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A perfect place to record resolutions, inspirations and fresh ideas. This journal features a silk-screened cover, an illustration of a leaf on every page and 100% recycled paper.

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When Mahadai Das died at the tragically early age of 49, there was an outpouring of grief across the Caribbean that a poet, who never quite had the chance to build a literary career to match her talents, had been lost. She had been known for some time as a highly promising Guyanese poet, but when Peepal Tree published her Bones in 1988, there was widespread critical recognition that here was an outstandingly original new voice. Then severe illness struck and though there followed occasional poems that developed the achievement of Bones, there was no new collection.This Collected Poems, discussed with Mahadai Das before her death, and organised in co-operation with the poet's sister, brings together almost all the poems she wrote. It includes I Want to Be a Poetess of My People (1976), My Finer Steel Will Grow (1982), and Bones (1988). In addition, A Leaf in His Ear brings together many of the fine poems published in journals and previously uncollected, and some unpublished work, from lively, humorous nation-language poems to experiments with ballad forms and the oblique, gnomic poems written in the years after Bones.With an introduction by Denise DeCaires Narain Gurnah.Mahadai Das was born in Guyana in 1954. She was a dancer, actress, teacher, beauty-queen and volunteer member of the Guyana National Service. She left Guyana to philosophy in the USA. Then came debilitating health problems. She died in 2003.

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Finalist for the 2022 National Book Critics Circle Award in TranslationTranslated from the Arabic and introduced by Fady Joudah, You Can Be the Last Leaf draws on two decades of work to present the transcendent and timely US debut of Palestinian poet Maya Abu Al-Hayyat. Art. Garlic. Taxis. Sleepy soldiers at checkpoints. The smell of trash on a winter street, before “our wild rosebush, neglected / by the gate, / blooms.” Lovers who don’t return, the possibility that you yourself might not return. Making beds. Cleaning up vomit. Reading recipes. In You Can Be the Last Leaf, these are the ordinary and profound—sometimes tragic, sometimes dreamy, sometimes almost frivolous—moments of life under Israeli occupation. Here, private and public domains are inseparable. Desire, loss, and violence permeate the walls of the home, the borders of the mind. And yet that mind is full of its own fierce and funny voice, its own preoccupations and strangenesses. “It matters to me,” writes Abu Al-Hayyat, “what you’re thinking now / as you coerce your kids to sleep / in the middle of shelling”: whether it’s coming up with “plans / to solve the world’s problems,” plans that “eliminate longing from stories, remove exhaustion from groans,” or dreaming “of a war / that’s got no war in it,” or proclaiming that “I don’t believe in survival.” In You Can Be the Last Leaf, Abu Al-Hayyat has created a richly textured portrait of Palestinian interiority—at once wry and romantic, worried and tenacious, and always singing itself.

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