Search results for ""Sarabande Books, Incorporated""

“On the bridges to those slippery worlds, we are wrapped in gold foil, disease free. Who is saving whom? The question’s not stated, only implied.” In 2013, the Italian government implemented Mare Nostrum, an operation intended to limit immigration from Africa and the Middle East to European countries. For the refugees, the journeys were harrowing, often ending in shipwrecks or imprisonment, and the arrivals were wracked with uncertainty. Here, the poet Khaled Mattawa conjures a pointed, incantatory account of the refugee experience in the Mediterranean. In reclaiming the operation's name Mare Nostrum (our sea in Latin), he renders us culpable for the losses, and responsible to those risking their lives in pursuit of hope and respite from oppression. The voices are many, and the lyrics ritualistic, as if Mattawa has stirred ghosts from the wreckage. Part narrative, part blessing, this chapbook begs of its readers: Do you remember? Mattawa’s writing is a lighthouse for politics of the twenty-first century, and this chapbook a stunning memorial.

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"One of the most exciting and visceral poets of his generation."—Tony Hoagland"Look at homie on the beach picking shells in dress shoes," David Tomas Martinez writes in his raw, electrifying second collection. In his debut, Hustle, Martinez offered a kaleidoscopic coming-of-age narrative replete with teen shootings and car-jackings, uncertain forays into sex, and the ongoing violence of colonialism upon Latino communities in San Diego. Emerging from the fray, the poet is left to wonder: Who am I now? In Post Traumatic Hood Disorder, the speaker assembles a bricolage self-portrait from the fractures of the past. Sliding between scholarly diction and slangy vernacular, studded with references to Greek mythology and hip-hop, Martinez's poems showcase a versatility of language and a wild-hearted poetic energy that is thoughtful, vulnerable, and distinctly American.David Tomas Martinez is a recipient of a 2017 NEA fellowship, the Pushcart Prize, the Verlaine Poetry Prize, a CantoMundo fellowship, and the Stanley P. Young Fellowship from Breadloaf. His debut collection of poetry, Hustle (2014, Sarabande Books) received the New England Book Festival's prize in poetry, the Devil's Kitchen Reading Award, and $10,000 as honorable mention from the Antonio Cisneros Del Moral Prize. His work has been published or is forthcoming in Poetry, Ploughshares, Tin House, Boston Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Oxford American, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. Martinez lives in Brooklyn, NY.

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Selected by Dean Young as winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry, Fludde draws on Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience to critique and dismantle contemporary American values and conditioning: commodification, environmental negligence, corporate exploitation, toxic masculinity. At once surreal and satirical, vulnerable and nostalgic, Mishler channels the voices of disillusioned middle management alongside the freewheeling imaginative vision of children to disrupt the fixity of our received ideas.

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Praise for Sallie Bingham: "Sallie Bingham binds her collection together with sheer talent. The title novella is absolutely first-rate—a skillfully suggestive amalgam of Katherine Mansfield and Eudora Welty. This same unblinking gaze is hard at work on the essential weakness and dependence of men ('The Banks of the Ohio' and 'The Ice Party'), the illusion of freedom that comes with divorce ('Bare Bones'), and the desperate terror of adolescent love ('Winter Term')."—James R. Frakes, The New York Times Book Review "Sallie Bingham's characters scrutinize their relationships with children, lovers, and their own treacherous souls. . . . Nearly every one of these flinty stories is a tiny masterpiece."—Entertainment Weekly "Hardened but not compromised by adult life, these luminous stories . . . feature narrators who find mature, often solitary forms of reckoning, and even happiness. . . . There is not a false note in Bingham's striking collection."—Publishers Weekly, starred review "These engaging tales span landscape, gender, and age, and readers will treasure Bingham's strikingly perceptive composition and refined, clever flashes of detail and clarity."—Booklist Sallie Bingham published her first novel with Houghton Mifflin in 1961. Since then she has published four collections of short stories, four novels, and a memoir. She was book editor for The Courier-Journal in Louisville, Kentucky, and has been a director of the National Book Critics Circle. She is the founder of The Kentucky Foundation for Women.

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Winner of the 2009 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry, selected by Dan Chiassonn From "The Above Song": Foie gras has been outlawed. So has gravitas, faux grass, middle class. Soon: the past. Julia Story lives in Somerville, Massachusetts.

