Search results for ""Sarabande Books, Incorporated""

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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"Michael Mazur's approach to the Inferno gave me inspiration and guidance in understanding Dante. The monotypes, nourished by the artist's intense engagement with the poetry, are themselves acts of translation, embodying vital principles."—Robert Pinsky, from the preface A unique collection that revisits Dante's classic with translations by former Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky and full-color artwork by internationally renowned artist Michael Mazur. This rare and stunning collaboration is sure to be sought by both collectors and readers alike.

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“Barot’s Want is dexterous and thrilling, and his capacious and generous vision shows us how the eye survives ‘to correct the heart.’”—Michael Collier “In Rick Barot’s hands every poem casts at least two luminous shadows. Want is masterfully merciless and merciful at the same time.”—Terrance Hayes

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“He brings something ancient and compelling . . . a kind of rare Sephardic wisdom, a brilliance traveling at the speed of Los Angeles light. He is one of America’s very best poets. A true visionary.”—Tomaz Salamun “Angel’s poems are deceptively quiet, deceptively calm. Beneath their carefully constructed surfaces, they are wild, even intimidating. The power of restraint in poetry cannot be overestimated. . . . These poems burn from within.”—Carol Muske-Dukes, LA Times With the publication of his award-winning volumes, Anxious Latitudes, Neither World, and Twice Removed, Ralph Angel has won the admiration of readers of contemporary poetry for the extraordinary abstract lyricism of his poems. There is a superb grace, speculative intelligence, and a wry philosophical wisdom to Angel’s poetry. There are few poets so accomplished at creating an elegant yet innovative and provocative voice. Now, in Ralph Angel’s Exceptions and Melancholies: Poems 1986–2006, we find ourselves again in the presence of poetry that will move us even closer to a new and renewed promise of the American sublime. As Mark Doty has written, “These are the poems of a casual, down-to-earth philosopher who’s been spun around and turned inside out by loss, by the desolation of life in the late [and early] hours of the century. . . . Angel’s poems are stamped indelibly with the mark of a unique, shaping imagination, and they’re fresh with news of how it feels to live right now. He creates himself and his poems’ characters, strange people in a strangely familiar place. We recognize them, of course, as well we might since they are ourselves and the city where they live is ours. Ralph Angel is the author of three previous collections of poetry: Anxious Latitudes; Neither World, which received the 1995 James Laughlin Award of The Academy of American Poets; and Twice Removed; as well as a translation of Federico García Lorca’s Poem of the Deep Song. Angel’s poems have appeared in scores of magazines and anthologies, both here and abroad, and recent literary awards include a gift from the Elgin Cox Trust, a Pushcart Prize, the 2003 Willis Barnstone Poetry Translation Prize, a Fulbright Foundation fellowship, and the Bess Hokin Award of the Modern Poetry Association. Mr. Angel is the Edith R. White Distinguished Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Redlands, and a member of the MFA Program in Writing faculty at Vermont College. Originally from Seattle, he lives in Los Angeles.

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“Without self-absorption, Tall traces the self’s emergence in a place which she recognized from the start as her testing place.”—Seamus Heaney “In the literature of place, Deborah Tall’s book stands out for its delicacy, range of learning, and refreshing frankness.”—Phillip Lopate In her third book of nonfiction, Deborah Tall explores the genealogy of the missing. Haunted by her orphaned father’s abandonment by his extended family, his secretive, walled-off trauma and absent history, she sets off in pursuit of the family he claims not to have. From the dutiful happiness of Levittown in the 1950s to a stricken former shtetl in Ukraine, we follow Tall’s journey through evasions and lies. Reflecting on family secrecy, postwar American culture, and the urge for roots, Tall’s search uncovers not just a missing family but an understanding of the part family and history play in identity. A Family of Strangers is Tall’s life’s work, told in such exacting, elegant language that the suppressed past vividly asserts its place in the present. Deborah Tall is the author of four books of poems, most recently Summons, published by Sarabande Books after Charles Simic chose it for the Kathryn A. Morton Poetry Prize. She has also published two previous two books of nonfiction, The Island of the White Cow: Memories of an Irish Island and From Where We Stand: Recovering a Sense of Place, and co-edited the anthology The Poet's Notebook with Stephen Kuusisto and David Weiss. Tall has taught writing and literature at Hobart and William Smith Colleges and edited its literary journal, Seneca Review, since 1982. She lives in Ithaca, New York, with her husband David Weiss and their two daughters.

