Search results for ""BOA Editions, Limited""

One of Big Other's "Most Anticipated Small Press Books of 2020" In this fiercely feminist ecopoetic collection, Kathryn Nuernberger reclaims love and resilience in an age of cruelty. As the speaker—an artist and intellectual—finds herself living through a rocky marriage in a conservative rural state, she maintains her sense of identity by studying the science and folklore of plants historically used for birth control. Her botanical portraits of common herbs like Queen Anne’s lace and pennyroyal are interwoven with lyric biographies of groundbreaking women ecologists whose stories have been left untold in textbooks. With equal parts righteous fury and tender wisdom, Rue reassesses the past and recontextualizes the present to tell a story about breaking down, breaking through, and breaking into an honest, authentic expression of self.

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A New York Times "New & Noteworthy" SelectionSet in Southern California's San Gabriel Valley, Diana Marie Delgado’s debut poetry collection follows the coming-of-age of a young Mexican-American woman trying to make sense of who she is amidst a family and community weighted by violence and addiction. With bracing vulnerability, the collection chronicles the effects of her father’s drug use and her brother’s incarceration, asking the reader to consider reclamation and the power of the self.

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In this ferocious and tender debut, Chen Chen investigates inherited forms of love and family--the strained relationship between a mother and son, the cost of necessary goodbyes--all from Asian American, immigrant, and queer perspectives. Holding all accountable, this collection fully embraces the loss, grief, and abundant joy that come with charting one's own path in identity, life, and love. In the Hospital My mother was in the hospital & everyone wanted to be my friend. But I was busy making a list: good dog, bad citizen, short skeleton, tall mocha. Typical Tuesday. My mother was in the hospital & no one wanted to be her friend. Everyone wanted to be soft cooing sympathies. Very reasonable pigeons. No one had the time & our solution to it was to buy shinier watches. We were enamored with what our wrists could declare. My mother was in the hospital & I didn't want to be her friend. Typical son. Tall latte, short tale, bad plot, great wifi in the atypical cafe. My mother was in the hospital & she didn't want to be her friend. She wanted to be the family grocery list. Low-fat yogurt, firm tofu. She didn't trust my father to be it. You always forget something, she said, even when I do the list for you. Even then. Chen Chen was born in Xiamen, China, and grew up in Massachusetts. His work has appeared in two chapbooks and in such publications as Poetry, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, Best of the Net, and The Best American Poetry. The recipient of the 2016 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize, he has been awarded fellowships from Kundiman, the Saltonstall Foundation, Lambda Literary, and in 2015, he was a finalist for the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowships. He earned his BA at Hampshire College and his MFA at Syracuse University. Currently, he is pursuing a PhD in English and Creative Writing at Texas Tech University. Chen lives in Lubbock, Texas, with his partner, Jeff Gilbert, and their pug dog, Rupert Giles.

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In this fascinating new collection by longtime poet Charles Rafferty, evocative prose poems insert strange and mysterious twists into otherwise mundane middle-class scenarios. With wonderful intelligence and imagination, these compact, revelatory poems show us what is possible when we jettison accepted devices of thought for methods that are stranger, and much truer.Charles Rafferty is the author of six collections of poetry, one collection of stories, and two poetry chapbooks. He lives in Sandy Hook, CT, where he works at a technology research firm, directs the MFA program at Albertus Magnus College, and teaches in the Westport Writers' Workshop.

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Beforelight explores queer childhood as a site of rupture and queer coming-of-age as a process of both becoming and unbecoming. With wisdom and grace, the speaker in these poems confronts the impacts of fragmented relationships and trauma on his nascent identity, ultimately committing to the self''s authenticity as the highest form of devotion. Lush, cinematic, and deeply psychological, these poems grapple with the fragility of our most formative connections—familial, communal, and ancestral—as the speaker searches for communion with himself and tries to discover how not to “make a life out of pain.”

