THE MOTHS AND OTHER STORIES, Helena Maria Viramontes' stories exploring women's struggles to overcome the dictates of family, culture, and church, is in a new edition. Prejudice and the social and economic status of Chicanos often form the backdrop for these haunting stories, but their central, unifying theme deals with the social and cultural values which shape women's lives and which they struggle against with varying degrees of success.

    The histories of South Texas and its people unfold in Laurie Ann Guerrero’s stirring language, including the dehumanization of men and its consequences on women and children. Guerrero’s tongue becomes a palpable border, occupying those liminal spaces that both unite and divide, inviting readers to consider that which is known and unknown: the body. Guerrero explores not just the right, but the ability to speak and fight for oneself, one's children, one's community—in poems that testify how, too often, we fail to see the power reflected in the mirror. From the 2012 Award Citation for the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize:“This is the poetry of both saints and sinners (and even murderers). The poet conjures up Pablo Neruda, Gloria Anzaldúa, Sylvia Plath, and is rooted in the best Latin American, Chicano/a, and contemporary American poetics, able to render an effective poetic version of Nepantla, the land where different traditions meet, according to Anzaldúa. These poems make the reader laugh, cry, cringe, lose one’s breath, and almost one’s mind, at times.” —Francisco X. Alarcón, judge "Guerrero has always written pointedly with a sharp pen and a sharp knife always at the ready. In her first full-length collection, these dazzling, edgy, irascible poems lean into their sweet natural bristling air, stitching and stretching image to image. This is the singing blue glory of language at its best." —Nikky Finney, author of Head Off & Split, winner of The National Book Award "Guerrero writes in a language of the body, visceral, almost unbearably vivid, the language of a poet who knows how to work with her hands. In an age when so many poems say nothing, these poems miss nothing . . . attention must be paid to such a poet now and for years to come." —Martín Espada, author of The Trouble Ball

    He paints vivid portraits of good kids, bad kids, families clinging to hope, life after the steel mills, gentrifying barrios, and everything in between. Drawing on the rich traditions of Latinx and Chicago writers like Sandra Cisneros and Gwendolyn Brooks, Olivarez creates a home out of life in the in-between. Combining wry humor with potent emotional force, Olivarez takes on complex issues of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and immigration using an everyday language that invites the reader in. Olivarez has a unique voice that makes him a poet to watch.

    . . . Hustle is full of dashing nerve, linguistic flair, and unfakeable heart."—Tony HoaglandThe dark peoples with things:for keys, coins, pencilsand pens our pockets grieve.No street lights or signs,no liquor stores or bars,only a lighter for a flashlight,and the same-faced trees,similar-armed stonesand crooked bushesstaring back at me.There is no path in the woods for a boy from the city.I would have set fire to get off this wildernessbut Palomar is no El Camino in an empty lot,the plastic dripping from the dashand the paint bubbling like a toad's throat.If mountains were old pieces of furniture,I would have lit the fabric and danced.If mountains were abandoned crack houses,I would have opened their meanings with flame,if that would have let the wind and trees lead my eyesor shown me the moon's tiptoe on the moss—as you effect my hand,as we walk into the side of a Sunday night.David Tomas Martinez has published in San Diego Writer's Ink, Charlotte Journal, Poetry International, and has been featured in Border Voices. A PhD candidate at the University of Houston, Martinez is also an editor for Gulf Coast.

    A collection of stories by Sandra Cisneros, the winner of the 2019 PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature.The lovingly drawn characters of these stories give voice to the vibrant and varied life on both sides of the Mexican border with tales of pure discovery, filled with moments of infinite and intimate wisdom.

    Ada Limon's first full-length poetry book--startling and funny--Limon is a poet to keep your eye on.

    The poems in Admission Requirements attempt to discover what is required of us when we cut across our material and psychic geographies. Simultaneously full and empty of its origins, the self is continually taxed of any certainties and ways of being. The speaker in these poems is engaged in a kind of fieldwork, surveying gardens, communities, and the haphazard cityscape, where the reader is presented with the paradoxes of subsumed histories. With understated irony and unsettling imagery, the poems address the internal conflicts inherent in contemporary living.