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In her daring essay collection Dear Sound of Footstep, author Ashley Butler engages the reader in an exploration of her mother's death and an estranged paternal relationship. As illusions of a celestial umbrella slowly disappear, she begins a search for answers within the infinite. The candid narrative evolves into a stunning, abstract deconstruction of time and space, piloting the reader precariously close to the unanswered question, "Why are we here?" Among the subjects she touches on: the fastest man on earth, wind farms and tunnels, and the anechoic (without echo) chamber at Harvard University. We hear about some of history's oddest seekers of spiritual and scientific knowledge: Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the father of cosmonautics; Yves Klein, the "artist of space"; Russian futurist Nikolai Federov; and Harry Houdini, hanging headfirst over a crowd in Times Square. The essays are a blend of conventional narrative, aphorism (“The aphorism is a form of eternity,” said Nietzsche), lyrical imagery, and language, with insights like, "A voice begins with the thought that must be set apart from a body." Butler's collection has a true magic of its own, at times both brutal and gorgeous, but always coming back to an empathy of spirit and intelligence far beyond Butler's years. Ashley Butler was born and raised in Virginia. She has a BA from Columbia University and an MFA from the University of Iowa. Her work has appeared in Ninth Letter,jubilat, Gulf Coast, Creative Nonfiction, and POOL. She lives in Texas.

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I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl is film noir set in verse, each poem a miniature crime scene with its own set of clues—frosted eye-shadow, a pistol under a horse’s eye, dripping window units, an aneurysm opening its lethal trap. In otherworldly vignettes, 1994 pairs the unreliable narration of Jacob’s Ladder (with its questions of identity and shifting realities) with the microscopic compulsiveness of Einstein’s Dreams. The book’s sense of hypnotic premeditation brings Donnie Darko to mind as well, as poem after poem scatters the breadcrumbs of a murder mystery leading us further away from the present self and deeper into the past. I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl is an astounding debut collection that will crawl under your skin and stay there. "I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl is a remarkable book. It is innovative, original, unprecedented, and, at the same time, its originality and innovation are predicated on a passionate, even obsessive relationship with the past."—Lynn Emanuel

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"Readers will find that the words profiled here have a new trace of meaning, warmth, and a time-worn glow."—John Morse, publisher of Merriam-Webster, Inc. In One Word: Contemporary Writers on the Words They Love or Loathe, Molly McQuade asks the question all writers love to answer: what one word means the most to you, and why? Writers respond with a wild gallimaufry of their choosing, from ardor to bitchin' to thermostat to wrong to very. There is corn, not the vegetable but the idea, defining cultural generations; solmizate, meaning to sing an object into place; and delicious slang, such as darb and dassn't. Composed as expository or lyric essays, zinging one-liners, extended quips, jeremiads, etymological adventures, or fantastic romps, the writings address not only English words but also a select few from French, German, Japanese, Quechua, Basque, Igbo, and others. The result is like the best of meals: filled with color, personality, and pomp. There is something delightful and significant for every reader who picks up this wonderful book. Includes contributions by Albert Goldbarth, Forrest Gander, Brenda Hillman, Mimi Schwartz, Daisy Fried, Thylias Moss, Srikanth Reddy, Susan Bernofsky, Michael Martone, Cole Swensen, and more.

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“Her stories have a fablelike quality, a dreaminess that lulls even as Miller explores the most contemporary issues. Her characters seem to live on after the last word—I found myself thinking of them days after I’d finished the book, turning over what might have happened in later years....These psychologically acute stories are truly satisfying—imaginative, open-ended, haunting.”—O, The Oprah Magazine "The latest collection from Miller skillfully explores the tension in Midwestern race and class relations....Miller's tales impart a real breadth of experience."—Publishers Weekly “Alyce Miller has the eye and the skills for getting the short story right. . . . She writes vividly about people in various degrees of emotional extremis, and she avoids the temptation to invent resolutions for the dilemmas they’re in. She deftly captures individual psychologies.”—Norman Rush, from the introduction In this startling new collection by prize-winning author Alyce Miller, changing images of water as a force both destructive and healing are woven throughout. Whether giving voice to the nameless wife from a tale by Chekhov or illustrating the fears driving apart black and white communities in small-town Ohio, Miller makes vivid the heart of human interaction. These stories, told from different perspectives of age, race, and gender, acknowledge a common rhythm in each of us—unsettled desire. Alyce Miller has authored a collection of stories, The Nature of Longing (W.W. Norton & Company), winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, and a novel, Stopping for Green Lights (Anchor Doubleday), as well as more than 120 stories, poems, and essays that have appeared in literary magazines and anthologies. Her other awards include the Lawrence Foundation Prize from Michigan Quarterly Review, The Kenyon Review Award for Literary Excellence in Fiction, and distinguished citations in The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Essays, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and The Pushcart Prize. She leads a double life as an attorney specializing in animal law and a professor in the graduate writing program at Indiana University Bloomington.