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A Blessing the Boats Selection with a Foreword by Aracelis Girmay, Renia White’s debut poetry collection pushes against state-sanctioned authority and societal thought while ruminating on Black joy. Renia White’s debut poetry collection strikes up a conversation, considering what’s being said, what isn’t, and where it all come from. From her vantage point of Black womanhood, White probes the norms and mores of everyday interactions. In observations, insights, and snippets of speech, these poems look to the unspoken thoughts behind our banter, questioning the authority of not only the rule of law but also of our small talk itself—the concepts we have accepted and integrated without pause. Casual Conversation imagines a new way of knowing, a way that encourages us to think through how we structure and stratify ourselves, inviting something strange and other to spill out. White challenges us to question whether there is anything casual about this life, even as she invites us to consider other logics and to think alongside each other. This book gives space to hold what we fear out of formality: consequence, embarrassment, anger. It plays, it tarries, it disrupts. It pulls apart what seems sound in an effort to see: what did we make here? How’s it going?

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The characters in these nine short stories abandon families, plot assassinations, nurse vendettas, tease, taunt, and terrorize. They retaliate for bad marriages, dream of weddings, and wait decades for lovers. How far will we go to escape to a better dream? What consequences must we face for hope and fantasy? Robin McLean's stories are strange, often disturbing and funny, and as full of foolishness and ugliness as they are of the wisdom and beauty all around us. Robin McLean holds an MFA from UMass Amherst. She teaches at Clark University and lives in Bristol, New Hampshire, and Sunderland, Massachusetts.

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Dariusz Sosnicki's poems open our eyes to the sublime just beneath the surface of the mundane: a train carrying children away from their parents for summer vacation turns into a ravenous monster; a meal at a Chinese restaurant inspires a surreal journey through the zodiac; a malfunctioning printer is a reminder of the ghosts that haunt us no matter where we find ourselves. Among the perpetrators and victims, buzzed or wasted to the bone, gliding without their blinkers on in the ruts of the national fate-they're not at home. Dariusz Sosnicki is an award-winning poet, essayist, and editor in Poland.

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"It has true spiritual importance for contemporary American literature."--Edward Hirsch Upon its initial publication, acclaimed poet Li-Young Lee's memoir The Winged Seed: A Remembrance (1995), received an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. In lyrical prose, Lee's extraordinary story begins in the 1950s when his parents fled China's political turmoil for Indonesia. Along with many other Chinese members of the population, his family was persecuted under President Sukarno. Falsely accused and charged for crimes against the state, his father spent a year and a half in jail as a political prisoner, half of that time in a leper colony. While his entire family was being transported to a prison colony, they escaped and fled to Hong Kong, Japan, Malaysia, and back to Hong Kong where his father rose to prominence as an evangelical preacher. Eventually, the family sought asylum in the United States in 1962. When the author was six, they emigrated to a small town in western Pennsylvania where his father became a Presbyterian minister. This reissued edition contains a new foreword by the author and never-before-seen photos of the family from different stages of their journey. Li-Young Lee is the author of four critically acclaimed books of poetry that have garnered such awards as the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award from New York University; the 1990 Lamont Poetry Selection; the Writer's Award from the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation; and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Lannan Foundation, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

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An NPR Favorite Book of 2019In her third collection of poems, Jillian Weise delivers a reckoning to the ableism of the Western Canon. These poems investigate and challenge the ways that nondisabled writers have appropriated disabled bodies, from calling out William Carlos Williams to biohacking Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral” to chronicling the ongoing headlines of violence against disabled women. Part invective, part love poem, Cyborg Detective holds a magnifying glass to the marginalization and fetishization of disabled people while claiming space and pride for the people who already use technology and cybernetic implants every day.

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Winner of the BOA Short Fiction Prize Finalist for the the Big Other Award for Fiction The Complete Writings of Art Smith, the Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, Edited by Michael Martone is a Midwestern mythology that celebrates facts, fiction, and the impermanence of art. Inspired by the real-life pioneer of early aviation who invented the art of skywriting, the brief stories in this collection by “editor” Michael Martone follow the adventures of Art Smith and his authorship in the sky. In the spirit of Kurt Vonnegut and Hayao Miyazaki, The Complete Writings of Art Smith, the Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, Edited by Michael Martone recreates the wonder of the early flying machines as it reimagines the unwritten stories we tell about the daredevils who flew them.

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An exploration of memory, mourning, and humanity’s precarious relationship to the Anthropocene, Christopher Kennedy’s The Strange God Who Makes Us documents our fragile relationship with time and the imperfect ways in which we document our lives. These prose poems written by one of the form’s masters serve both as attempts to preserve and honor the past and as a call to action to ensure an inhabitable planet for future generations.

