, “a frieze on screen.” A mother cycles through her own often dissonant identities: “soother, watcher, blame-taker.” And both mother and child assume another, significant role: artistic collaborators.For Day of the Child is a poem co-created by child and mother, offering a space in which each’s stories, thoughts, words—“unbound / by Time & time’s delineations”—tangle together. In which apartness—“Oh indivisible divisible,” the presence of another heart beating inside the mother’s own body—is continually negotiated. And in which the mother considers her place as intermediary between the child and the world: her protection, her complicity, her joy. Its octave pairs ebb and flow, expand and contract, producing a portrait of raising another human as refracted as it is circular, just as a river “breaks into many suns, the sun.” For, as the child asserts, “love is a circl[e] round / as a Ball.”Challenging the notion that parenthood is not itself a poetic endeavor, Day of the Child makes of childrearing “a refrain I reframed each day with new words.”

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A New York Times Book Review “New & Noteworthy” Poetry Collection A Book Riot “Best Fall 2020 Book in Translation” Stone-Garland, this new entry in the Seedbank Series, presents translations of six poets of the Greek lyric tradition. Anecdotes of Simonides, Anacreon, Archilochus, Theognis, Alcman, and Callimachus may be easy to come by but their poems are restored less often. That’s a loss that this anthology remedies. Reading ancient poetry is a simple pleasure, like strolling through a cemetery overgrown with wildflowers. Imagine the graveyard filled with broken stones, each with a fragment that could compose a poem. Stone by stone you build a garland that represents a possible vision of a world long gone. Dan Beachy-Quick is our guide on this walk through a ruin of lyric poetry. To these reclaimed fragments he brings a love of discovery through lyricism. Beachy-Quick’s translations take joy in the intricacies of ancient Greek and logophiles will find treats in these pages. Returning to the foundations of a poetic tradition that has evolved throughout the ages is a chance to rekindle past identities and relationships to the world.

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Winner of the 2022 Colorado Book Award for PoetryA boy asks his father what it means to die; a poet wonders whether we can truly know another’s thoughts; a man tries to understand how extreme violence and grace can occupy the same space. These are the questions Wayne Miller tackles in We the Jury: the hard ones, the impossible ones.From an academic dinner party disturbing in its crassness and disaffection to a family struggling to communicate gently the permanence of death, Miller situates his poems in dilemma. He faces moments of profound discomfort, grief, and even joy with a philosopher’s curiosity, a father’s compassion, and an overarching inquiry at the crossroads of ethics and art: what is the poet’s role in making sense of human behavior? A bomb crater–turned–lake “exploding with lilies,” a home lost during the late-aughts housing crash—these images and others, powerful and resonant, attempt to answer that question.Candid and vulnerable, Miller sits with us while we puzzle: we all wish we knew what to tell our children about death. But he also pushes past this and other uncertainties, vowing—and inviting us—to “expand our relationship / with Death,” and with every challenging, uncomfortable subject we meet. In the face of questions that seem impossible to answer, We the Jury offers not a shrug, but curiosity, transparency, a throwing of the arms wide.

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“Even present tense has some of the grace of past tense, / what with all the present tense left to go.” From Max Ritvo—selected and edited by Louise Glück—comes a final collection of poems fully inscribed with the daring of his acrobatic mind and the force of his unrelenting spirit. Diagnosed with terminal cancer at sixteen, Ritvo spent the next decade of his life pursuing poetry with frenetic energy, culminating in the publication of Four Reincarnations. As with his debut, The Final Voicemails brushes up against the pain, fear, and isolation that accompany a long illness, but with all the creative force of an artist in full command of his craft and the teeming affection of a human utterly in love with the world. The representation of the end of life resists simplicity here. It is physical decay, but it is also tedium. It is alchemy, “the breaking apart, / the replacement of who, when, how, and where, / with what.” It is an antagonist—and it is a part of the self. Ritvo’s poems ring with considered reflection about the enduring final question, while suggesting—in their vibrancy and their humor—that death is not merely an end. The Final Voicemails is an ecstatic, hopeful, painful—and completely breathtaking—second collection.