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“[Sallie] Bingham writes with an austere and unerring knowledge of what it is to be human and transgressive.”—Paula Fox “Restrained and wise, these lovely stories unfold like lavender-scented linens, quieting the fretful mind.”—Joe Ashby Porter Forty-year veteran of the novel, noted feminist, and author of over ten books, Sallie Bingham returns with Red Car, a collection written in her signature style—discreet, sly prose circling taboo subjects. Her new offering is about love enjoyed, whether alone or with lovers, sensual or familial, comedic or tragic, often with a wry twist. Sallie Bingham lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

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There is something utterly in thrall here, honey-slow and fixated. Driven by obsession—in particular, obsession with the legendary French poet, Robert Desnos—Muench’s identification with a true self beyond the self’s known truth is startling. —from the introduction by Carol Muske-Dukes “Simone’s poems have a confidence and sophistication of what I like to call intentionality. Also wit, grace, poise, and a relationship to writing beyond self-referential feeling.” —Anne Waldman “Lush, sprouting, sensuous images line-by-line, adopting myth freely, Muench’s poems are volatile explosives, circling beauty.”—James Tate

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Through a partnership to promote wider access to literary voices of Mexican artists in the United States and American writers in Mexico, the National Endowment for the Arts, the United States Embassy in Mexico, and Mexico’s National Fund for Culture and the Arts have joined together to support a proposed three-year program of anthology publication and public outreach activities. In the first year, Sarabande has been named publisher of the poetry anthologies. “We are pleased to introduce readers to the best of contemporary Mexican and American poetry through these comprehensive bilingual anthologies,” states National Endowment for the Arts Chairman Dana Gioia. “I believe they will quickly become essential volumes for poetry lovers and grant new insight into both cultures.” Contributors include: Kay Ryan, Larry Levis, Thomas Lux, Marilyn Nelson, Ron Silliman, Molly Peacock, Amy Uyematsu, Jorie Graham, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Naomi Shihab Nye, and more.

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“Wright has a hunk of the ineffable in his teeth and he won’t let go. In poem after poem, he plumbs our deepest relationships with nature, time, love, death, creation. Wright’s search breaks all the barriers of time, space, action, for its dramatic narrative simply refuses to acknowledge the usual unities, as though all time were this time, all places this place and all actions one.”—Philip Levine, from his citation for the 1996 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. Charles Wright was named chancellor of The Academy of American Poets in 1999 and has won a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Critics Circle Prize and a Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Since 1983, he has been at the University of Virginia.

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"Nystrom’s gift as a poet is that she doesn’t stop looking, and her poems make sure it is all still there for us to see."—Eamon Grennan The landscape of Torn Sky is South Dakota, a place of extremes, where parched land meets frigid air and exiled Native Americans still struggle to live in peace alongside ranchers. Nystrom’s poems weave together the voices of her childhood with ghosts of the last two tumultuous centuries and articulate with such subtle and unsentimental grace that each side is understood. Debra Nystrom was born in Pierre, South Dakota. She is the author of one previous book, A Quarter Turn. She lives in Charlottesville, Virginia, and teaches at the University of Virginia.

