Jahrein Junior and Josairah are the offspring of two hood legends; Jahrein and Josh. They’ve grown up around each other, practically their entire lives, but as time goes on, their mutual attraction can’t be denied. Thinking that their situation was better left in secrecy, the two forge ahead as a couple, only no one knows. But when everything’s out in the open, will Jahrein Junior truly be ready for a commitment? Or will he need Josairah to Freeze, until he’s ready to be the man she needs?

    Vievee Francis’s poems engage many of the same concerns as her poetic predecessors—faith in a secular age, the city and nature, aging, and beauty. Words certainly do not fail as Francis sets off into the wild world promised in the title. The wild here is not chaotic but rather free and finely attuned to its surroundings. The reader who joins her will emerge sensitized and changed by the enduring power of her work. Winner, 2016 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in the Poetry category Finalist, 2015 Balcones Poetry Prize Shortlist finalist, 2015 PEN Open Book Award for an exceptional book by an author of color

    Try to see as others do what is desired or refused. What went wrong. Or right, then wrong. Objectively, what hangs. Pull yourself together. Years are neither kind nor cruel. You drag on. The girl is gone. Consider that it might be time to call in a professional. Blood is fearless, runs to meet a touch, indiscriminate, remembering the first time it fell in love with the world, unaware that now you are alone.From MirrorIn Modern and Normal, Karen Solie takes her on-the-road fascination with being between places to a new level, exploring conceptual and perceptual states of in-betweenness - for example, between what is perceived and what is actually there, or between and among the patterns the world repeats from the cell to the structure of the universe -- to find points of intersection. Solie finds a middle ground between the discourses of the hard sciences and the intuitive, a realm of weird overlap wherein lie questions of probability, fate, determinism, chance, luck, and faith. She writes about fractals and physics, but also about bar bands, broken hearts, and the trappings of desire. Some splendid landscape poems celebrate nature while mourning the way in which it's often exploited and used. Once again Karen Solie offers readers her lovely dexterity and skill in poems which entertain as they move.

    R. Ammons’s long, thin poem was written on a roll of adding-machine tape, then transferred foot by foot to manuscript. He chose this method as a serious experiment in making a poem adapt to something outside itself. The tape determined both the length of the poem’s lines and when it ends. Tape for the Turn of the Year is a poem of infinite variety, blessed by the rich resources of one of this century’s greatest poets. By turns witty, serious, lyrical, and meditative, it is at once a superbly entertaining book and a significant literary achievement.

    At the same time, this stark but moving story touches on the central themes of the Harlem Renaissance, including the urgent need for unity and identity among blacks.

    My grandmother was an old school hooker who relied on a few regulars to supply her basic needs, and my mother was a cracked- out-trick who was killed by a junkie pimp in an alley way. I was there, five-years-old, cold, hungry and huddled near a dumpster. I watched him beat the life out of my mom for the twenty dollars she’d just made. I sat there for hours until the hunger pains forced me to move. I grew up in this ass-for-cash game. I’ve seen the best and survived the worst. I am the madam of an elite prostitution ring in the hood, and this is the story of how the ring was brokenHoney Williams aka Honey Dip is a former junkie trick turned call girl that secretly yearns for a relationship with her daughter and a chance at a normal life. She is tired of the game but doesn't want to turn her back on the prostitutes that saved her life and welcomed her into their family when nobody else wanted to be bothered. Just when she thinks things couldn't be anymore complicated, she falls in love with a man who is young enough to be her son and declared off limits by Portia.SEX, DRUGS, LIES, AND BETRAYAL... WELCOME TO THE NIGHT LIFE. YOU WON'T BE DISAPPOINTED!REVIEWAuthor Julia Press Simmons does it again with another 5 star novel! In this tale of Fornication you will meet Honey Dip as she travels down the road of prostitution, sisterhood and maybe even true love!You will also meet Portia, the leader of the prostitution ring and her girls all know that Portia is not the one to be played with. But, is this sisterhood true or is it all about the money? Would you be more loyal to your pimp or a dollar? These girls have a story to tell and you don't want to miss out!Find out what this author put together in Fornication. If you've read any of her other books you know you will not be disappointed! Julia's pen game is tight!I can't wait for volume 2!!!Stephanie TarrerDivas & Gents Into Urban/Street Lit! (Facebook)