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From the author of You Must Remember This, an uncanny collection of poems that plumbs our capacity for cruelty and for wonder. Who? A speaker at once questioner and questioned. An artist who embraces and resists what his work requires of him. “A naked / man in a crowd.” What? Poems at once surreal and vulnerable, refusing to hide their uncomfortable truths behind their wildest imaginings. Where? In the mind, where “Nobody fails at meditation / like I do.” Outside dreamlike cities. In the rich earth under a simple mattress. In new, disorienting fables and seemingly familiar folktales. When? As a child, spurning his mother. As a young man, seeking wisdom and peace. And as an older man, looking back at what he once was. Suffused in psychology, uncertainty, and desire, The Interrogation is a catechism of the self—or selves. Inside this collection’s hall of mirrors, faces double and multiply endlessly, and voices echo, laugh, and taunt. Why? these poems ask. Why does art demand sacrifice? Why does the heart want what it wants? And how do we escape loneliness? The Interrogation is an accomplished collection, unsparingly honest, infused with yearning and laced with dark humor.

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How can one reconcile the irreconcilable? In this masterful companion to Day Unto Day, Martha Collins finds common ground between contradictions—beauty and horror, joy and mortality, the personal and the political. Like its predecessor, the daybook of Night Unto Night begins with time. Its six sequences, each written in one month a year, over the course of six years, bring together the natural and the all-too-human. Red-winged blackbirds and the death of a friend. The green leaves of a maple tree and drones overseas. A February spent in Italy and the persistence of anti-immigrant rhetoric. Dissonance is a permanent state, Collins suggests, something to be occupied rather than solved. And so this collection approaches its transcendence in the space between these seeming contrasts—and in the space between stanzas, sequences, days, and months. These poems are powerfully alive, speaking to and revising each other, borrowing a word or a line before turning it on end. We are doomed to repeat mistakes, seasons, wars, words. Yet redemption beckons, too, in the persistence of empathy and love.

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A woozy logic dominates these poems: a heart can become a buzzing hive of bees, a rooster can trigger a series of bombs, a young man can embrace a city bus as his spirit animal. Yet Bazzett slices through his poems with a dangerous sense of humor. "Your humor is deft and cutting / my fingers off one by one," as one poem puts it. Once dismembered, Bazzett's poems can re-member us and piece together the ways in which we once thought we knew ourselves, creating a new, strange sense of self. A meditation on who we are, who we've been, and what we might become, Bazzett's writing is like a note written in invisible ink: partially what we see on the page, but also but also the "many dozen doorways that we don't walk through each day." You Must Remember This is a consistently slippery, enrapturing collection of poems.

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Love. Sex. Death. Meat. Traffic. Pets. In Cattle of the Lord, Rosa Alice Branco offers a stunning poetic vision at once sacred and profane, a rich evocation of daily life troubled by uneasy sacramentality. In a collection translated by Alexis Levitin and presented in both Portuguese and English, readers find themselves in a world turned upside down: darkly comic, sensual, and rife with contradiction. Here, liturgical words become lovers' invitations. Cows moo at the heavens. And chickens are lessons on the resurrection. Over the course of the collection, Branco's unorthodox -- even blasphemous -- religious sensibility yields something ultimately hopeful: a belief that the physical, the quotidian, and the animalistic are holy, too. Writing at the boundaries of sense and mystification, combining sensuous lyrics and wit with theological interrogation, Branco breaks down what we think we know about religion, faith, and what it means to be human.

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Winner of the National Poetry Series Mothers masquerading as witches and sepulchral bellhops who reveal themselves to be fathers: in Justin Boening's debut collection of poems, selected for the National Poetry Series by Wayne Miller, nothing is as it seems. Peopled by figures both uncanny and tragic--lionesses who dance and cry, surgeons who carry with them the trauma of past lives, an opera singer whose notes go awry--Not on the Last Day, but on the Very Last uses the language of dreams and of fairy tales to deliver a keenly felt exploration of family, grief, regret, and belonging. Here everything stands for something else. But though the Freudian mother and father lurk behind every sequined costume, continue to strip away the masks, Boening suggests, and you'll find an even more primal absence at the center--Nobody, No One, mortality, death. Beyond that, we find, lies only the truth of our relationships with each other. Shot through with mournfulness, gorgeously spangled in its language--"a squall of chrysanthemums / and the weird"--Not on the Last Day, but on the Very Last is an unforgettable collection about our human failings and the grace we each seek.

