Bright Scythe: Selected Poems by Tomas Tranströmer


Tomas Tranströmer - 2015
    Known for sharp imagery, startling metaphors and deceptively simple diction, his luminous poems offer mysterious glimpses into the deepest facets of humanity, often through the lens of the natural world. These new translations by Patty Crane, presented side by side with the original Swedish, are tautly rendered and elegantly cadenced. They are also deeply informed by Crane’s personal relationship with the poet and his wife during the years she lived in Sweden, where she was afforded greater insight into the nuances of his poetics and the man himself.

the things I didn't say in therapy


Logan Duane - 2020
    

Old Town


Lin Zhe - 2010
    Her narrative ranges across the entire length of China, to California and back again, to the battlefields of the Anti-Japanese War of Resistance and the brutal “struggle" sessions of the Cultural Revolution. But it always returns to this family's home in Old Town, that archetypical, old-fashioned, and vanishing place steeped in the traditions of South China. Ms. Lin examines the inner strength that sustains people's lives in their darkest hours, when religious and political faith falter. And yet, a vein of irony and droll humor runs through this powerful story. Lin Zhe's novel may be understood as a love story, memoir, history, or allegory. For the non-Chinese reader it provides a rare and moving insight into Chinese lives in a century of fearsome upheaval. This book was originally published under the title Riddles of Belief...and Love - A Story.

Poems of Nazım Hikmet


Nâzım Hikmet - 1973
    The Blasing/Konuk translations, acclaimed for the past quarter-century for their accuracy and grace, convey Hikmet's compassionate, accessible voice with the subtle music, innovative form, and emotional directness of the originals.

Memoir of the Hawk


James Tate - 2001
    In the privacy of their homes, who can save them from themselves? In the forests and hills and on the beautiful lakes, what could possibly be wrong? Even in the sweet hometown, with its kindly police, menace lurks in a thousand disguises. Mystery and magic surround this metropolis of the imagination. Once again, James Tate has given us a world of surprising pleasures:... lost in the interstellar space between teacups in the cupboard, found in the beak of a downy woodpecker, the lovers staring into the void and then jumping over it, flying into their beautiful tomorrows like the heroes of a storm.

Summer Solstice: An Essay


Nina MacLaughlin - 2020
    Fat red tomatoes sliced thin and salted. Lemonade and long dreamy days. The treasures of the season are gone much too soon -- but they're captured here, in loving sensuous prose that's both personal and universal, for you to find any time of year.Experience the most evocative tribute to the meaning of the season, a season whose magical feeling stays with us even in winter. Where does that feeling come from? What is summer made of? The smell of cut grass behind the gasoline of a lawnmower. A crown you've made of flowers. Blackberry bush prickers. First hot dog off the grill. Stargazing and sleeping with the windows open. This essay brims with a searching honesty and insight about what this season has meant in our pasts and what it might mean in our lives ahead.Release yourself into the sky and feel, Nina MacLaughlin writes, for a moment: there's time.If summer is the season of your life, if the months between Memorial Day and Labor Day hold your favorite memories, you'll love Summer Solstice .

Under the Red Flag


Ha Jin - 1997
    Winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for short fiction, Under the Red Flag features twelve stories which take place during China's Cultural Revolution--stories which display the earnestness and grandeur of human folly and, in a larger sense, form a moral history of a time and a place.

The Tears of Autumn


David Wiltshire - 2007
    Biff and Rosemary are honeymooning in Sorrento.They meet Konrad and Anna, a charming couple who also happen to be newlyweds.They seem to have so much in common — Biff is a pilot in the RAF and Konrad is in the German Navy. Soon things will be very different. . .They tour the Amalfi coast, and visit the ruins at Pompeii. When their holiday comes to an end, they swear to meet again in a year’s time.But their countries and their allegiances will be torn apart by war.Konrad and Anna seem so nice. They can’t possibly be the enemy, can they?Each of them is drawn further into the chaos of conflict. Who will survive? And what will fate hold for these couples?ONE LAST HOLIDAY BEFORE THE WAR THAT WILL CHANGE THEIR LIVES FOREVERA breathtaking wartime saga perfect for fans of Josephine Cox, Kate Eastham, Dinah Jefferies, Pam Howes and Tania Crosse.

soft magic.