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A baby that keeps losing its brain, a cow in a wedding gown, a woman whose chest is a radio — bizarre and whimsical figures populate this collection of dreamlike prose poems from Russell Edson (1935-2014), with a Foreword by Pulitzer Prize winner Charles Simic.A seminal voice in American prose poetry from the sixties onward, Edson’s whole career is surveyed in a single volume edited for our times, presenting a new and contemporary view of a poet of startling imagination and strangeness. Craig Morgan Teicher calls us to witness Edson’s obsessions with the curious, the absurd, and the peculiar, and the ways in which they can haunt our daily lives. The prose poems in this collection mold our everyday into something extraordinary and unsettling. Edson’s poems are surreal fables in which his characters experience all that life throws at them— marriage, parenthood, technological advances, aging, dying, the afterlife— through irreverent dialogue and vivid imagery in turns both humorous and grotesque. Russell Edson is a vital and ever-contemporary poet with a unique moral and comedic vision, whose literary career quietly yet definitively shaped the prose poetry subgenre as we know it now.

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At once an extension of and a departure from his previous explorations of family and art, Craig Morgan Teicher's The Trembling Answers delves boldly into the tangled realms of fatherhood, marriage, and poetry. Dealing with the day-to-day of family life--including the alert anxiety and remarkable beauty of caring for a child with severe cerebral palsy--these personal narratives brightly illuminate the relationship that exists between poetry and a life fiercely lived. Video Baby Monitor A watched pot never boils, so perhaps a son on a screen never dies. Like the eyes of a painting this image follows wherever we move. Surveillance is love, love is every moment the last. Barely moving picture, memory of now, sleep, be still, be safe. Night is long, life short. I cover you with my eyes. Craig Morgan Teicher: is the author of four books of poetry and fiction and the editor of Once and For All: The Best of Delmore Schwartz (2016). A prolific critic and reviewer of poetry, he has worked at Publishers Weekly for 10 years, where he is currently Director of Digital Operations. He teaches at New York University and Princeton University.

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Grounded in protest and solidarity, Subhaga Crystal Bacon’s Isabella Gardner Award-winning Transitory is a collection of elegies memorializing 46 transgender and gender-nonconforming people murdered in the US and Puerto Rico in 2020. Epistolary in nature, these commemorative poems are “gleaned sketches” attempting to reconstruct lives and deaths from the typically scarce information made available on the internet. Interspersed with the elegies are personal explorations of gender identities and sexualities from a Queer elder who has lived through the post-Stonewall years of sexual liberation, the second wave of feminism, and the recent rapid increases in awareness about gender and sexualities met almost equally with anti-trans and anti-Queer violence. Seen through the lenses of whiteness and privilege from the last quarter of a lifetime, these poems navigate the desire to be at home in our bodies, to be loved and desired without danger, and most of all to live free, healthy, and welcome in the world we inhabit.

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A poetic retelling of Noah’s Ark set in the near future, Ceive is a novella in verse that recounts a post-apocalyptic journey aboard a container ship. This contemporary flood narrative unfolds through poems following the perspective of a woman named Val, who is found in the wreckage of her flooding home by a former UPS delivery man. As environmental and political catastrophes force them to flee the Eastern Seaboard, Val and her rescuer take refuge alongside a group of pilgrims seeking refuge from the catastrophic collapse of a civilization destroyed by gun violence, climate crisis, and social unrest. The ship of cargo and refugees is run by the captain Nolan and his wife Nadia, who set sail for Greenland, now warmed to a temperate climate. The couple place Val in charge of caring for a neurodivergent young boy who holds knowledge of analog navigation. Mourning her missing daughter, Val experiences both isolation and a wellspring of compassion in survival, an indefatigable need to connect. She and the other pilgrims weather illness and peril, boredom and conflict, deprivation and despair as they set sail across stormy, unfamiliar waters. Drawing from the Anglo-Saxon poem The Seafarer, the Bible, and the Latin root word in receive, Ceive is a vision of eco-cataclysm and survival—inviting meditations on biodiversity, illness, social law, sustenance, scripture, menopause, sensory perception, human bonds, caregiving, and loss, all the while extending a call for renewal and hope.