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Influenced by both the "gray, sinister sea" near the village where Yi Lu grew up during the Cultural Revolution, and the beauty of the sea in the books she read as a child, Sea Summit is a collection of paradox and questioning. The sea is an impossible force to the poet: it is both a majestic force that predates man, and something to carry with us wherever we go, to be put "by an ancient rattan chair," so we can watch "its waves toss" from above. Exploring the current ecological crisis and our complicated relationship to the wildness around us, Yi Lu finds something more complex than a traditional nature poet might in the mysterious connection between herself and the forces of nature represented by the boundless ocean. Translated brilliantly by the acclaimed poet Fiona Sze-Lorrain, this collection of poems introduces an important contemporary Chinese poet to English-language readers.

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In his first collection since Fancy Beasts, a book that "slice[d] straight through nerve and marrow on its way to the heart and mind of the matter" (Tracy K. Smith), Alex Lemon dazzles us again with his exuberance and candor. Whether in unrestrained descriptions of sensory overload or tender meditations on fatherhood and mortality, Lemon blurs that nebulous line between the personal and the pop-cultural. These poems are full of frenetic energy and images pleasantly, strangely colliding: jigsaws and bathtubs and kung-fu and X-rays. It's a distinct brand of edginess that readers of Lemon will once again applaud. A lean and muscular collection, The Wish Book marks a new high in this poet's unstoppable career.

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A William Carlos William Award Finalist for 2012 A Kansas City Star Top Book of 2012 A Library Journal Top Winter Poetry Pick A series of semi-mythologized, symbolic narratives interspersed with dramatic monologues, the poems collected in The City, Our City showcase the voice of a young poet striking out, dramatically, emphatically, to stake his claim on "the City." It is an unnamed, crowded place where the human questions and observations found in almost any city--past, present, and future--ring out with urgency. These poems--in turn elegiac, celebratory, haunting, grave, and joyful--give hum to our modern experience, to those caught up in the City's immensity, and announce the arrival of a major new contemporary poet.

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The Village on Horseback features mesmerizing new work from the author of Samedi the Deafness and The Way Through Doors, one of the New Yorker's Best Books of 2009. This collection of new pieces by experimental writer Jesse Ball is a philosophical recasting of myth and legend. Unearthing parables from the compost heap of oral tradition, folklore, literature, and popular culture, The Village on Horseback can be read as a sort of fabulist's compendium by an author who has been called charming, lyrical, fanciful, and "disturbingly original."

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Drawn from the environments of northern Vermont and the South of France, the poems in Rooms and Their Airs explore the interface of the human and natural worlds, further eroding that distinction with each poem. The verse here merges subject and object, often giving voice to natural phenomena -- a vernal pool, a fossil, a beam of light. These poems sparkle with humor, sophisticated word play, and intellectual examination, reflecting an elegant and contagious curiosity about history, language, and the world. Linked poems give voice to garden vegetables while drawing inspiration from the archival illustrations in The Medieval Handbook. A mother and daughter's trip to see France's cave paintings uncovers living vestiges in prehistoric depictions and reaffirms the enduring nature of art. With this collection, Jody Gladding cements her reputation as the literary heir to A. R. Ammons, Gustaf Sobin, and Lorine Niedecker.

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The counterpointed and imagistic work collected in Gaze reveals a poet uniquely concerned with the idea of vision: how the objective world (the world of time and memory), the world of the inner life, and the other world (the world of imagination and alternate life) may be seen, and how the experience of this seeing may alter itself and create meaning. Each of the book's three sections examines one of these categories of seeing, moving between narrative and lyric modes, between the undisguised voice of the poet and the voices of a variety of characters, creatures, and ghosts. Swinging between moments of delicate connection (touching a girl's wrist) and striking brutality (a boy slamming a just-caught fish against a boat's stern to kill it "as he was taught"), Howell turns these modes of vision in on each other, and the result is a collection wholly unified and unlike anything come before.