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"Vogelsang’s poetry is both abrasive and generous."—John Ashbery "Vogelsang has found an interrogating voice at once dissembling and direct."—Stanley Plumly The poems in Vogelsang’s fourth collection are events of great pressure, tension, and heat. In a language pitched somewhere just above the vernacular, Vogelsang often connects with the classics and grapples with concerns of our time, offering a singular experience—emotionally affecting and intellectually provocative poetry. Arthur Vogelsang is the author of A Planet, Twentieth Century Women, and Cities and Towns, which received the Juniper Prize. He is the coeditor of The American Poetry Review and teaches at New England College. He divides his time between Los Angeles and Philadelphia.

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Winner of the 2001 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry. "Barot’s mature linguistic skills really come down to a metaphorical and musical intelligence that refuses to value one element over another, that will not let the language or the longing take over."—From the Foreword by Stanley Plumly "This is a book of lyric wonders: wit that turns dark, darkness that blazes up again in music and story."—Eavan Boland Rick Barot is currently Jones Lecturer in Poetry at Stanford University. He was born in the Philippines and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. He attended Wesleyan University, the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, and Stanford, where he was a Wallace E. Stegner Fellow in Poetry.

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Equipoise, Kathleen Halme's second book of poems. Based in fact on the North Carolina coastline, the climate of these poems is one abundant with sun, salt water, and the paradoxical shore. Equally at home in formal meter and free verse, Halme explores the balancing pull of forces and discovers a refreshing version of mindfulness in daily life. Despite contemporary trends of cynicism and despair, Halme braves happiness. Even as she acknowledges that "We all live in fear/of shoreless feelings," such anxiety succumbs to her inclusive vision: "We are in the soup, singular/and swimming, roiling/with the isopods and copepods./ . . . We are delicious, surrendered to shells and jellies,/ every one soaking in sun."For readers eager to experience "the ache of paradise," these poems chart consciousness with obvious pleasure: "Are you not a lucky one/you who hear your own mind think." But here is an intellect made lyrical. To celebrate the sensual core of experience, Halme's seemingly spare language is lush with assonance. In these poems, vowels have a cumulative effect, resounding, finally, in a grandiose vocative o of astonishment and joy.Kathleen Halme's first book of poetry, Every Substance Clothed, winner of the 1995 University of Georgia Press Contemporary Poetry Series competition, was awarded the Balcones Poetry Prize. She completed her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Michigan, where her work was awarded the Hopwood Creative Writing Award. Halme is a 1997-98 recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship. She is associate professor of English at Western Washington University in Bellingham."Here is a volcanically poised and deliciously balanced book of meditative graces, of provisional lyric holdings, of sumptuous meditations shored against the ruins."-Edward Hirsch"Most prominent is Halme's sensual commitment to language; her poems resonate with a phonetic lushness illuminating her intelligent imagery. These poems are enjoyable most notably for the pleasure of pure sound. . . . Gently peppered into her poems are flavors of mysticism, portrayed by an efficient and clever selection of words, which result in a pleasurable and unexpected unfolding. Overall, these poems

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"Brian Griffin's first work of fiction, Sparkman in the Sky, is like Hemingway's In Our Time in that it can be read either as a collection of short stories or as a discontinuous novel. From story to story, themes gather meaning until in the last one they are resolved or transposed into a new key. The first-person narrator may be named Hal or Ian or Victor, but by the end all these narrators have fused into a collective exemplar of how things go in a certain place in our time. . . . It's no knock on Brian Griffin to say that he has learned from Hemingway, among others. After all, Miles Davis was no less gifted a musician, no less original, for having learned from Dizzy Gillespie. And Griffin has his own original qualities, his own subtleties, his own sly humor-even a gift for farce. . . . This book is way beyond promising."-The New York Times Book Review Brian Griffin grew up in the country near Soddy-Daisy, Tennessee, in a family he describes as "infested by preachers, all Southern Baptists of the fundamentalist sort." He earned his B.A. in English from Middle Tennessee State University and his M.F.A. from the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Griffin teaches creative writing at the University of Tennessee. He lives with his wife and children in Knoxville and works closely with a group there to promote interracial harmony in the inner city. Griffin's stories and poems have been well published in journals including Shenandoah, New Delta Review, Clockwatch Review, Snake Nation Review, and Southern Poetry Review. In addition to various short stories and poems, Griffin is currently at work on a novel.

