. . " In words drawn from urban and Navajo perspectives, Sherwin Bitsui articulates the challenge a Native American person faces in reconciling his or her inherited history of lore and spirit with the coldness of postmodern civilization.Shapeshift is a collection of startling new poetry that explores the tensions between the worlds of nature and man. Through brief, imagistic poems interspersed with evocative longer narratives, it offers powerful perceptions of American culture and politics and their lack of spiritual grounding. Linking story, history, and voice, Shapeshift is laced with interweaving images—the gravitational pull of a fishbowl, the scent of burning hair, the trickle of motor oil from a harpooned log—that speak to the rich diversity of contemporary Diné writing."Tonight, I draw a raven's wing inside a circle measured a half second before it expands into a hand. I wrap its worn grip over our feet As we thrash against pine needles inside the earthen pot." With complexities of tone that shift between disconnectedness and wholeness, irony and sincerity, Bitsui demonstrates a balance of excitement and intellect rarely found in a debut volume. As deft as it is daring, Shapeshift teases the mind and stirs the imagination.

    environmental movement that covers the colonial period through 1999. It provides students with a balanced, historical perspective on the history of the environmental movement in relation to major social and political events in U.S. history. The book highlights important people and events, places critical concepts in context, and shows the impact of government, industry, and population on the American landscape. Comprehensive yet brief, First Along the River discusses the religious and philosophical beliefs that shaped Americans' relationship to the environment, traces the origins and development of government regulations that impact Americans' use of natural resources, and shows why popular environmental groups were founded and how they changed over time.

    It is not an afterthought and it is not treated as a separate chapter or appendix; but rather, it is the carefully integrated philosophy of Professor Roberts' approach to teaching literature and composition. Complete coverage of writing about each element and a total of 28 MLA-format student essays with accompanying commentary ensure student comprehension of writing about literature and therefore, produce better student papers.

    It offers humorous reflection upon our species' endless attempts to transmit insight regarding our human condition.

    The historical body of evidence that remains from the Salem witch trials of 1692 touched the hands, mind, and imagination of poet Nicole Cooley, compelling her to seek entry to an inaccessible past of lies. The Afflicted Girls, so named after the young women who claimed to be victims of witchcraft, spans the centuries to give voice to those both audible and silent on history's pages--accusers and accused of several kinds: wife and husband, servant and master, congregant and minister, and, not least, bewitched and witch. Piercing, enchanting, Cooley's poems form a remarkable narrative, one that displays the enormous cultural power the Salem witch trials retain in twenty-first-century America.

    A Bulgarian immigrant, Dimitrov writes as both observer of and fervent participant in this "American Youth," as his speakers navigate both the physical and emotional landscapes of desire, intimacy, and longing--whether for a friend, a lover, or a self, "Saint or stranger, I still recklessly seek you."

    

    The space-age sounding title was suggested over 800 years ago by "The Blind Ones and the Elephant," a story immortalized in Rumi's Mathnavi.

    

    Awake chronicles Laux's coming to terms with a childhood darkened by violence and sexual abuse--a struggle at once to embrace and to forgive the past.

    Reflecting recent struggles around #MeToo, and the growing interest in witchcraft and astrology, these poems unmake the world around them so that it might be remade anew. Spells are poems; poetry is spelling. Spell-poems take us into a place where the right words can influence the universe.Edited by Sarah Shin and Rebecca Tamás, with an introduction by So Mayer, Spells other contributors include Rachael Allen, Nuar Alsadir, Khairani Barokka, Emily Berry, A.K. Blakemore, Jen Calleja, Vahni Capildeo, Kayo Chingonyi, Elinor Cleghorn, Nia Davies, Kate Duckney, Livia Franchini, Will Harris, Caspar Heinemann, Rebecca May Johnson, Amy Key, Daisy Lafarge, Francesca Lisette, Canisia Lubrin, Karen McCarthy Woolf, Lucy Mercer, Hoa Nguyen, Rebecca Perry, Nat Raha, Nisha Ramayya, Sophie Robinson, Erica Scourti, Dolly Turing, and Jane Yeh.