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In her highly anticipated new collection, Deborah Keenan sifts through inanimate objects and forgotten memories in search of personal validation. Her journal-like confessions create an instant bond with the reader, yet these seemingly simple poems daringly redefine common language. Keenan skillfully twists words to suit her ends, creating a colorful, dream-like world filled with lions, paintings, wars, and mummies. Throughout, she constantly reorganizes this world in an effort to realize her place in it.

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Tom Crawford's words paint familiar landscapes—Seattle's coastline, New York's public spaces, rural China, and Western mobile homes—in a new light. In poems as humorous as they are revelatory, sea birds careen off cliff walls "Then back/to the water to consider/where they went wrong," nudes are spontaneously drawn in urban coffee shops, and the Bhagavad Gita sits on a shelf in a trailer home, holding up deodorant. Crawford’s Eastern spirituality, tempered by working-class pragmatism, transforms these narrative poems into memorable portraits of the everyday.

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Since its establishment as a federally protected wilderness in 1964, the Boundary Waters has become one of our nation’s most valuable—and most frequently visited—natural treasures. When Amy and Dave Freeman learned of toxic mining proposed within the area’s watershed, they decided to take action—by spending a year in the wilderness, and sharing their experience through video, photos, and blogs with an audience of hundreds of thousands of concerned citizens. This book tells the deeper story of their adventure in northern Minnesota: of loons whistling under a moonrise, of ice booming as it forms and cracks, of a moose and her calf swimming across a misty lake. With the magic—and urgent—message that has rallied an international audience to the campaign to save the Boundary Waters, A Year in the Wilderness is a rousing cry of witness activism, and a stunning tribute to this singularly beautiful region.

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Chris Dombrowski was playing a numbers game: two passions--poetry and fly-fishing; two children, one of them in utero; and an income hovering perilously close to zero. Enter, at this particularly challenging moment, a miraculous email: can't go, it's all paid for, just book a flight to Miami. Thus began a journey that would lead to the Bahamas and to David Pinder, a legendary bonefishing guide. Bonefish are prized for their elusiveness and their tenacity. And no one was better at hunting them than Pinder, a Bahamian whose accuracy and patience were virtuosic. He knows what the fish think, said one fisherman, before they think it. By the time Dombrowski meets Pinder, however, he has been abandoned by the industry he helped build. With cataracts from a lifetime of staring at the water and a tiny severance package after forty years of service, he watches as the world of his beloved bonefish is degraded by tourists he himself did so much to attract. But as Pinder's stories unfold, Dombrowski discovers a profound integrity and wisdom in the guide's life.

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The creek behind John Daniel’s home in western Oregon disappears underground in the summer months. Using this creek as a metaphor, Daniel reflects on his own seasonal changes — from days as a student on LSD, rock climber, logger, and railroad worker, to life as a writer attentive to the “evidence of the unseen.” Winter Creek is John Daniel’s disarmingly honest story of his restless, rootless, disaffected youth, looking for meaning in drugs and an active outdoor life in the West. From time spent fishing, climbing, and making a living logging—as well as through friendships with writers including William Stafford and Wallace Stegner—Daniel developed a personal and artistic ethos based on a long view of evolution and the glory of living with one’s senses and an open mind. Daniel also speaks for the need to value small farmers and ranchers—“authentic human communities” that are as threatened as the plants and animals environmentalists strive to protect. “[Daniel’s voice is] fresh, self-reflective, and free of cant ... shows considerable originality, force, and descriptive art.” — Kirkus Reviews on John Daniel's The Trail Home

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“A full-bodied literary achievement bustling with sweat, regret, and sound.” —KIESE LAYMON Ndiya Grayson returns to her childhood home of Chicago as a young professional, but even her high-end job in a law office can’t protect her from half-repressed memories of childhood trauma. One evening, vulnerable and emotionally disarrayed, she goes out and meets her equal and opposite: Shame Luther, a no-nonsense construction worker by day and a self-taught piano player by night. The love story that ensues propels them on an unforgettable journey from Chicago’s South Side to the coast of Kenya as they navigate the turbulence of long-buried pasts and an uncertain future. A stirring novel tuned to the clash between soul music’s vision of our essential responsibility to each other and a world that breaks us down and tears us apart, Another Kind of Madness is an indelible tale of human connection.