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Even Shorn takes its title from the Song of Solomon and that Book’s equation of pastoral feminine beauty with the plenty of harvest. Isabel Duarte-Gray argues that material bounty no longer exists in the rural spaces where she was raised. Duarte-Gray’s poetry mines local orature, family history, and folklore for the music of Western Kentucky, creating the sparse line breaks and the harsh syntax of the present. The poems describe quilt patterns with sinister shapes: “a snake’s tongue is a trigger finger/Man’s tongue pleases no one.” Animals proliferate: “One cat became five/five became nine. /Then a flood and ebb/as each moon brought its tide/below the trailer floor…” A grandfather plays drunk, solitary Russian Roulette. A cousin lives in a closet. Duarte’s poetry is shocking, whip smart, and truly unique.

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The latest installment in the Sarabande Series in Kentucky Literature, Mare’s Nest explores a Kentucky horse farm in its turbulent beginnings. From Kentucky native and Brooklyn-based poet Holly Mitchell, Mare’s Nest troubles the meaning of a racehorse, in particular the broodmare and the foals she carries. Reaching from the photographic experiment of Muybridge’s "The Horse in Motion" to Patti Smith’s album Horses, Mitchell touches upon history, dreams, Southern family stories, and queer adolescence in the early aughts. Colloquially referring to a muddled situation or an illusory discovery, the term “mare’s nest” can also refer quite literally to the soft depression left by a horse lying in grass. And so the idea of a “mare’s nest," in all of its linguistic potential, serves as the central focus for Holly Mitchell’s meditative debut.

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Reckon, "Black Joy: 2022 Best of Books""Those of us who have been following her work for a while have known Reid would come flying out of the gates and, well, here is the emphatic proof.”—Laird Hunt, National Book Award finalist for ZorrieThot is a ground-breaking, fast paced, book length essay that experiments with poetry, dialogue, and memoir. At its epicenter are two competing forces. One is Chanté’s upbringing in the splendor, density, rhythms, and madness of Bronx, NY, including the murder of Chante’s neighbor, Deborah Danner, killed by a police officer during his break-in. The other is Reid’s academic life at Brown University, where she is completing a critical thesis on Toni Morrison’s book, Beloved. Its characters—Sethe, Denver, Margeret Garner—wind in and out of the conversation, as do the Medea and Narcissus of Greek myths. Thot is a thrilling cacophony, a highly original mix of genre and voice, sure to please readers in search of something startling and new.

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Readers familiar with Sallie Bingham’s 1989 memoir, Passion and Prejudice, will remember her provocative chronicle of the Bingham family saga, cited by Gloria Steinem as “a major step toward feminist change and democracy.” In Little Brother, she reflects on just one of her siblings: the youngest son Jonathan and his all-too brief life. The book begins with a count she calls her “dreadful list” of nine close relatives who died by accident, suicide, overdose, exposure to the elements, and electrocution, all before the age of 50. Jonathan was only twenty-two years old when he climbed a pole, hoping to rig up some lighting for a barn party and, by some fluke, grabbed a live wire. But even before his fatal fall to the ground, the boy suffered from insecurity, isolation, and difficulty relating to his large family. Bingham draws from archived material, chief among them the young man’s journal and letters. She writes his short history with obvious affection and tenderness, along with more than a dash of survival guilt. Little Brother is a moving and honest new work.

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A Man with Eight Pairs of Legs is about the ways our bodies are marked by memory, often literally, and the risky decisions we make when pushed to the extreme. Winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction, this collection of short stories is a study in compassion and in passion, a must-read for our times.

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In her opening, Amy Wright explains: “This essay anchors a central thread of dialogue over a dizzying divide. It weaves a decades-plus-worth of questions and answers from a range of discussions I’ve had with artists, activists, scientists, philosophers, physicians, priests, musicians, and other representatives of the human population. Some of them are famous, some will be, some should be—but all of them refract the light of the unknowable mystery of the self.” Folding together conversations from a vast web of thinkers like Dorothy Allison, Rae Armantrout, Gerald Stern, Lia Purpura, Raven Jackson, Wendy Walters, Kimiko Hahn, Philanese Slaughter, and many, many more, Paper Concert depicts every individual as a collective in dire need of preservation. If this book is a paper concert, it is a symphony. Just pull up a chair and listen.

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A harrowing and heartfelt essay collection weaving narratives about family, gun violence, art, and the American Dream. Two weeks before her grandfather purchased a gun, Ashley Marie Farmer’s grandmother tripped as she walked across their living room. It was a swift accident on an ordinary day: her chin hit the floor; her cervical spine shattered. She asked, “I’m paralyzed, aren’t I?” Later, thinking to put her out of her misery, he kissed his sleeping wife of sixty-three years and shot her in the chest. He tried to shoot himself too, but the weapon broke apart in his hands. He was immediately arrested. This is the scene we are greeted with at the outset of Farmer’s stunning collection of hybrid essays. One of its greatest features is the variety of voices, a kaleidoscopic approach that corrals in autobiography, audio transcripts, media, legal documents, internet comments, short prose pieces, and more. The result is a moving, deeply satisfying, and eye-opening story. Ashley Marie Farmer is a profound writer who is clearly here to stay, her voice a true gift to our times.