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"Discipline, humility, kindness. These qualities cohere in the best mentors, bundled into an overarching approach to the art of writing. It is not, I think, coincidence that the writers in this collection remember these qualities best when speaking of their mentors as people, as fellow pilgrims who helped them on the way. In some sense, whether consciously or not, we seek out mentors who learn how to live—as an artist, and as a human being."—from the Introduction by Jeffrey Skinner Lee Martin is the author of a collection of stories, The Least You Need to Know (Sarabande, 1996), a memoir From Our House (Dutton 2000), and a novel Just Enough Haughty, also forthcoming from Dutton. He teaches in the creative writing program at the University of North Texas where he also edits the American Literary Review. Jeffrey Skinner is currently Director of Creative Writing at the University of Louisville. His published collections of poetry include The Company of Heaven (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992), Late Stars (Wesleyan University Press, 1985), and A Guide to Forgetting (Graywolf Press, 1988), which was a National Poetry Series selection. Contributors include: Michael Collier on William Meredith Jay McInerney on Raymond Carver Tess Gallagher on Theodore Roethke and Stanley Kunitz Reginald Shepherd on Alvin Feinman Dana Gioia on Elizabeth Bishop Maura Stanton on Vert Rutsala and John Berryman Elizabeth Graver on Annie Dillard, Angela Carter, Stanley Elkin, and others Sylvia Watanabe on Dorothy Vella David Huddle on Peter Taylor David Wojahn on James L. White Erin McGraw on John L’Heureux CONTENTS PREFACE by Lee Martin, vii INTRODUCTION: The Scrupulous Philanthropy of Expertise by Jeffrey Skinner, xi MICHAEL COLLIER An Exact Ratio, 3 The Farrier, 12 JAY MCINERNEY Raymond Carver: A Still, Small Voice, 15 Getting in Touch with Your Child, 24 TESS GALLAGHER Two Mentors: From Orphanhood to Spirit-Companion, 39 Behave, 45 DAVID HUDDLE What about Those Good People?, 51 Backstory, 57 REGINALD SHEPHERD T

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In her fourth book of poems, Deborah Tall serves up, as Charles Simic remarks, "a huge feast of words and images." Spare, charged, eloquently complex, her poems distill emotion to its precipitate. In "Cottage by the Beach, Normandy," loneliness is this: A dozen tulips/erect in the centerpiece,/ hold their allotment of empty air. In "Winter Solstice," war yields, A hillside of markers,/a showroom of tombs./The bushes fruited with ice. Summons is a call to speak out—in the face of violence, cruelty, and loss—and a summoning up of the forces of nature and humanity that console. "The art of prosody, of which Deborah Tall is a master, is a jeweler’s art. It is about ascertaining the weight of words, measuring each one of them in turn against silence and time. . . . As we read, line by line, sounds turn into music, words and images grow in meaning. If you believe this is what all poets do anyway, you are wrong. Only the best of them know how to make us reread with increasing pleasure a few lines of poetry."—from the foreword by Charles Simic Marketing Plans: o Author tour NYC, Boston, NY State and New England o Advertisements in key literary and trade magazines Deborah Tall is the author of three previous books of poems (most recently Come Wind, Come Weather from State Street Press) and two books of nonfiction: The Island of the White Cow: Memories of an Irish Island (Atheneum, 1986) and From Where We Stand: Recovering a Sense of Place (Knopf, 1993). Tall is the editor of the Seneca Review and co-editor of the anthology The Poet’s Notebook (Norton, 1995). She has taught writing and literature at Hobart and William Smith Colleges since 1982 and lives in Ithaca, New York.

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Entire Dilemma is Michael Burkhard's seventh collection of poetry and his first book since W.W. Norton published My Secret Boat (A Notebook of Prose and Poems) in 1990. He has received a Whiting Writers' Award, the Poetry Society of America's Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, and two grants from both the New York State Foundation for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. He has taught at various colleges and universities, most recently the University of Louisville, LeMoyne College, and Syracuse University. During the 1990s, he has also worked as an alcoholism counselor, particularly with children whose lives have been impacted by alcoholism."On rare occasions one comes across an artist whose work feels truly haunted, as mysterious and resonant as the landscape or the constantly shifting reality of our dreams. . . . Michael Burkard's poetry presents a kaleidoscopic and rigorously self-reflective vision, encompassing at once a great tenderness for the world and an uneasiness with the surfaces to which we cling. . . . In a time of far too muchcleverness and cacophony, Entire Dilemma serves as a touchstone, an indispensable reminder of just how quiet and redemptive poetry can be."-Provincetown Arts"Burkard's poems are lit from within, radiant but disturbing. . . . Entire Dilemma exists . . . where complex hope, via poetic creation, defeats simple spiritual estrangement."-The Gettysburg Review"Burkard's new book stands as an antidote to the fashionable but spiritually unambitious work that passes for publishable poetry now flooding the literary marketplace. Burkard returns us to a primary strangeness. . . . [He] is invested in a metaphysics of relationship, probing into how we treat each other (and hence ourselves). . . . His is an honest introspection mapping out hearts that ever slide."-Harvard Review"Entire Dilemma is Michael Burkard's first book since 1990's My Secret Boat (A Notebook of Prose and Poems), and it is, in my mind, the most coherent of his collections. . . . The earlier work sings to and from what could be called 'American surrealism' (Williams and Stevens, Tate and Knott), with strains of Kafka, Babel, and Borges providing th