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The Southern Review of Books's "Best Southern Books of April 2021" Punk-rock feminist poems exploring motherhood, pop culture, and resistance with a spirit of defiance, abundance, and irreverent joy Kendra DeColo reaffirms the action of mothering as heroic, brutal, and hardcore. These poems interrogate patriarchal narratives about childbirth, postpartum healing, and motherhood through the lens of pop culture and the political zeitgeist. With references ranging from Courtney Love to Lana Del Rey to Richard Burton to Nicolas Cage, I Am Not Trying to Hide My Hungers from the World revitalizes the way we look at mothering: pushing its boundaries and reclaiming one's spirit of defiance, abundance, and irreverent joy.

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Winner of the BOA Short Fiction Prize One of BuzzFeed's Fifteen Small Press Books To Kick Off Your 2020 Reading Season A fastidious pet robot with a knack for knitting. A soporific giant pitching camp in the middle of a city. A mysterious mime whose upcoming performance has the whole town on edge. The stories in Mark Polanzak’s BOA Short Fiction Prize-winning The OK End of Funny Town stitch fantastic situations into the drab fabric of everyday life. Polanzak delights in stretching every boundary he encounters, from the new focus on practical learning at the New Community School, to the ever-changing tastes of diners in search of the next big trend in local cuisine. Wondrous yet familiar, The OK End of Funny Town excavates the layers between our collective obsession with passing fads and our secret yearning for lasting connection. “Polanzak’s collection is rich and packed with visionary tales that are sure to entertain speculative fiction readers.” —Booklist

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A Blessing the Boats Selection A New York Times Books New & Notable Poetry Book One of Big Other's "Most Anticipated Small Press Books of 2020" On The Rumpus's list of "What To Read When 2020 Is Just Around the Corner" In the tradition of women as the unsung keepers of history, Deborah Paredez’s second poetry collection tells her story as a Latina daughter of the Vietnam War. The title refers to the year 1970—the “year of the Metal Dog” in the lunar calendar—which was the year of the author’s birth, the year her father prepared to deploy to Vietnam along with many other Mexican-American immigrant soldiers, and a year of tremendous upheaval across the United States. Images from iconic photographs and her father’s snapshots are incorporated, fragmented, scrutinized, and reconstructed throughout the collection as Paredez recalls untold stories from a war that changed her family and the nation. In poems and lamentations that evoke Hecuba, the mythic figure so consumed by grief over the atrocities of war that she was transformed into a howling dog, and La Llorona, the weeping woman in Mexican folklore who haunts the riverbanks in mourning and threatens to disturb the complicity of those living in the present, Paredez recontextualizes the historical moments of the Vietnam era, from the arrest of Angela Davis to the haunting image of Mary Ann Vecchio at the Kent State Massacre, never forgetting the outcry and outrage that women’s voices have carried across time.

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Winner of the 2018 National Jewish Book Award for Poetry Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry Erika Meitner’s fifth collection of poetry plumbs human resilience and grit in the face of disaster, loss, and uncertainty. These narrative poems take readers into the heart of southern Appalachia—its highways and strip malls and gun culture, its fragility and danger—as the speaker wrestles with what it means to be the only Jewish family in an Evangelical neighborhood and the anxieties of raising one white son and one black son amidst racial tensions and school lockdown drills. With a firm hand on the pulse of the uncertainty at the heart of 21st century America and a refusal to settle for easy answers, Meitner’s poems embrace life in an increasingly fractured society and never stop asking what it means to love our neighbor as ourselves.

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Consumed with the accumulation of lost time and unfulfilled longing, Desire Museum by Danielle Cadena Deulen is an intricate exploration of things left unfinished or unsatisfied. Divided into four sections and shaped by female-identified embodiment, Desire Museum touches on lost love and friendship, climate crisis, lesbian relationships, and the imprisonment of children at the U.S.-Mexico border. These poems trace the pleasures and pitfalls of sex, the anxieties of motherhood, and the ramifications of interpersonal, sociopolitical, and environmental trauma in women’s lives. In these pages, Deulen holds up a candle to desire itself, questioning what it means to recognize and embrace one's desires, or what it might mean to let them go.In conversation with Hopkins, Keats, Crane, and Lorca, Deulen seamlessly weaves memories into dreamscapes and blurs the human and natural worlds. With love, wonder, grief, and awe, Desire Museum shows us that to live alongside desire is to refuse to be contained: “I refuse meaning [ ] the first sunrise reiterates the last.”