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Within the thirteen stories of Whitney Collins’s Big Bad dwells a hunger that’s dark, deep, and hilarious. Part domestic horror, part flyover gothic, Big Bad serves up real-world predicaments in unremarkable places (motels, dormitories, tiki bars), all with Collins’s heart-wrenching flavor of magical realism. A young woman must give birth to future iterations of herself; a widower kills a horse en route to his grandson’s circumcision; a conflicted summer camper is haunted by a glass eye and motorcycle crash. Collins’s cast of characters must repeatedly choose to fight or flee the “big bad” that dwells within us all. Winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction, and boasting a 2020 Pushcart-winning story, Big Bad simultaneously entertains and disconcerts.

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Visually arresting and utterly one-of-a-kind, Sarah J. Sloat's Hotel Almighty is a book-length erasure of pages from Misery by Stephen King, a reimagining of the novel's themes of constraint and possibility in elliptical, enigmatic poems. Here, "joy would crawl over broken glass, if that was the way." Here, sleep is a "circle whose diameter might be small," a circle "pitifully small," a "wrecked and empty hypothetical circle." Paired with Sloat's stunning mixed-media collage, each poem is a miniature canvas, a brief associative profile of the psyche—its foibles, obsessions, and delights.

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Buzzfeed News,"15 Small Press Books To Kick Off Your 2020 Reading Season" The Millions, “February Preview: The Millions Most Anticipated” "Death looms in these four sparkling novellas—thus the book’s sly title—but until then there’s the wonder of life. Frank’s subjects include fascinating friendships and complicated marriages, awful parties and odd enthusiasm. Bonus: song mentions that add up to a terrifically eclectic playlist.” —Kim Hubbard, People Magazine In her quartet of novellas, Joan Frank invites readers into the inner lives of characters bewildered by love, grief, and inexplicable affinities. A young couple navigates a strange friendship and unexpected pregnancy; a woman recalls the bizarre fallout of her former lover's fame; a lonely widow is drawn to an arrogant young man; a wealthy spiritual seeker grapples with what wealth cannot affect. Witty and humane, Frank taps the riches of the novella form as she writes of loneliness, friendship, loss, and the filaments of intimacy that connect us through time.

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Heather Seller's unpretentious, vernacular prose allows Georgia a persuasive mix of innocence and experience. These are miraculous stories of survival, perhaps even forgiveness. To some of us Georgia's life would be unthinkable. Sellers makes us believe it is well worth living. "Heather Sellers writes delicious, dangerous prose. She starts you twenty-three floors up in condo squalor, nips across for dysfunction in Disney country, threatens incest in Hotlanta, and comes to grief on the Gulf. The dead-credible life of Georgia Jackson—ineffably sweet, thoroughly in love with her own luscious body, half in love with her lush of a father—skids at the edge of the surreal. Her story had me laughing through the lump in my throat. An original. A knockout debut."-Janet Burroway Marketing Plans Author tour in Sellers' hometowns in Michigan and Florida Brochure and postcard mailings Advertisements in key literary and trade magazines Heather Sellers was born and raised in Orlando, Florida and received a Ph.D. in Writing from Florida State University. Her work has appeared in Indiana Review, New Virginia Review, The Hawaii Review, The Chattahoochee Review, The Women's Review of Books, and Sonora Review. Her story "Fla. Boys" is anthologized in New Stories from the South, 1999: The Year's Best. She received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1999. She currently lives in Holland, Michigan, where she's an associate professor of English at Hope College. Excerpt From Georgia Under Water From the short story, "Spurt" I spent those days watching myself in every reflective surface known to Daytona Beach. My knees weren't knobs anymore. My knees were lush transitions. My thighs shone golden-brown; my shins, paler, but long and strong. My ankles were slim, bony in a fetching way, my feet suddenly inches too long for my slaps and sandals. My hair swung in a shiny curtain behind me; my legs were in constant motion, counterpoint. "You've had a growth spurt," my mother said. "Your shorts are way too short. When did this happen?" "I think yesterday and/or the day before," I said. We were in

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"It might be the best book on animals I’ve ever read. It’s also the only one that’s made me laugh out loud."—Helen MacDonald for The New York Times Book ReviewBeginning with Yuka, a 39,000 year old mummified woolly mammoth recently found in the Siberian permafrost, each of the 16 essays in Animals Strike Curious Poses investigates a different famous animal named and immortalized by humans. Modeled loosely after a medieval bestiary, these witty, playful, whipsmart essays traverse history, myth, science, and more, bringing each beast vibrantly to life.Elena Passarello is an actor, a writer, and recipient of a 2015 Whiting Fellowship in nonfiction. Her first collection with Sarabande Books, Let Me Clear My Throat, won the gold medal for nonfiction at the 2013 Independent Publisher Awards. She lives in Corvallis, Oregon.