Upile Chisala - 2015
    is the debut collection of prose and poetry by Malawian writer, Upile Chisala. This book explores the self, joy, blackness, gender, matters of the heart, the experience of Diaspora, spirituality and most of all, how we survive. soft magic. is a shared healing journey.

There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé


Morgan Parker - 2017
    The poems weave between personal narrative and pop-cultural criticism, examining and confronting modern media, consumption, feminism, and Blackness. This collection explores femininity and race in the contemporary American political climate, folding in references from jazz standards, visual art, personal family history, and Hip Hop. The voice of this book is a multifarious one: writing and rewriting bodies, stories, and histories of the past, as well as uttering and bearing witness to the truth of the present, and actively probing toward a new self, an actualized self. This is a book at the intersections of mythology and sorrow, of vulnerability and posturing, of desire and disgust, of tragedy and excellence.

Postcolonial Banter


Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan - 2019
    It features some of her most well-known and widely performed poems as well as some never-seen-before material. Her words are a disruption of comfort, a call to action, a redistribution of knowledge and an outpouring of dissent. Whilst enraged and devastated by the world she finds herself in, in many ways it is also the mundane; hence, whilst political and complex in nature, her poetry is just the ‘banter’ of everyday life for her and others like her. Ranging from critiquing the function of the nation-state and rejecting secularist visions of identity, to reflecting on the difficulty of writing and penning responses to conversations she wishes she’d had; Suhaiymah’s debut collection is ready and raring to enter the world.

INRI


Raúl Zurita - 2003
    Latin American Studies. Translated from the Spanish by William Rowe. INRI responds to the need to find a language for an event that was kept hidden and excluded from official records in Chile: the fact that the bodies of the disappeared were thrown out of helicopters into the mouths of volcanoes and into the sea. In order to bring this event, that was neither seen nor heard, into language, Zurita invents a form and language capable of bringing it into the present. The one place where these unspeakable acts might be registered is in the landscape of Chile: the mountains, desert, and sea. There the event might begin to be touched, heard, and finally seen. When there are no places from which to speak, "the stones cry out."

The Winged Energy of Delight: Selected Translations


Robert Bly - 2005
    The poetry he chose supplied qualities that were lacking from the literary culture of this country. For the first time Robert Bly’s brilliant translations, from several languages, have been brought together in one book. Here, in The Winged Energy of Delight, the poems of twenty-two poets, some renowned, others lesser known, are brought together.At a time when editors and readers knew only Eliot and Pound, Robert Bly introduced the earthy wildness of Pablo Neruda and Cesar Vallejo and the sober grief of Trakl, as well as the elegance of Jiménez and Tranströmer. He also published high-spirited versions of Kabir and Rumi, and Mirabai, which had considerable influence on the wide culture of the 1970s and 1980s. Bly’s clear translations of Rilke attracted many new readers to the poet, and his versions of Machado have become models of silence and depth. He continues to bring fresh and amazing poets into English, most recently Rolf Jacobsen, Miguel Hernandez, Francis Ponge, and the ninteenth-century Indian poet Ghalib. As Kenneth Rexroth has said, Robert Bly “is one of the leaders of a poetic revival which has returned American literature to the world community.”

Rosary


Anna Akhmatova - 2014
    One of the forefront leaders of the Acmeism movement, which focused on rigorous form and directness of words, she was a master of conveying raw emotion in her portrayals of everyday situations. Her works range from short lyric love poetry to longer, more complex cycles, such as Requiem, a tragic depiction of the Stalinist terror. During the time of heavy censorship and persecution, her poetry gave voice to the Russian people. To this day, she remains one of Russia's most beloved poets and has left a lasting impression on generations of poets that came after her. Rosary, published in 1914, is Akhmatova's second book, and one of her most popular collections. After its publication, Akhmatova became a household name and further established her place among the greatest Russian poets.

Ghachar Ghochar


Vivek Shanbhag - 2013
    As they move from a cramped, ant-infested shack to a larger house on the other side of Bangalore, and try to adjust to a new way of life, the family dynamic begins to shift. Allegiances realign; marriages are arranged and begin to falter; and conflict brews ominously in the background. Things become “ghachar ghochar”—a nonsense phrase uttered by one meaning something tangled beyond repair, a knot that can't be untied. Elegantly written and punctuated by moments of unexpected warmth and humor, Ghachar Ghochar is a quietly enthralling, deeply unsettling novel about the shifting meanings—and consequences—of financial gain in contemporary India.