    His critically acclaimed collection Woodcuts of Women is now available in paperback and features ten moving and heartbreaking stories of lust, love, and longing among men and women struggling to find their way in the world. Written in Gilb's spare, humid language, each of these haunting stories is crafted with a poetic, aching beauty. At turns powerful and resonant, hopeful and humorous, Woodcuts of Women is a tour de force by one of America's foremost Latino writers. The sheer intensity and bravado of [Gilb's] vision make this collection succeed. -- Jean Thompson, The New York Times Book Review Lonely, tough stories -- stories that force us to confront what's difficult in us, and in the people we love. -- Adrienne Miller, Esquire Gilb's stories read like verbal woodcuts deliberately unrefined and carefully unadorned, clear in their intent but without undue elaboration.... -- Sean Glennon, The Hartford Courant ...Gilb writes of the gritty passions of man for women, grand delusions and tender mercies.... -- Oscar C. Villalon, San Francisco Chronicle

    Sofia and her fated daughters, Fe, Esperanza, Caridad, and la Loca, endure hardship and enjoy love in the sleepy New Mexico hamlet of Tome, a town teeming with marvels where the comic and the horrific, the real and the supernatural, reside.

    Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV-everywhere, all the time. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person's ability to speak, perform, and stay alive. Our addressability is tied to the state of our belonging, Rankine argues, as are our assumptions and expectations of citizenship. In essay, image, and poetry, Citizen is a powerful testament to the individual and collective effects of racism in our contemporary, often named "post-race" society.

    Despite the intervening decades, the woman, known only as The Mother, is met with the same questions: Where are you from? No, where are you really from? The American-born daughter of Bengali immigrant parents, her truthful answer, here, is never enough. She finds herself navigating a climate of lingering racism with three daughters in tow and a husband who spends more time in business class than at home.The Mother's simmering anger breaks through one morning, when, during a baseless and prejudice-driven police raid on her house, she finally refuses to be calm, complacent, polite—and is ultimately shot. As she lies bleeding on her driveway, The Mother struggles to make sense of her past and decipher her present—how did she end up here?Devi S. Laskar has written a brilliant debut novel novel that grapples with the complexities of the second-generation American experience, what it means to be a woman of color in the workplace, a sister, a wife, a mother to daughters in today's America. Drawing inspiration from the author's own terrifying experience of a raid on her home, The Atlas of Reds and Blues explores, in exquisite, lyrical prose, an alternate reality that might have been.

    A sparrow trapped in a car window evokes a mother battered by a father’s fists; a workout at an iron gym recalls a long-ago mentor who pushed the speaker “to become something unbreakable.” The presence of these and poetic forbears—Gil Scott-Heron, Yusef Komunyakaa—provide a context for strength in the face of danger and anger. At the heart of the book is a sonnet crown triggered by the shooting deaths of three Brooklyn men that becomes an extended meditation on the history of racial injustice and the notion of payback as a form of justice.

     When Emilia Cruz agreed to accompany her sister to a boating party, she had no idea that the darling of the literary world would be in assistance—or that he would take such pleasure in disparaging the deliciously sinful serial she writes under a pseudonym. No one save her sister knows she’s the author and to be found out would mean certain scandal. Stuck on his long-awaited second book, Ruben Torres has begun to edit in secret a gossip paper whose literary reviews are as cruel as they are clever. The more he writes about the mysterious author of a popular serial, the more papers he sells…and the more he is determined to find out her identity before anyone else can.

    The language here is at once disruptive and familiar, political and sensual, and tinged by the melancholy of loss and the discomforting radiance of redemption. A strong debut." —Chris AbaniThe best way to hide is in plain sight. In this politically-charged and candid debut, we follow the chronicles of an undocumented immigrant speaker over a twenty-year span as she grows up in the foreign and forbidding landscape of America.From "Ivan, Always Hiding":I strained for the socketas you pulled me,my bare legs against your legs in the windowless dark. The room,snuffed out, could have been nolarger than a freight car,no smaller than a box van; we couldn't tell anymore, the glintsin the shellacked floor, too, were dulled. This is like death, you said,always joking. I slid my headinto the crook of your neck, and didn't disagree. Raised in the Philippines and California, Janine Joseph holds an MFA from New York University and a PhD from the University of Houston. Her poems have appeared in the Kenyon Review Online, Best New Poets, Hayden's Ferry Review, and elsewhere. Her libretto "From My Mother's Mother" was performed as part of the Houston Grand Opera's "Song of Houston: East + West" series. A Kundiman and Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow, she is an assistant professor of English at Weber State University.

    ...y no se lo trago la tierra won the first national award for Chicano literature in 1970 and has become the standard literary text for Hispanic literature classes throughout the country. It is now an award-winning, motion picture entitled And the Earth Did Not Swallow Him.... and the Earth did not devour him / Tomás Rivera --from Voices of the fields: children of migrant farmworkers tell their stories / S. Beth Atkin --Christmas / Langston Hughes --Children for hire / Verena Dobnik and Ted Anthony --First confession / Frank O'Connor --Aria: a memoir of a bilingual childhood / Richard Rodriguez