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Robert Clinton was born and raised in upstate New York. He studied at Union College and received an MFA in creative writing from Goddard College in 1979. He has worked at many jobs in many places, mostly as a carpenter and cabinet-maker, and is currently a designer for a custom cabinet shop in Boston. His poems have appeared in journals such as Anteaus, Prairie Schooner, The Atlantic Monthly and Ploughshares,"Perhaps what's so refreshing about Taking Eden is that it fits into no neat category. There's a sensitivity in it to the natural world, but the phrase 'nature poetry' certainly doesn't apply; many of the poems use a narrative structure, yet 'narrative poetry,' too, seems inaccurate. The surreal leaves its tracks throughout the book, but they are as delicate as the traces left by subatomic particles in a Wilson's cloud chamber, dispersing as soon as they are seen, reabsorbed into the other events of these poems. Clinton's imagination is multidimensional, and the pleasures of Taking Eden are accordingly complex. While the poems here share some qualities-an alertness couched in simple diction, often-they do not predict one another. This is especially admirable in a first book. . . . Robert Clinton is a poet with a unique outlook. . . . Taking Eden has a maturity that bodes well for Clinton's future work: these poems grow more like oak than ailanthus; they are dense and strong."-The Boston Book Review"Many of the thirty-nine poems in Robert Clinton's first book of poetry, Taking Eden, seem at once autobiographical and universally appealing."-Independent Publisher"'Some days are holidays of silence,' Clinton writes in 'My Father;' his most introspective and lonely short work owes much to the early Mark Strand. His more narrative poems relate visionary, solitary encounters with bearers of wisdom, frequently father-substitutes but sometimes the speaker's own father, who form an understated lineage: 'The men I know / born in labor all of them // go along the rock / the way I go without / much hesitation.' In 'Treetops,' a 'son who will remain unborn' finds the poet 'in the shade of the house collecting stones,' 'he stands up, / pushing the house into the

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"I’m Always so Serious is brilliant.” —Terrance Hayes, winner of the National Book Award for Lighthead Karisma Price’s stunning debut collection is an extended meditation on Blackness, on family, on loss. Anchored in New Orleans and New York City, these poems braid personal and public histories into a cultural reckoning of past and present. James Booker speaks to Ringo Starr, a phone “Autocorrects ‘Nigga’ to Night,'” If Beale Street Could Talk is recast with characters from The Odyssey. In these pages there is grief, there is absence, there is violence—“We know that mostly everything around us / is measured in blood.”—but there is also immense love and truth. Karisma Price has created a serious masterpiece, a book “so dark you have no other option but to call it / precious.”

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“What magic, what beauty there is in these pages.”—John Freeman, author of Wind, TreesIn this adventurous debut lurk stories that are deep, lush, and full of wonder. While camping in the Kalahari Desert, a couple grows attached to a starving lion on the cusp of death; meanwhile, just north of the Smokies, a young boy is held captive by a dangerous old man who hunts dogs for sport; and off the Hawaiian coast, lovers kayak into the ocean to observe a tiger shark, only to find themselves in treacherous waters. The characters in these stories are headstrong and complex, and the prose is buoyant, rhythmic, and fiercely knowing. Nights from This Galaxy captures the spirit of a wild and wonderful planet, while acknowledging our shared fragility and the imminent grief that binds us all.