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From the author of Good Night, Mr. Wodehouse and The Cape Ann comes a new tale of resilient womanhood in Harvester, Minnesota. Growing up in early twentieth-century Illinois, Ruby Drake is a happy child. But one winter’s night, her beloved parents perish in an accident—and suddenly Ruby finds herself penniless and nearly alone in the world. Her new path eventually takes her to Harvester, where she is lucky enough to find work on the welcoming Schoonover farm. Kind Emma, forward-thinking Henry, and their hired men—ambitious Dennis and reserved Jake—soon become a second family to the orphaned teenager. At a historical moment when young women are expected to be focused on courtship and marriage, the industrious, bright Ruby searches for opportunities to expand her horizons at every step. Mastering her responsibilities on the farm. Learning to smoke cigarettes. Borrowing books from the local lending library, reading devotedly and expansively: mythology, romance, poetry. And falling in love with her married neighbor, Roland: “the most beautiful man—maybe in the world.” But when Ruby is asked to care for Roland’s wife in the wake of tragedy, she is torn between duty and passion, between what has been her lot and what could be. Jane Eyre set in Faith Sullivan’s “reliably inviting world” (Wall Street Journal), Ruby & Roland is a story of relationships—friendship, romance, and the families we are born with and create—and of one woman’s journey of selfhood on the prairie.

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Fierce, searing, and darkly comical, Garriga's debut collection of short-short fiction depicts historical and imagined duels, re-envisioning in a flash the competing points of motivation--courage and cowardice, honor and vengeance--that lead individuals to risk it all. In this compact collection, "settling the score" provides a fascinating apparatus for exploring foundational civilizing ideas. Notions of courage, cowardice, and revenge course through Michael Garriga's flash fiction pieces, each one of which captures a duel's decisive moment from three distinct perspectives: opposing accounts from the individual duelists, followed by the third account of a witness. In razor-honed language, the voices of the duelists take center stage, training a spotlight on the litany of misguided beliefs and perceptions that lead individuals into such conflicts. From Cain and Abel to Andrew Jackson and Charles Dickenson; from John Henry and the steam drill to an alcoholic fighting the bottle: the cumulative effect of these powerful pieces is a probing and disconcerting look at humankind's long-held notions of pride, honor, vengeance, and satisfaction. Meticulously crafted by Garriga, and with stunning illustrations by Tynan Kerr, The Book of Duels is a unique and remarkable debut.

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Full of cryptic twists, philosophical quandaries, and fabulist turns, J. C. Hallman's stories elucidate an intuitive understanding of the human condition. An alienated young man discovers the meaning of love in the pages of the biology textbook The Conjugal Cyst, and in the arms of two increasingly unavailable older nurses. As his father deserts his mother, who is subsequently encroached upon by his eligible English teacher, an adolescent boy constructs a wicker man in the garage, to repel successors and to summon his own adult identity. A mother and son witness a father's backyard fling with a disturbed neighbor who has pruned a leafy cave out of the dividing hedge. A young couple's romantic consummation is repeatedly interrupted by the intrusion of a narrator commenting on the phenomenon of eroticism. Richly allusive, these literate and literary stories explore modern riddles with no easy answers.

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Every winter, Tommy Jack McMorsey watches the meteor showers in northern Minnesota. On the long haul from Texas to Minnesota, Tommy encounters a deluded Japanese tourist determined to find the buried ransom money from the movie Fargo. When the Japanese tourist dies of exposure in Tommy Jack's care, a media storm erupts and sets off a series of journeys into Tommy Jack's past as he remembers the horrors of Vietnam, a love affair, and the suicide of his closest friend, Fred Howkowski. Exploring with great insight and wit the ways images, stereotypes, and depictions intersect with, Extra Indians offers a powerful glimpse into contemporary Native American life.