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Since Heather McHugh first began publishing her poems in 1968, poetry readers have marveled at the immensity and range of her gift. There seems to be nothing that McHugh can’t do with words and do with high wit and sonic brilliance. In her chapbook Feeler, McHugh takes on the fraught subject of empathy—how much we feel, and do, for the afflicted. It also addresses the relation between thought and feeling: “Nowadays I cannot tell/ the two apart: can’t feel things thoughtlessly/or think things up without emotion.” As with only the very best poets, McHugh seamlessly combines thought and feeling, in poems that are entertaining and profound.

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"So persuasive are Yoon's powers of invention that I went searching for his Solla Island somewhere off the mainland of South Korea—not realizing that it exists only in this breathtaking collection of eight interlinked stories...Yoon's writing results in a fully formed, deftly executed debut. The lost lives, while heartbreaking, prove illuminating in Yoon's made-up world, so convincing and real. To read is truly to believe."—San Francisco Chronicle “Paul Yoon writes stories the way Fabergé made eggs: with untold craftsmanship, artistry, and delicacy. Again and again another layer of intricacy is revealed, proving that something as small as a story can be as satisfying and moving as a Russian novel.”—Ann Patchett “These are lovely stories, rendered with a Chekhovian elegance. They span from post–World War II to the new millennium, with characters of different ethnicities, yet each story has a timelessness and relevance that's haunting and unforgettable. Yoon is a sparkling new writer to welcome and celebrate.”—Don Lee “These are splendid stories, at once lyrical and plain-spoken and full of unusual realities. Once the Shore is a kind of fantastic Korean gazetteer that tours us confidently through unpredictable incidents and often startling conversations—Paul Yoon’s writing is erotic, haunting, original and worldly.”—Howard Norman Spanning over half a century—from the years just before the Korean War to the present—the eight stories in this collection reveal an intricate and unforgettable portrait of a single island in the South Pacific. Novelistic in scope, daring in its varied environments, Once the Shore introduces a remarkable new voice in international fiction. Publishers Weekly starred review: "Yoon's collection of eight richly textured stories explore the themes of family, lost love, silence, alienation and the effects of the Japanese occupation and the Korean War on the poor communities of a small South Korean island. In the namesake story, a lonely young waiter connects with an American widow who has come to find the cave where her husband claimed to have carved their initials during his tour of duty in Korea. The narrator shifts between Jim coping with the loss of his big brother, a fisherman killed by a surfacing American submarine, and the sorrow of the widow. In "Among the Wreckage," aging parents Bey and Soni hope to recover the body of their son, Karo, killed in a U.S. military bombing test on what was thought to be a deserted island. The sad journey provides Bey an opportunity to examine his inability to show affection to his wife and only child. Yoon's stories are introspective and tender while also painting with bold strokes the details of the lives of the invisible."

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Is it possible for poetry to be simultaneously raw and elegant, direct and oblique, hurtful and consoling? Yes, says Dear Delinquent, Ann Townsend's incandescent new collection. "My heart presses my ribcage like an octagon fist," she writes, taking on the persona of both betrayed and betrayer. Through poems that masterfully recall the styles of Sylvia Plath or Philip Larkin, Townsend convinces us that, even if its most destructive forms, love is the driving force behind all behavior.

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Readers of Make/Shift will find themselves confronting moments in which status and ceremony are shown to be destabilized, contingent—sorting through the suddenly unfamiliar contents of a time capsule, hanging poolside with parents while their hockey player sons devastate a hotel, and wandering the memory palace of a traumatized valedictorian during a commencement address—all while flash vignettes based on corporate slogans saturate the story collection with greater and greater frequency, like the commercials of a TV movie.

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Mothers Over Nangarhar is an unusual and powerful war narrative, focusing less on the front lines of combat and more on the home front, a perspective our American cultural canon has largely ignored after 222 years at war. In her stunning poetry debut, Pamela Hart concentrates on the fears and psychological battles suffered by parents, lovers, and friends during a soldier’s absence and return home, if indeed there’s a return. With honest grit and compassionate imagination, Hart describes her own experience having a son overseas, incorporating lyric meditations, photography, news articles, support group meetings, family interviews, oral histories, and classic literature to construct a documentary-style narrative very much situated in the now. Blending reality with absurdism and guided openly by a Calvino kind of logic, Hart reveals to us a crucial American point of view.