    Best of all, he's packed us in his suitcase. He represents an ever-changing population of those raised elsewhere who find themselves beckoned by the history, mystique, and magic-makers of New York City. These poems inhabit their own contradictions, and exquisitely navigate the many complicated sides of what it means to be alive. About The Author: Jon Sands has been a professional teaching and performing artist since 2007. He's a recipient of the 2009 NYC-LouderARTS fellowship grant, and has represented New York City multiple times at the National Poetry Slam. He is the Director of Poetry and Arts Education Programming at the Positive Health Project, as well as a Youth Mentor with Urban Word-NYC. His work has appeared in decomP magazine, The Millions, Suss, The Literary Bohemian, Danse Macabre, The November 3rd Club, and others. He lives in New York City, where he makes better tuna salad than anyone you know.

    From vantage points on both sides of the Atlantic, Chatti investigates the perpetual exile that comes from always being separated from some essential part of oneself.“Tunsiya is Arabic for Tunisian/female, and Amrikiya is Arabic for American/female. This naming makes a cross of empowerment even as it is it requires great effort to bear it. Muslim female power is real and undeniable in thesecoming of age poems. In this collection, arcs spark between Tunisian and American citizenship, male and female duality, sky and earth, and yes and no. This is one of the punchiest and powerful chapbooks to appear in recent years. Leila Chatti is someone to watch.” —JOY HARJO“I marvel at Leila Chatti’s poems, their deceptive ease, their ‘calligraphy of smoke,’ their luminous concern with identity and self, love and family, her aesthetic command. ‘I orbited the town of my origin.’ She writes an America that belongs to the world, not the other way around. ‘What kind of world will we leave/ for our mothers?’ In poems filled with vision, desire, tenderness, she disarms our most guarded partialities, those we hide in our slumber, or deep under our tongues: ‘a Muslim girl who loved her father’; ‘ghost of a word mixed up with our bodies.’ Leila Chatti is a remarkable poet. Take notice.” —FADY JOUDAH“Leila Chatti is a major star. She writes exquisite, indelible, necessary poems, from two worlds mixing, rich as the threads of finest tapestries— glistening, warm. I’m struck by her vibrant sense of detail and perfect pacing. We need her honest, compassionate voice so much, at this moment, and everywhere.”—NAOMI SHIHAB NYE

    A powerful call to end American gun violence from celebrated poets and those most impacted, including a foreword by Gabrielle Giffords and Mark Kelly and an introduction by Colum McCann, published on the fifth anniversary of the Sandy Hook shooting.Focused intensively on the crisis of gun violence in America, this volume brings together poems by dozens of our best-known poets, including Billy Collins, Patricia Smith, Mark Doty, Rita Dove, Natalie Diaz, Martin Espada, Robert Hass, Naomi Shihab Nye, Ocean Vuong, Danez Smith, Brenda Hillman, Natasha Threthewey and Juan Felipe Herrera.Each poem is followed by a response from a gun violence prevention activist, political figure, survivor, or concerned individual, including Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Jody Williams, Senator Christopher Murphy, Moms Demand Action founder Shannon Watts, survivors of the Columbine, Sandy Hook, Charleston Emmanuel AME, and Virginia Tech shootings, and Samaria Rice, mother of Tamir, and Lucy McBath, mother of Jordan Davis.The result is a stunning collection of poems and prose that speak directly to the heart; a persuasive and moving testament to the urgent need for gun control.

    Here refugees listen to relaxation tapes that create an Arcadia out of tires and bleach. Here the alphabet spells out disaster and devours children. Here plate tectonics birth a misery rift, spinning loved ones away from each other across an uncaring sea. And here the cosmos--and Cosmos, as Carl Sagan's hopeful words are fissured by erasure--yawns wide.Wilder is grimly visceral but also darkly sly; it paints its world in shades of neon and rust, and its apocalypse in language that runs both sublime and matter-of-fact. "Some of us didn't have lungs left," writes Wahmanholm. "So when we lay beneath the loudspeaker sky--when we were told to pay attention to our breath--we had to improvise." The result is a debut collection that both beguiles and wounds, whose sky is "black at noon, black in the afternoon."