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A Louisville Poets Anthology edited by Louisville native and acclaimed Horsepower author Joy Priest.Conceived in the aftermath of city-wide protests in 2020, Once a City Said showcases the polyvocal communities of Louisville, Kentucky, a city celebrated for its bourbon, basketball, and horseracing, but long fraught with racial injustice, police corruption, and social unrest.Priest takes the city’s narrative out of the mouths of politicians, news anchors, and police chiefs, and puts it into the mouths of poets. What emerges is an intimate report of a city misshapen by segregation, tourism, and ruptures in the public trust. Featuring thirty-seven acclaimed and emerging poets—including Mitchell L. H. Douglas, Erin Keane, Ryan Ridge, and Hannah L. Drake—Once a City Said archives the traditions and icons, the landmarks and spirits, the portraits and memories of Derby City.This publication is supported by individual donors who gave to the 2021 Fund for the Arts ArtsMatch campaign. Matching funds were made possible by Fund for the Arts in partnership with LG&E and KU Foundation.

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"These are poems with teeth and tenderness and so much knowledge. You’d overlook their sharp, glinting beauty at your peril.”—Kathryn Nuernberger, author of The Witch of Eye and RUEThis is a book of tragicomic gurlesque word-witchery inspired by the Kate Bush cosmos. Campily glamorous, darkly funny, obsessively ekphrastic, boozily baroque, psychedelically girly & musically ecstatic, 50 Things Kate Bush Taught Me About the Multiverse dazzles as Karyna McGlynn's third collection.

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Early in her powerful, affecting debut, Desautels writes: “I always mention gratitude because/people like that ending.” Unflinching in its candor, this is the story of a woman with two swellings in her belly: a nascent baby, and a cancerous tumor. The poet could focus on the particulars of the medical case, using language from a traditional illness narrative. Instead she gives us the basics, then gathers up surprising and expansive material from various landscapes—the Black Hills, the prairies of Texas, the mountains, switchgrass, and, especially, the neighboring buffalo, to which she feels a profound connection. Desautels’ metaphors strike home; they are counterpoints, balm to the uncertainty and grief that make us uncomfortable. The book moves elegantly from its dark beginnings to a transcendent thankfulness. With healing lyricism, she writes: “And I imagine the white sheets as heron wings./And the whirring machines are white eggs./And the worried voices are sunlight on water.”

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This amazingly wise and nimble collection investigates the horrors inflicted on so-called “witches” of the past. The Witch of Eye unearths salves, potions, and spells meant to heal, yet interpreted by inquisitors as evidence of evil. The author describes torture and forced confessions alongside accounts of gentleness of legendary midwives. In one essay about a trial, we learn through folklore that Jesus’s mother was a midwife who cured her own son’s rheumatism. In other essays there are subtle parallels to contemporary discourse around abortion and environmental destruction. Nuernberger weaves in her own experiences, too. There’s an ironic look at her own wedding, an uncomfortable visit to the Prague Museum of Torture, and an afternoon spent tearing out a garden in a mercurial fit. Her researched material is eye-opening, lively, and often funny. An absolutely thrilling collection.

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Composed entirely of words taken from the letters and public statements of the notorious segregationist Bull Connor, the poems in White Bull use language that was wielded in violence and oppression to reckon with the present moment. The city of Birmingham is a character too, with its suffocating heat and humidity, quarry pools, and mountain in the distance. Here, the truth comes out, like a child whispering in the midst of a political rally, “Summer separates us with the same trees.” And, “I thought if I repeated a word enough it would change its meaning.” Elizabeth Hughey holds up and examines the things handed down to us—from patterned wing backs and chipped tea sets to family names and gender roles—and asks if we should keep any of it or burn it all down and start again.

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"Marianne Chan's brilliant debut collection masterfully develops themes of identity and the long-term effects of colonization." —Largehearted Boy All Heathens is a declaration of ownership—of bodies, of histories, of time. Revisiting Magellan’s voyage around the world, these poems explore the speaker’s Filipino American identity by grappling with her relationship to her family and notions of diaspora, circumnavigation, and discovery. Whether rewriting the origin story of Eve (“I always imagined that the serpent had the legs of a seductive woman in black nylons”), or ruminating on what-should-have-been-said “when the man at the party said he wanted to own a Filipino,” Chan paints wry, witty renderings of anecdotal and folkloric histories, while both preserving and unveiling a self-identity that dares any other to try and claim it.