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How to Carry Water: Selected Poems of Lucille Clifton celebrates both familiar and lesser-known works by one of America’s most beloved poets, including 10 newly discovered poems that have never been collected. These poems celebrating black womanhood and resilience shimmer with intellect, insight, humor, and joy, all in Clifton’s characteristic style—a voice that the late Toni Morrison described as “seductive with the simplicity of an atom, which is to say highly complex, explosive underneath an apparent quietude.” Selected and introduced by award-winning poet Aracelis Girmay, this volume of Clifton’s poetry is simultaneously timeless and fitting for today’s tumultuous moment.

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In passionate poems about sin, obsession, and mortality—an artist’s infatuation with a doll, an interspecies relationship, an ex-lover whose presence lingers in recipes, ecclesiastical birds, and a sex toy holding a loved one’s ashes—Waters delivers impeccably crafted narratives infused with his signature lyrical gestures. At the book’s core is a sequence of twenty-five poems on aging, dementia, and caregiving, chiseled phrase by phrase toward unflinching and memorable closure. Caw is a brilliant, intimate and moving addition to Waters’s body of work and may be his most powerful collection yet.

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What happens when everything falls away, when those you call on in times of need are themselves calling out for rescue? In his highly anticipated second collection, Chen Chen continues his investigation of family, both blood and chosen, examining what one inherits and what one invents, as a queer Asian American living through an era of Trump, mass shootings, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Always at work in the wrecked heart of this new collection is a switchboard operator, picking up and connecting calls. Raucous 2 a.m. prank calls. Whispered-in-a-classroom emergency calls. And sometimes, its pages record the dropping of a call, a failure or refusal to pick up. With irrepressible humor and play, these anarchic poems celebrate life, despite all that would crush aliveness. Hybrid in form and set in New England, West Texas, and a landlocked province of China, among other places, Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency refuses neat categorizations and pat answers. Instead, the book offers an insatiable curiosity about how it is we keep finding ways to hold onto one another.

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Volcanic eruptions and waves collide in Yaccaira Salvatierra’s explosive debut collection Sons of Salt, which explores the duality of personal and political landscapes as well as legacies of violence within Mexican-American communities. Sons of Salt poignantly captures the experiences of mothers who battle for their sons’ wellbeing, particularly when fathers are absent due to systemic oppressions. Salvatierra’s verse breaks the bones of poetic form to bring attention to the failures of a conceptually western God who has categorically failed to protect His children, and gives birth instead to a god of nature. Weaving self-made mythology, mourning, and maternal fear into visual and narrative poems, Salvatierra creates a collection that probes the d

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This first U.S. publication of Erez Bitton, one of Israel's most celebrated poets, recalls the fate of Moroccan Jewish culture with poems both evocative and pure. Considered the founding father of Mizrahi Israeli poetry, a major tradition in the history of Hebrew poetry, Bitton's bilingual collection dramatically expands the scope of biographical experience and memory, ultimately resurrecting a vanishing world and culture. Preliminary Background Words My mother my mother from a village of shrubs green of a different green. From a bird's nest producing milk sweeter than sweet. From a nightingale's cradle of a thousand Arabian nights. My mother my mother who staved off evil with her middle fingers with beating her chest on behalf of all mothers. My father my father who delved into worlds who sanctified the Sabbath with pure Araq who was most practiced in synagogue traditions. And I-- having distanced myself deep into my heart would recite when all were asleep short Bach masses deep into my heart in Jewish- Moroccan. The 2015 recipient of the Israel Prize, Erez Bitton was born in 1942 to Moroccan parents in Oran, Algeria, and emigrated to Israel in 1948. Blinded by a stray hand grenade in Lod, he spent his childhood in Jerusalem's School for the Blind. He is considered the founding father of Mizrahi Israeli poetry in Israel--the first poet to take on the conflict between North African immigrants and the Ashkenazi society, and the first to use Judeo-Arabic dialect in his poetry.

