As warm and intelligent as it is ribald and cunning, this collection of Thom Gunn's is his richest yet.

    Unlike the classical portrait of a maiden kidnapped by a tyrant, Zucker's Persephone chooses to travel to the Underworld and assume her role as Hades' queen. Caught between worlds--light and dark, innocence and power, a mother's protection and a lover's appeal--Persephone describes the strangeness of the Underworld and the problems of transformation and transgression. The arrangement of Zucker's poems reflects Persephone's travels between the Underworld and the Surface. Both spare and lyrical, they are written as entries in Persephone's diary and as letters between Persephone, Demeter, and Hades. The language--strange, urgent, direct--is pulled and changed as Persephone journeys from one world to another revealing the struggle of unmaking and remaking the self.

    The volume responds primarily to the twenty-first century's inescapable evidence of the terms of black life--not so much new as newly visible. The poems trace a whole web of connections between the kinds of violence that affect people across the racial, ethnic, gender, class, sexual, national, and linguistic boundaries that do and do not divide us. How do we protect our humanity, our ability to feel deeply and think freely, in the face of a seemingly endless onslaught of physical, social, and environmental abuses? Where do we find language to describe, process, and check the attacks and injuries we see and suffer? What actions can break us out of the soul-numbing cycle of emotions, moving through outrage, mourning, and despair, again and again? In poems that span fragment to narrative and quiz to constraint, from procedure to prose and sequence to song, semiautomatic culls past and present for guides to a hoped-for future.Hardcover is un-jacketed.

    It can often seem like there's no way things will ever get better. I wrote this book to remind you that it will, and to give you some comfort and hope along the way. May you find the healing and love your heart deserves. -Illiana Cenjur

    Some are the recipients of numerous awards, while others, who are making their first appearance, are quickly making significant contributions to twenty-first-century poetry.The poets include Rick Barot, Joshua Beckman, David Berman, Nick Flynn, Matthea Harvey, Terrance Hayes, Major Jackson, James Kimbrell, D.A. Powell, Spencer Reece, Matthew Rohrer, Rebecca Wolff, Kevin Young, Matthew Zapruder, Andrew Zawacki, and many others.

    Whether Jeffrey McDaniel's denouncing insomnia ("4,000 A.M."), exploring family tragedy ("Ghost Townhouse"), or celebrating love and lust ("The Biology of Numbers"), his writing is so profoundly original, so funny, twisted, and literary simultaneously, you won't know whether to laugh or cry, but you'll definitely keep reading.

    The book is in two sections, the first a focused collection of wildly inventive lyrics that take as launch pad such far flung subjects as allergenesis, the contents and significance of swamps, a revised notion of marriage, and ancestors—both actual and dreamed. The eponymous second section is a cogent series, or long poem, based on a persona named "the eater," who, along with the poems themselves, storms voraciously through tablefuls of Chinese delicacies (each poem in the series takes its titles from an actual Chinese dish), as well as through doubts and confident proclamations from regions of an exploratory self. Hymn for the Black Terrific has Falstaffian panache; it is a book of pure astonishment.Kiki Petrosino is the author of Fort Red Border (Sarabande, 2009) and the co-editor of Transom, an independent on-line poetry journal. She holds graduate degrees from the University of Chicago and the Iowa Writer's Workshop. Her poems have appeared in Tin House, FENCE, Jubilat, Gulf Coast, and The New York Times. Petrosino teaches creative writing at the University of Louisville.

    Through her poetry, essays, stories, and performances, Ryka Aoki has challenged, informed, and shared with queer audiences across the United States. Available on Amazon, as well as directly from the press at Trans-Genre.net.

    Tied to their ancestral and adopted homelands in ways unimaginable in generations past, these memorable characters straddle both worlds but belong to none.From a Hong Kong movie idol fleeing a sex scandal, to an obedient daughter turned Stanford imposter, to a Chinatown elder summoned to his village, to a Korean-American pastor with a secret agenda, the characters in these ten stories vividly illustrate the conflict between self and society, tradition and change. In “What We Have is What We Need,” winner of The Atlantic student fiction prize, a boy from Mexico reunites with his parents in San Francisco. When he suspects his mother has found love elsewhere, he fights to keep his family together.With insight and wit, she writes about what wounds us and what we must survive. Her searing stories explore the clash of cultures and the complex, always shifting allegiances that we carry in ourselves, our family, and our community. Deceit and Other Possibilities marks the emergence of a remarkable new writer.

    Beauty/Beauty is a book with tenderness running through its veins, exploring salvation, reparation, and the fullness of being alive; the difficulty of defining what love is, the heartbreak, the faraway friends, the overwhelming abundance of things in museums. It is alive with memories, with old loves hanging around in the corners of dark rooms, ghost mouths hidden inside the mouth you are kissing, and eulogies to dearly departed pets. Each poem creates its own tiny world to be lived in and explored; a stegosaurus is adored, a million silver spiders play dead, a list of flowers is not really a list of flowers, adorable dogs want to be friends, the flightless grow wings, and the stars turn green.

    The manuscript is comprised of the lyrics to Denis Leary's popular Christmas song of the same title (plus three new verses written for this book), and includes 25 newly commissioned illustrations in the style of classic stop-motion TV Christmas specials.

    Fiona was always destined to leave, her effortless beauty burnished by fierce ambition--qualities that Jane admired and feared in equal measure. When Fiona moves to New York and cares for a sick friend through a breakup with an opportunistic boyfriend, Jane remains in California and grieves her estranged father's sudden death, in the process alienating an overzealous girlfriend. Strained by distance and unintended betrayals, the women float in and out of each other's lives, their friendship both a beacon of home and a reminder of all they've lost.In stories told in alternating voices, Jean Chen Ho's debut collection peels back the layers of female friendship--the intensity, resentment, and boundless love--to probe the beating hearts of young women coming to terms with themselves, and each other, in light of the insecurities and shame that holds them back.Spanning countries and selves, Fiona and Jane is an intimate portrait of a friendship, a deep dive into the universal perplexities of being young and alive, and a bracingly honest account of two Asian women who dare to stake a claim on joy in a changing, contemporary America.

    Remarkably, this is the first collection of Ocampo’s poetry to appear in English. From her early sonnets on the native Argentine landscape, to her meditations on love’s travails, to her explorations of the kinship between plant and animal realms, to her clairvoyant inquiries into history and myth and memory, readers will find the full range of Ocampo’s “metaphysical lyricism” (The Independent) represented in this groundbreaking edition.

    Each of these families has its own troubles and secrets—and something the other two want. But the three clans—whose members include a matriarch who talks to dead relatives; her nymphomaniac granddaughter; an old man who reads only decades-old newspapers; and a street punk—share a past and face a common future. Told in a sequence of interwoven stories, Troublemaker “refracts classic old-vs.-new-world tensions through the prism of second-generation Chinese-American Gen-Xers.” (Time)Nominated for the Stephen Crane First Fiction Award

    Sly, funny, intelligent, and artfully structured, The Fortunes recasts American history through the lives of Chinese Americans and reimagines the multigenerational novel through the fractures of immigrant family experience.Inhabiting four lives—a railroad baron’s valet who unwittingly ignites an explosion in Chinese labor, Hollywood's first Chinese movie star, a hate-crime victim whose death mobilizes Asian Americans, and a biracial writer visiting China for an adoption—this novel captures and capsizes over a century of our history, showing that even as family bonds are denied and broken, a community can survive—as much through love as blood.Building fact into fiction, spinning fiction around fact, Davies uses each of these stories—three inspired by real historical characters—to examine the process of becoming not only Chinese American, but American.