    . . . Her poems offer a curative gift of merciful vision to a country blinded by its own blood and pain, as her narrators wait more or less patiently in their 'difficult knowledge' for the healing of their country's wounds" (San Francisco Examiner and Chronicle).

    In a shallow attempt to move forward, she marries the older Deacon of the church, but is liberated when he dies on their wedding night. Now free to find love and happiness, Sabrina discovers the dark side of love and lust when she is confronted by her new best friend Blair; when Blair thinks Sabrina has stolen the man she loves.

    Her work combines the spiritual desperation of Dickinson with the rhetorical virtuosity of Wallace Stevens. The result is a poetry at once ornate and intense; linguistically marvelous, yes, but also as visceral as anything you are likely to encounter."—Tony Hoagland"In poems striking for their vivid, playful, and original use of the imagination, [Mary Ruefle] brings us an often unnerving, but always fresh and exhilarating view of our common experience of the world."—Charles SimicSelected Poems brings together the finest work from Mary Ruefle's distinguished and inimitable poetic career, showcasing the arc of her development as one of the most expert, surprising, and hilarious practitioners of the art. Anyone who wishes for poetry to be both richly challenging and thoroughly entertaining need look no further than this monolithic retrospective by a contemporary master.Mary Ruefle, winner of the 2011 William Carlos Williams Award for Selected Poems, has published ten books of poetry, a book of prose (The Most of It, Wave Books, 2008), and a comic book; she is also an erasure artist whose treatments of nineteenth-century texts have been exhibited in museums and galleries, and published in A Little White Shadow (Wave Books, 2006). Mary is the recipient of numerous honors, including an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and a Whiting Award. She lives in Bennington, Vermont, and teaches in the MFA program at Vermont College.

    Within these notebooks, Roethke allowed his mind to rove freely, moment by moment, moving from the practical to the transcendental, from the halting to the sublime.Fellow poet and colleague David Wagoner distilled these notebooks—twelve linear feet of bookshelf—into an energetic, wise, and rollicking collection that shows Roethke to be one of the truly phenomenal creative sources in American poetry.From “A Psychic Janitor”: I’m sick of fumbling, furtive, disorganized minds like bad lawyers trying to make too many points that this is an age of criticism: and these, mind you, tin-eared punks who couldn’t tell a poem from an old boot if a gun were put to their heads . . .Cover art by United States Poet Laureate Ted Kooser.

    As a teenager he'd received letters from this stranger father, a self-proclaimed poet and con man doing time in federal prison for bank robbery. Another Bullshit Night in Suck City tells the story of the trajectory that led Nick and his father onto the streets, into that shelter, and finally to each other. .

    Once again this bilingual volume, translated in this edition for the first time in English, reveals the importance of the great Romanian-German poet, who lived for most of his life in France. Translator Pierre Joris has achieved a great feat in bringing these three volumes into the English language.

    Using the events of his life as starting points, Gerald Stern deals with time and loss, with the dichotomy of light and darkness, and—always—with the possibility of joy. This stunning collection moves from autobiography to the visionary in surges of memory and language that draw the reader from one poem to the next.

    That's the lesson a fine brother with a wounded heart learns when an eccentric old woman grants him a wish for true love--if he's not too blind to see it.

    history while ensuring a balanced sense of the broad diversity of American women. Modeling for students how historians gather and interpret evidence, DuBois and Dumenil provide a textbook rooted in recent scholarship yet accessible to all introductory students.