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As an anthropologist, Adrie Kusserow's ethnographic poetry probes culture and globalization with poems about Sudanese refugees based in Uganda, Sudan, and the United States, especially the "Lost Boys of Sudan." The poet struggles with how to respond to suffering, poverty, displacement, and the brutal aspects of war. Much of this exploration is based in poems in which a mother is also bringing her family to a larger global arena. Adrie Kusserow is a professor of cultural anthropology at St. Michael's College. Her international fieldwork supports girls' education in South Sudan and youth media literacy in Bhutan. She lives in Underhill Center, Vermont.

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Richly allusive, the poems in Brigit Pegeen Kelly's The Orchard evoke elements of myth in distinctive aural and rhythmic patterns. Her poetic strength lies in her ability to cast poems as modern myths and allegories. Propelled by patterned repetitions and lush cadences, the poems move the reader through a landscape where waking and dream consciousness fuse. Brigit Pegeen Kelly teaches creative writing at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her poetry collections are Song (BOA Editions), the 1994 Lamont Poetry Selection of The Academy of American Poets and a finalist for the 1995 Los Angeles Times Book Award, and To the Place of Trumpets, selected by James Merrill for the 1987 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize.

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"X. J. Kennedy's well-known travels between the realms of the comic and the serious qualify him for dual citizenship in the world of poetry. Here, the playful is on full display in verse not just 'light' but bright and delightful."-Billy Collins Peeping Tom's Cabin is the first full-length collection of light verse for adults composed by one of America's most celebrated poets. An uncompromising formalist, Kennedy uses a broad range of longstanding poetic forms, including limerick, nursery rhyme, ballad, rhymed epitaph, and clerihew. This collection includes many poems previously published in poetry and popular journals, including The Sewanee Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, and Poetry. These poems honor and skewer all classes of citizen, regardless of their revered place in society. Parents, lovers, poetry critics, students, and especially notable literary figures receive Kennedy's astute comic attention. "To Someone Who Insisted I Look Up Someone" I rang them up while touring Timbuktu, Those bosom chums to whom you're known as "Who?" X. J. Kennedy has published six collections of verse, including Nude Descending a Staircase, which received the Lamont Award from the Academy of American Poets. His newest collection, The Lords of Misrule, received the 2004 Poets' Prize. Kennedy has also authored eighteen children's books and several textbooks on fiction and poetry. Other recognitions include the Los Angeles Book Award for Poetry, the Aiken-Taylor Award, and Guggenheim and National Arts Council fellowships. Kennedy was also given the first Michael Braude Award for light verse by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

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Lynne Thompson’s Blue on a Blue Palette reflects on the condition of women—their joys despite their histories, and their insistence on survival as issues of race, culture, pandemic, and climate threaten their livelihoods. The documentation of these personal odysseys—which vary stylistically from abecedarians to free verse to centos—replicate the many ways women travel through the stages of their lives, all negotiated on a palette encompassing various shades of blue. These poems demand your attention, your voice: “Say history. Claim. Say wild.”

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In Every Hard Sweetness, Carter-Jones chronicles Civil Rights’ era atrocities through the story of her family’s experience with an all-too-common practice in which Black men were wrongfully incarcerated in institutions for the criminally insane. The result is a stunning work reflecting on race, criminalization, and the devastating consequences of a Black father’s incarceration on his psyche and family, specifically his Black daughter. Told through a mixture of photography, ekphrasis, and erasure, Carter-Jones’ powerful collection creates an extraordinary record of her family’s life at a time of great suffering and upheaval.

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From poet George Looney comes a new short story collection that explores the essential nature of faith while plumbing the gritty secrets of the human heart. With swamps, alligators, revival tents, faith healers, sex, death, guilt, sin and snakes, Looney leads us through a dark landscape brimming with the miraculous and the peculiar alike. A man from a fire shows up on someone's doorstep, covered in ash and barely alive. One man’s actions make an entire town question its own violence. A healer is bitten in half by an alligator as a crowd looks on. Dripping with Southern gothic, The Visibility of Things Long Submerged gazes at the obscure and obscene. Densely populated with characters that know intimately the trials of life and the restorative powers of love, these stories are filled with a deep longing for something beyond the restless disquiet.