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Exploring the paranoia and bravura of the modern American male, these powerful novellas depict a realm marked by faltering blunders, misguided intentions, and the fear of failure. At once comical and terrifying, “I Am Death, or Bartleby the Mobster” charts the slumped career of a muckraking journalist, Jack, who has managed to attract the attention of Frank Fini, one of Chicago’s great mob bosses. Fini wants to hire Jack to ghostwrite his autobiography, A Boy’s First Book of Mobsters, and so begins a journey through hell as Jack attempts to restore his career, revive his ex-wife’s interest in him, and stay one step ahead of Fini and the mob. “Peasants,” alternately satirical and tender, takes as its setting the modern corporate office, in this case a publisher of guides for users of geographic information systems. Walter Rasmussen has developed a few successful books and his future looks bright. But as a special project begins to falter and he finds his position in jeopardy, he begins to suspect his colleagues of sabotaging his career. As he did with Visigoth, Gary Amdahl demonstrates that he is our most adept and honest guide into the psyche of the modern American male.

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“From the summer of my twelfth year I carry a series of images more vivid and lasting than any others of my boyhood and indelible beyond all attempts the years make to erase or fade them… “ So begins David Hayden’s story of what happened in Montana in 1948. The events of that cataclysmic summer permanently alter twelve-year-old David’s understanding of his family: his father, a small-town sheriff; his remarkably strong mother; David’s uncle Frank, a war hero and respected doctor; and the Haydens’ Sioux housekeeper, Marie Little Soldier, whose revelations turn the family’s life upside down as she relates how Frank has been molesting his female Indian patients. As their story unravels around David, he learns that truth is not what one believes it to be, that power is abused, and that sometimes one has to choose between family loyalty and justice.

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Visigoth is a portrait of the American male—gritty, violent, and fascinating. The protagonists in this collection of stories come from all walks of life—hockey players, middle managers, political hopefuls, and wayward husbands—but all share a tendency to turn towards violence when life begins spinning out of control. In "The Flyweight," an all-star high-school wrestler struggles with his own success and the expectations of others when he begins hearing voices after a schizophrenic breakdown. "Visigoth," the title story, depicts a college hockey player unable to understand that his relationship with an English professor is over. The novella "The Free Fall" focuses on a cycle of escalating violence in small farming and mining towns and the effect that it has on the main character and his family. Sharp, inquisitive, and witty, Visigoth challenges the reader to question the popular glory of violence in all its manifestations.

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Copper Nickel is a meeting place for multiple aesthetics, bringing work that engages with our social and historical context to the world with original pieces and dynamic translations.Issue 27 is particularly international—even for Copper Nickel—and features an expansive folio of younger and less-established Irish and UK poets, including Irish poets Martin Dyar, Elaine Feeney, Victoria Kennefick, Conor O'Callaghan, Paul Perry, Stephen Sexton, Lorna Shaughnessy, and Jessica Traynor; and UK poets James Byrne, Vahni Capildeo, Manuela Moser, Sam Riviere, Zoë Brigley Thompson, and Chrissy Williams. The oldest poet in the folio was born in 1968; the youngest poets were born in the 1990s. Issue 27 also features three translation folios (which are a regular feature in Copper Nickel): (1) a group of five prose poems by Danish poet Carsten Rene Nielsen (b. 1966), translated and introduced by David Keplinger; (2) three longer poems by Mexican poet Cristina Rivera Garza (b. 1964), translated by Julia Leverone; and (3) four poems by Mauritian poet Khal Torabully (b. 1956), translated and introduced by Nancy Naomi Carlson. This issue also includes fiction by Farah Ali, Amy Stuber, Jyotsna Sreenivasan, and Jacinda Townsend. Nonfiction includes a personal essay on Günter Grass by poet and German translator Stuart Friebert, a lyric essay on hexes by Laughlin award winner Kathryn Nuernberger, and a lyric essay on hide-and-seek by Ira Sukrungruang. Poets in issue 27 include two-time Pushcart Prize winner T. R. Hummer, NEA Fellow Christopher Kempf, Kingsley Tufts Award winner John Koethe, Whitman Award winner Emily Skaja, Best American Poetry contributor Corey Van Landingham, Jenny Boychuk, Juan Morales, Paul Otremba, Paige Quiñones, Arthur Russell, Francis Santana, and Chelsea Wagenaar. The cover features work by Denver-based photographer Kristen Hatgi Sink.

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