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“Jenny is the future of nonfiction in America. What an absurdly arrogant statement to make. I make it anyway. Watch.”—John D’Agata “Yes, Aristotle, there can be pleasure without ‘complete and unified action with a beginning, middle, and end.’ Jenny Boully has done it.”—Mary Jo Bang A book with only beginnings and endings, all invented. Jenny Boully opens and closes more than fifty topics ranging from physics and astronomy to literary theory and love. A brilliant statement on interruption, impermanence, and imperfection. Jenny Boully is the author of The Body: An Essayand [one love affair]*. Born in Thailand, she currently divides her time between Texas and Brooklyn.

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“A searching, sensitive, and engagingly witty meditation.” —Lyndall Gordon “What a great pleasure this gorgeous little book has given me! It should be offered everywhere indeed, and at every museum shop on earth.”—Honor Moore A fascinating meditation on art and personality, Patricia Vigderman’s exploration of Isabella Stewart Gardner’s famous Boston museum radiates out from its subject to investigate Garnder’s legacy of luxury and willfulness. Isabella Gardner’s high spirits and aesthetic pleasure, her women friends and female power, her friendships with the adventurers and aesthetes of her world, are gathered into this engrossing investigation of patronage and passion. Blending biography, memoir, philosophy, and detective story, The Memory Palace is more than a tribute to the museum and the woman; it is an altogether new genre. Vigderman’s witty and intimate quest for her subject sets a literary precedent for the appreciation of artistic imagination. Loosening up the past, entering its mysteries and its memories, she reminds us that we change our lives when we begin a relationship with art. Patricia Vigderman grew up in Washington, D.C., and Europe. She graduated from Vassar College, after which a circuitous course led her through editing, translating, freelance journalism, teaching, marriage, motherhood, divorce, a doctoral dissertation (on nineteenth-century novels as film, as history, and as autobiography), and a lot of time in museums. Her recent writing has appeared in The Georgia Review, Harvard Review, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, Mid-American Review, Northwest Review, Raritan, Seneca Review, and Southwest Review. She divides her year between Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Gambier, Ohio, where she teaches in the English department at Kenyon College. She is married to the writer Lewis Hyde.

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Winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Fiction Barnes & Noble 2014 Discover Great New Writers Selection, Third Place The stories in Elegy on Kinderklavier explore the profound loss and intricate effects of war on lives that have been suddenly misaligned. A diplomat navigates a hostile political climate and an arranged marriage in an Israeli settlement on a newly discovered planet; a small town in Kansas shuns the army recruiter who signed up its boys as troops are deployed to Iraq, falling in helicopters and on grenades; a family dissolves around mental illness and a child's body overtaken by cancer. The moment a soldier steps on an explosive device is painfully reproduced, nanosecond by nanosecond. Arna Bontemps Hemenway's stories feel pulled out of time and place, and the suffering of his characters seem at once otherworldly and stunningly familiar. Elegy on Kinderklavier is a disquieting exploration of what it is to lose and be lost.

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"What a strange and unexpected treasure chest this is, filled with all manner of quirky revelations, all about the mundane sublime and the ineffable extraordinary. Most extraordinary of all, perhaps, through, is the haunting perfection, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, of the writing itself. Who is this Angela Pelster and where has she been all our lives?"-Lawrence WeschlerAngela Pelster's startling essay collection charts the world's history through its trees: through roots in the ground, rings across wood, and inevitable decay. These sharp and tender essays move from her childhood in rural Canada surrounded by skinny poplar trees in her backyard to a desert in Niger, where the "Loneliest Tree in the World" once grew. A squirrel's decomposing body below a towering maple prompts a discussion of the science of rot, as well as a metaphor for the ways in which nature programs us to consume ourselves. Beautiful, deeply thoughtful, and wholly original, Limber valiantly asks what it means to sustain life on this planet we've inherited.Angela Pelster's essays have appeared in Granta, the Gettysburg Review, Seneca Review, the Globe and Mail, Relief Magazine, and others. Her children's novel The Curious Adventures of India Sophia won the Golden Eagle Children's Choice award in 2006. She has an MFA from the University of Iowa's nonfiction writing program and lives with her family in Baltimore, Maryland, where she teaches at Towson University.

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