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In pursuit of his brother, a man traverses the fantastical and grotesque landscape of Hell, pondering their now fractured relationship. The poems in Dustin Pearson’s A Season in Hell with Rimbaud form an allegorical travelogue that chronicles two brothers’ mutual descent into hell. When the older brother runs off by himself, the younger brother begins roaming Hell’s different landscapes in search of him. As he searches, the younger brother ruminates on their now fractured relationship: what brought them here? Can they find each other? Will their bonds ever be repaired? In the tradition of Virgil, Dante, Milton, Swift, Shelley, Joyce, Sarte, and especially Arthur Rimbaud, Pearson leads his speakers on a speculative, epistolary journey through the nether realm inspired by Christian beliefs and tradition. Drawing on the works of French Symbolists and the literary traditions of the American South, A Season in Hell with Rimbaud guides readers through an intimate rendering of one brother’s journey to find his lost and estranged brother, perhaps recovering a part of himself in the process.

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Selected by Aimee Nezhukumatathil as the winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize, Danni Quintos carves a space for brown girls and weird girls in her debut collection of poems. Two Brown Dots explores what it means to be a racially ambiguous, multiethnic, Asian American woman growing up in Kentucky. In stark, honest poems, Quintos recounts the messiness and confusion of being a typical ‘90s kid—watching Dirty Dancing at sleepovers, borrowing eye shadow out of a friend’s caboodle, crushing on a boy wearing khaki shorts to Sunday mass—while navigating the microagressions of the neighbor kids, the awkwardness of puberty, and the casual cruelties of fellow teenagers. The mixed-race daughter of a dark skinned Filipino immigrant, Quintos retells family stories and Phillipine folklore to try and make sense of an identity with roots on opposite sides of the globe. With clear-eyed candor and a wry sense of humor, Quintos teases the line between tokenism and representation, between assimilation and belonging, offering a potent antidote to the assumption that “American” means “white.” Encompassing a whole journey from girlhood to motherhood, Two Brown Dots subverts stereotypes to reclaim agency and pride in the realness and rawness and unprettyness of a brown girl’s body, boldly declaring: We exist, we belong, we are from here, and we will continue to be.

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Nestled against the backdrop of Seattle's flora, fauna, and cityscape, Luther Hughes' debut poetry collection wrestles with the interior and exterior symbiosis of a gay Black man finding refuge from the threat of depression and death through love and desire.Hughes draws readers into a Seattle that is heavily entrenched in violent anti-Blackness, and full of vulnerable and personal encounters from both the speaker’s past and present. With reverent and careful imagery, Hughes fashions deeply saturated, tender vignettes that reckon relationships between family and friends, lovers, nature, and the police-state.A Shiver in the Leaves is stunningly cinematic in its layered portrayal of the never-ending dualities of a queer Black poet’s life in the city. Hughes's interrogation of selfhood renders a sharply intimate and viscerally powerful reimagining of what it means to be alive in a body, and what it can mean to live.

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Poems by Nguyen Phan Que Mai Translated from the Vietnamese by Bruce Weigl and Nguyen Phan Que Mai Nguyen Phan Que Mai is among the most exciting writers to emerge from post-war Vietnam. Bruce Weigl, driven by his personal experiences as a soldier during the war in Vietnam, has spent the past 20 years translating contemporary Vietnamese poetry. These penetrating poems, published in bilingual English and Vietnamese, build new bridges between two cultures bound together by war and destruction. The Secret of Hoa Sen, Que Mai's first full-length U.S. publication, shines with craft, art, and deeply felt humanity. I cross the Lam River to return to my homeland where my mother embraces my grandmother's tomb in the rain, the soil of Nghe An so dry the rice plants cling to rocks. My mother chews dry corn; hungry, she tries to forget.

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Why God Is a Woman is a collection of poems written about a magical island where women rule and men are the second sex. It is also the story of a boy who, exiled from the island because he could not abide by its sexist laws, looks back with both nostalgia and bitterness and wonders: Why does God have to be a woman? Celebrated prose poet Nin Andrews creates a world both fantastic and familiar where all the myths, logic, and institutions support the dominance of women. Nin Andrews's books include The Book of Orgasms and Sleeping with Houdini.

