Wild Swims


Dorthe Nors - 2018
    In prose that is both elegantly spare and saturated with emotion, Nors explores the relationships that we have with others, and those we forge with ourselves, with characteristic empathy and insight.

Paradise Rot


Jenny Hval - 2009
    A house with no walls, a roommate with no boundaries, and a home that seems ever more alive. Jo’s sensitivity, and all her senses, become increasingly heightened and fraught, as the lines between bodies and plants, and dreaming and wakefulness, blur and mesh. This debut novel from critically acclaimed artist and musician Jenny Hval, presents a heady and hyper-sensual portrayal of sexual awakening and queer desire. A complex, poetic and strange novel about bodies, sexuality and the female gender.

A Rustic Mind


Manali Manan Desai - 2018
    Through ‘A Rustic Mind’ I aim to provide a thoughtful take on such actions and incidents. Poetic in its expression, these words will strike a chord which is not only deep but relatable on many levels.

Giants in the Earth


O.E. Rølvaag - 1925
    First published in Norway as two books in 1924 and 1925, the author collaborated with Minnesotan Lincoln Colcord on the English translation.The novel follows a Norwegian family's struggles as they try to make a new life as pioneers in the Dakota territory. Rølvaag is interested in psychology and the human cost of empire building, at a time when other writers focused on the glamor and romance of the West. The book reflects his personal experiences as a settler as well as the immigrant homesteader experience of his wife’s family. Both the grim realities of pioneering and the gloomy fatalism of the Norse mind are captured in depictions of snow storms, locusts, poverty, hunger, loneliness, homesickness, the difficulty of fitting into a new culture, and the estrangement of immigrant children who grow up in a new land. It is a novel at once palpably European and distinctly American.Giants in the Earth was turned into an opera by Douglas Moore and Arnold Sundgaard; it won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1951.

Everything Like Before: Stories


Kjell Askildsen - 2012
    In this selection of tales, spanning the whole of his brilliant career, unnerving encounters occur, lonely individuals try to connect, families and relationships are fractured, and we are confronted by the fragility and absurdity of life.

Dark Matter


Aase Berg - 1999
    Translated from the Swedish by Johannes Goransson, Berg's hallucinatory, post-cataclysmic epic takes place in an unremitting future-past. The bodies mutate and hybridize. They are erotic and artificial, art and adrenaline. Available for the first time in English as a complete collection, the poems of this contemporary Swedish classic contaminate as they become contaminated--drawing on and altering source texts that range from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre to string theory. Calling on fables, science, the pastoral, and the body, DARK MATTER aggravates their perception while exhausting poetry down to its nerve: "a faint spasm of cheers before this, the nervous system's last chance to communicate with the dying I." The result: a monstrous zone of linguistic and bodily interpenetration, cell death, and radiant permutations. "Extraordinary and urgent, a coded warning smuggled out of dark." --China Mieville; "Aase Berg's poetry is discomforting because it lacks boundaries....When I read her I notice how my consciousness tries to separate, divide up and make sense of her almost hallucinatory images, but they always glide back together. I get nauseated and almost seasick from her texts." --Asa Beckman

Norwegian by Night


Derek B. Miller - 2012
    An ex-Marine, he talks often to the ghosts of his past - the friends he lost in the Pacific and the son who followed him into the US Army, and to his death in Vietnam.When Sheldon witnesses the murder of a woman in his apartment complex, he rescues her six-year-old son and decides to run. Pursued by both the Balkan gang responsible for the murder, and the Norwegian police, he has to rely on training from over half a century before to try and keep the boy safe. Against a strange and foreign landscape, this unlikely couple, who can't speak the same language, start to form a bond that may just save them both.An extraordinary debut, featuring a memorable hero, Norwegian by Night is the last adventure of a man still trying to come to terms with the tragedies of his life. Compelling and sophisticated, it is both a chase through the woods thriller and an emotionally haunting novel about ageing and regret.

A River Dies of Thirst: journals


Mahmoud Darwish - 2009
    “Every beautiful poem is an act of resistance.” As always, Darwish’s musings on unrest and loss dwell on love and humanity; myth and dream are inseparable from truth. “Truth is plain as day.” Throughout the book, Darwish returns frequently to his ongoing and often lighthearted conversation with death.Mahmoud Darwish (1941–2008) was awarded the Lannan Prize for Cultural Freedom in 2001. He was regarded as the voice of the Palestinian people and one of the greatest poets of our time.

Finna


Nate Marshall - 2020
    fin-na /ˈfinə/ contraction: (1) going to; intending to. rooted in African American Vernacular English. (2) eye dialect spelling of "fixing to." (3) Black possibility; Black futurity; Blackness as tomorrow.A lyrical and sharp celebration, these poems consider the brevity and disposability of Black lives and other oppressed people in our current era of emboldened white supremacy. In three key parts, Finna explores the mythos and erasure of names in the American narrative; asks how gendered language can provoke violence; and finally, through the celebration and examination of the Black vernacular, expands the notions of possibility, giving us a new language of hope.

You Must Buy Your Wife At Least As Much Jewelry As You Buy Your Horse and Other Poems and Observations Humorous and Otherwise from the Life on the Range


Dalton Wilcox - 2012
    The wit and wisdom of the West, as documented by Dalton Wilcox, poet laureate of the West.

soul like thunder


Sophia Elaine Hanson - 2018
    Sophia Elaine Hanson is the author of the critically acclaimed chapbook hummingbird as well as the #1 bestselling young adult series the Vinyl Trilogy. She resides in New York City and loves pigeons and Star Wars.

Many-Storied House


George Ella Lyon - 2013
    She has since published many more books in multiple genres and for readers of all ages, but poetry remains at the heart of her work. Many-Storied House is her fifth collection. While teaching aspiring writers, Lyon asked her students to write a poem based on memories rooted in a house where they had lived. Working on the assignment herself, Lyon began a personal

In the Middle Distance


Linda Gregg - 2006
    —from "Arriving Again and Again Without Noticing"In one poem in this emotional and spiritual collection, Linda Gregg asks, "It is clear why love / took me to the shore of death, / but why did it bring me back?" In the Middle Distance, Gregg's sixth book, explores up to and beyond the crossroads of devastation and desire. There, she finds not only survival but also salvation—hard-won, resilient, and meaningful.This collection brings Gregg's passion and intensity together with a new wisdom and vitality that is unmistakably original.

Invisible Strings


Jim Moore - 2011
                Two empty suitcases sit in the corner, if that’s any kind of clue.                                —from “Almost Sixty” Brief, jagged, haiku-like, Jim Moore’s poems in Invisible Strings observe time moving past us moment by moment. In that accrual, line by line, is the anxiety and acceptance of aging, the mounting losses of friends to death or divorce, the accounting of frequent flyer miles and cups of coffee, and the poet’s own process of writing. It is a world of both diminishment and triumphs. Moore has assembled his most emotionally direct and lyrically spare collection, one that amounts to his book of days, seasons, and stark realizations.

Good Bones


Maggie Smith - 2017
    Poems written out of the experience of motherhood, inspired by the poet watching her own children trying to read the world like a book they've just opened, knowing nothing of the characters or plot.--