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In Brood, Kimiko Hahn trains her eye on the commonplace—clothespins, bees, papaya, perfume, poached eggs, a sponge, fire, sand dollars—and reveals their very essence in concise evocative language. Underlying these little gems is a sense of loss, a mother's death or a longing for childhood. "Brood" connotes the bundling of family or beasts, but also dark thinking, and both are at play here where the less said, the better. Kimiko Hahn is the author of ten books of poetry, including most recently, Brain Fever (Norton, 2014). She has received numerous honors, including the PSA's Shelley Memorial Prize, the PEN/Voelcker Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Guggenheim Foundation, and New York Foundation for the Arts. She is a distinguished professor in creative writing at Queens College (CUNY) and lives in Forest Hills, New York.

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Karyna MyGlynn takes readers on tour through the half-haunted house of the contemporary American psyche with wit, whimsy, and candid confession. Disappointing lovers surface in the bedroom; in the bathroom, "the drained tub ticks with mollusks & lobsters;" revenge fantasies and death lurk in the basement where they rightly belong. With lush imagery and au courant asides, Hothouse surprises and delights.Karyna McGlynn is the author of I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl and three chapbooks. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and Translation at Oberlin College.

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Ordinary people seek connections to the natural world and each other in the poems of The Heronry, a collection that presents a series of spiritual encounters in the form of praise poems, lyric portraiture, and meditations on faith and belief.Mark Jarman is the author of ten poetry collections. He lives in Nashville, Tennessee.

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Seated one, loved by the lavishing comband fingers of another woman demon-strating how attention and technique coalesceinto art. Where to gowhen the mother is gone.All occupations form to replace her.What relief to be a girl again for an hour,beneath the practiced wrists of her avatar.Paula Bohince is the author of The Children and Incident at the Edge of Bayonet Woods. Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, Poetry, Granta, the Nation, and elsewhere.

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"Smote is a book of the dark reality of our daily existence; it is a book of abiding grace."—Robert Olen ButlerI release you like the crank-addled truck driverreleases his cargo at the midnight dockuntil the warehouse is one in a trailof crumbs, little light left on behind him. James Kimbrell is the author of The Gatehouse Heaven and My Psychic, and the co-translator of Three Poets of Modern Korea. He been the recipient of the Discovery/The Nation Award, a Whiting Award, a fellowship from the NEA, and a Morton Prize.

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"Reading these poems is an uncanny experience. . . . We enter into this book alert to possibility, and leave knowing how asleep we've been."—Nick Flynn Of all the meanings of exposed I think my favorite is the raw nerve shivering bug-like in the lamp light while the surgeon arranges his dainty knives. You can get close to that. You can brush its wriggling limb and hear the scream. You can lie there on the table, say, "little nerve oh nerve it'll be all right; there there, there there.

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Selected by Marie Howe for the 2011 Kathryn A. Morton Prize, Easy Math is anxious and exuberant both. Lauren Shapiro’s poems are Aesop stood on end, wry fables that defy our instinct to find a moral to the story. Instead, she offers us a gimlet eye to the disappointments of the world, tall tale-telling by turns rickety, defiant, and brave. “There are an infinite number of ways to torture the soul with hopefulness” Shapiro says, so we settle for ways to survive—crooked grins, twisted logic, and equations of jello shots, amusement parks, and post-it notes that never add up. “Everyone has something to say / about love and impermanence and waste.” She says it better than most. "Shapiro specializes in snappy, poignant retorts to the problems of pop culture. Joan Rivers, Lindsay Lohan, and even the wily Jersey Shore crew inhabit her crackling new volume of poems, winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry.... Shapiro guides readers into uncomfortable but evocative settings, from a surreal ESL classroom and plague-ridden Marseilles to a hotel workout room. Imagination does not just take flight here; it rides the airport shuttle bus and connects travelers from different continents." --Booklist "Lauren Shapiro can downshift from the sublime to the profane and back again in less than five seconds. Energy and joy create these metaphors, and if they are in discourse with postmodern malaise, they almost win the argument." —Marie Howe