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In his twentieth book, most of which was first composed on the backs of medical forms while on break as a third-shift medical technician, Sean Thomas Dougherty brings us a memoir-like prose sequence reflecting on disability, chronic illness, addiction, survival, love, and parenthood. In Death Prefers the Minor Keys, Dougherty offers the reader collaged prose poems, stories and essays full of dreams, metaphors, aphorisms, parables and narratives of his work as a caregiver. Moving portraits of Dougherty’s residents, a series of letters to Death, invocations of Jewish ancestry through the photography of Roman Vishniac, imaginary treatments for brain injuries, and half translated short stories of lives both real and imagined populate this collection. Through these, Dougherty engages issues of labor, the ontology of disability, and the mysticism of life. Death Prefers the Minor Keys is most of all a kind of love letter to Dougherty’s wife, and her courage and complicity in the face of long-term illness and addiction. Ultimately, we see how the antidote to despair can reside in daily acts of caring for other human beings.

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Awakening to histories personal and social, Conversation Among Stones is a meditation on memory and identity. Through fields of wild grass, restless seascapes, and cities tinged with sand, Willie Lin's debut collection of poetry questions what can remain and what must be pared away in our search for truth. Conversation Among Stones speaks both to the inanimate—misremembered histories, photographs, the dead—and to the voices in our daily lives that reverberate with disagreement and confusion. Punctuated by doubt and resistant to easy transformations, these poems listen and revise. With striking restraint and simultaneous abundance, these poems attempt to reconcile the desire for answers with the necessity of not knowing.Turn by turn, this collection catalogs moments of approach, fervor, and strife and carries us into a profound quest for understanding: “And that was one conviction: / that we must be to one another / what the world is not / to us.”

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In Joe Baumann’s newest collection Where Can I Take You When There’s Nowhere To Go, queer men explore their sense of who they are and what they want, often in worlds that are tilted askew from what we might expect. Thirteen surreal short stories utilize the strange and the bizarre as a backdrop for explorations of loneliness, queer coming-of-age, self-discovery, and loss. In “We Adore These Bodies Until They Are Gone,” people evaporate when suffering isolation and directionless; in “Happy Birthdays,” characters transform into different ages when they consume particular kinds of cake; and in the titular story, a pair of lonely teenagers come together at a party after one of them gifts the other with a small cloud he has spun out of his own hands. Baumann’s tender vignettes of love, anger, grief, and desire are a stunning ode to the places and people that can give us solace within an absurd and chaotic world.

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Take the body and split it wide open. Fill it with light. See the multiple interiors, the layered death, the familial mythology, the throb and splendor of being, the shedding of the body altogether: this is fox woman get out! Traveling from the corporeal to the cosmic, from life to death and back again, fox woman get out! is a full-throated performance of humanity in search of truth, ancestry, and artistic authenticity. Moving through themes of lineage, twinship, femininity and masculinity, reclamation of Indigeneity, dance, gender roles, and longing, González’s poems are a crescendo on the page. Part ecstatic elegy, part spell, this is a betwixt poetics, a kaleidoscopic, disruptive, and meditative work.

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Through a personal, historical, and political lens, Mahtem Shiferraw attends to the collective experiences inherited through deeply-rooted ancestry, tracing patterns of movement and migration, sorrow and invisibility, and the resulting complicated notions of home.In Nomenclatures of Invisibility, Shiferraw calls us to carve out space for the multitudes of selves we carry when we migrate across boundaries of body, language, and land. With momentum, giving name to everything in her path from the longing that comes with migration to her beloved eucalyptus tree, she blurs physical and temporal borders, paying homage to ancestors past, present, and future. Shiferraw writes unapologetically against erasure, against invisibility, instead creating a space that holds grief lovingly, that can tend to the wounds held and held in the endlessly-traveling body. Brilliant with abundance and texture, Shiferraw’s poems dismantle the empire's sterile use of language, both historical and present. In Nomenclatures of Invisibility, Mahtem Shiferraw builds a home within her poems, attentively naming those who exist within them out of invisibility and into the radiant light: “We walk / in unison too: our backs bending at once, / our arms breaking, our abdomens / kicked into silence, thighs bleeding. Through / this I ask; am I still lit? And they, again /…what else would you be—”

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