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The stories in Rise are fairytales, except that the witch, lucky Hans, and the frog prince are characters at the fringes of everyday life. There are rockets, swells of starlings, and children who disappear into thin air. L. Annette Binder writes magical tales with authority and restraint, and we believe her stories, every one. "The complex interweaving of themes, rendered through precise detail, is akin to a powerful subterranean disturbance that sends seismographs jumping but leaves few visible effects." —Starred Review, Publishers Weekly "L. Annette Binder’s Rise is a wondrous debut collection of her stories, any one of which could be an example of the form at its best." —ForeWord Reviews, Selected as summer 2012 best book of debut fiction "Binder has gone so deeply, and with such mystical brilliance and loyalty, into her own world that she has brought mine to me in high relief. She both casts a spell and breaks it. To experience Rise is to experience wonder." —Laura Kasischke "Three years ago I read a story titled 'Dead Languages.' I came out of my chair. I've been in standing ovation position reading every subsequent story written by L. Annette Binder. They came exquisitely one by one, and now you are damn lucky to have them all in one wondrous volume: Rise. —Michelle Latiolais “L. Annette Binder is a stunningly talented writer. Her stories are the stories of outsiders, gripping and heartfelt, heightened with hidden undertones of the surreal. It is this tension that makes the worlds she creates so vibrant, and allows her readers to see so deeply into these characters' souls. Rise is a beautiful book, and Binder’s words cut clear and straight to the bone.” —Hannah Tinti

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A private eye turned moderately successful poet leads readers on a satiric, hopeful tour of how to make a life in the arts, while still having a life. Revealing, hilarious, and peppered with sly takes on the ins and outs of contemporary American poetry (chapters include "The Silence of the Iambs," "The Revisionarium, Ask Dr. Frankenpoem," and "The Periodic Table of Poetic Elements"), Jeffrey Skinner offers advice, candor, and wit. Revision is the process a poem endures to become its best self. Or, if you are the poet, you are the process a poem endures to become its best self. Endures because a first draft, like all other objects in the universe, has inertia and would prefer to stay where it is. The poet must not collaborate. Best self because the poem is more like a person than a thing, and does not strenuously object to personification. Yo, poem. But let's not get carried away. It's your poem and you can treat it as you wish; sweet talk it; push it around if that's what it takes. Alfred Hitchcock notoriously said of the actors in his movies, "They are cattle." Jeffrey Skinner is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Salt Water Amnesia (Ausable Press, 2005). His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Nation, The American Poetry Review, Poetry, BOMB, and The Paris Review, and his work has earned awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the Howard Foundation.

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Lia Purpura’s essays are full of joy in the act of intense observation; they’re also deliciously subversive and alert to the ways language gets locked and loaded by culture. These elegant, conversational excursions refuse to let a reader slide over anything, from the tiniest shards of beach glass to barren big-box wastelands. They detonate distractedness, superficiality, artificiality. In the process, Purpura inhabits many stances: metaphysician and biologist, sensualist and witness—all in service of illuminating that which Virginia Woolf called “moments of being”—previously unworded but palpably felt states of existence and knowing. Rough Likeness finds worlds in the minute, and crafts monuments to beauty and strangeness.

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2010 ForeWord Book of the Year, Essay Silver Medalist, 2011 IPPY Awards in Multi-Cultural Adult Fiction 2011 American Book Award “Vaswani is a confident writer whose unflinching eye shows the reader the beauty grounded in the mundane.”San Francisco Chronicle “Vaswani’s voice is witty, sharp, innovative, unique.”Chitra Banerjee You Have Given Me a Country is an emotionally powerful exploration of blurred borders, identity, and what it means to be multicultural. Combining memoir, history, and fiction, the book follows the paths of the author's Irish-Catholic mother and Sindhi-Indian father on their journey toward each other and the biracial child they create. Neela Vaswani's second full-length work thematically echoes such books as The Color of Water, Running in the Family, or Motiba's Tatoos, but it is entirely unique in approach, voice, and story. The book reveals the self as a culmination of all that went before it, a brilliant new weave of two varied, yet ultimately universal backgrounds that spans continents, generations, languages, wars, and, at the center of it all, family. Neela Vaswani is the author of the short story collection Where the Long Grass Bends (Sarabande Books, 2004). Recipient of a 2006 O. Henry Prize, her fiction and nonfiction have been widely anthologized and published in journals such as Epoch, Shenandoah, and Prairie Schooner. She lives in New York City.

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"Ultimately, the lyrics in Hoodwinked read as odes to mortality. They marvel nonstop, unsentimentally, and with necessary ambivalence, at the world as given and the human inability to consistently rise to the exhausting challenge of making every second count. These poems constantly acknowledge that 'all flesh is grass.' They make us hear the wondrous, terrifying hum of impending obliteration, while at the same time never growing immune to beauty, never ceasing to be curious about what the grass itself makes of our common temporal conundrum." —Amy Gerstler, from the introduction Inherent untrustworthiness—of received opinion, the trompe l’oeil deceptions of nature, and the workings of our own unfaithful minds—is given its proper menace in David Hernandez’ Hoodwinked. In poems that range from the backyard to Iraq and back again, Hernandez disturbs the surface of contemporary life to reveal barely submerged worlds that, impossible to fathom, make fools of us all.

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