Please Love Me at My Worst


Michaela Angemeer - 2021
    Written during the 2020 COVID-19 quarantine, the book is a reflection of what it means to yearn for people who are unavailable and how important it is to focus on self-love and healing.

Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts


Jorie Graham - 1980
    Whatever the occasion--and her work offers a rich profusion of them--the poems reach to where possession is not within us, where new names are needed and meaning enlarged. Hence, what she sees reminds her of what is missing, and what she knows suggests what she cannot. From any event, she arcs bravely into the farthest reaches of mind. Fast readers will have trouble, but so what. To the good reader afraid of complexity, I would offer the clear trust that must bond us to such signal poems as (simply to cite three appearing in a row) Mother's Sewing Box, For My Father Looking for My Uncle, and The Chicory Comes Out Late August in Umbria. Finally, the poet's words again: . . . you get / just what you want and (just before that), Just as / from time to time / we need to seize again / the whole language / in search of / better desires.--Marvin Bell

5 to 1


Holly Bodger - 2015
    Tired of marrying off their daughters to the highest bidder and determined to finally make marriage fair, the women who form the country of Koyanagar have instituted a series of tests so that every boy has the chance to win a wife.Sudasa doesn’t want to be a wife, and Contestant Five, a boy forced to compete in the test to become her husband, has other plans as well. Sudasa’s family wants nothing more than for their daughter to do the right thing and pick a husband who will keep her comfortable—and caged. Five’s family wants him to escape by failing the tests. As the tests advance, Sudasa and Five thwart each other at every turn until they slowly realize that they just might want the same thing.Told from alternating points of view—Sudasa’s in verse and Contestant Five’s in prose—allowing readers to experience both characters’ pain and their brave struggle for hope.

The Laws of Evening: Stories


Mary Yukari Waters - 2003
    These graceful, expertly crafted stories, set in Japan, explore the gray areas between the long shadow of World War II and the rapid advance of Westernization. The women and children who inhabit this terrain have lost husbands and fathers to the war, and ancient traditions to American pop culture. Parents are mystified by the future of forks and knives, hairspray and hip-hop; children embrace it. With these stories of upheaval and renewal, estrangement and reconciliation, Waters provides keen insight into the experience and sensibility of different generations as they confront an altered world. A virtuoso collection infused with warmth, The Laws of Evening announces a stunning new voice in fiction.

The Bad Wife Handbook


Rachel Zucker - 2007
    Formally innovative and blazingly direct, The Bad Wife Handbook cross-examines marriage, motherhood, monogamy, and writing itself. Rachel Zucker's upending of grammatical and syntactic expectations lends these poems an urgent richness and aesthetic complexity that mirrors the puzzles of real life. Candid, subversive, and genuinely moving, The Bad Wife Handbook is an important portrait of contemporary marriage and the writing life, of emotional connection and disconnection, of togetherness and aloneness.

Introduction to Haiku: An Anthology of Poems and Poets from Basho to Shiki


Harold Gould Henderson - 1958
    Henderson was, from 1927 to 1929, the Assistant to the Curator of Far Eastern Art at the Metropolitan Musuem of Art. In 1930 he went to Japan, where he lived the following three years. On his return to this country he joined the faculty at Columbia University, where he taught Japanese and initiated a course in the history of Japanese art. He retired in 1955. His published works include The Bamboo Broom, Surviving Works of Sharaku (with Louis V. Ledoux), and A Handbook of Japanese Grammar. He has also translated H. Minamoto's Illustrated History of Japanese Art, etc. Mr. Henderson lives in New York City.

Solo


Kwame Alexander - 2017
    In fact, he’d give anything not to be the son of Rutherford Morrison, a washed-up rock star and drug addict with delusions of a comeback. Or to no longer be part of a family known most for lost potential, failure, and tragedy. The one true light is his girlfriend, Chapel, but her parents have forbidden their relationship, assuming—like many—that Blade will become just like his father.In reality, the only thing Blade has in common with Rutherford is the music that lives inside them. But not even the songs that flow through Blade’s soul are enough when he’s faced with two unimaginable realities: the threat of losing Chapel forever, and the revelation of a long-held family secret, one that leaves him questioning everything he thought was true. All that remains is a letter and a ticket to Ghana—both of which could bring Blade the freedom and love he’s been searching for, or leave him feeling even more adrift.

In a Dream You Saw a Way to Survive


Clementine von Radics - 2019
    An attempt to understand and to be understood, In a Dream You Saw a Way to Survive is an ode to vulnerability that delivers concentrated, thought-provoking, and earnest verse.

Chlorine Sky


Mahogany L. Browne - 2021
    Browne delivers a novel-in-verse about broken promises, fast rumors, and when growing up means growing apart from your best friend.

I am a Very Productive Entrepreneur: A Novella


Mathias Svalina - 2011
    I am a Very Productive Entrepreneur is poignant & brilliant; it's worth the investment.Christian Hawkey, author of Ventrakl

And We Rise


Erica Martin - 2022
    Complete with historical photographs, author’s note, chronology of events, research, and sources.

What If?


Anna Russell - 2018
    He is a talented drummer, a math genius, and he knows everything about rock and roll. Yet, he knows his problems have the power to hurt his family and make him fail at school. When Josh is diagnosed with OCD, it’s a blessing and a curse. Can he overcome his thoughts, or will they break him?

The Hunchback of Neiman Marcus: A Novel About Marriage, Motherhood, and Mayhem


Sonya Sones - 2011
    Nora Ephron's I Feel Bad About My Neck meets Elizabeth Berg—boldly original and endlessly enthralling—The Hunchback of Neiman Marcus is a luminous, brilliantly told story of life, marriage, and parenthood that you will not soon forget."Funny, fresh, and heartbreakingly poignant, this book had me laughing and crying at the same time."—Meg Cabot, author of The Princess Diaries series and Insatiable"I read The Hunchback of Neiman Marcus and I saw the light and the mirror and fell under Sonya Sones' spell."—Jacquelyn Mitchard, author of The Deep End of the Ocean"Wallpaper a room with the pages of The Hunchback of Neiman Marcus. It will be your favorite place. The room you come back to again and again, year after year."—Ilene Beckerman, author of Love, Loss, and What I Wore

Ghosting


Edith Pattou - 2014
    Alcohol, guns, and a dare. Within minutes, as events collide, innocents becomes victims—with tragic outcomes altering lives forever, a grisly and unfortunate scenario all too familiar from current real-life headlines. But victims can also become survivors, and as we come to know each character through his/her own distinctive voice and their interactions with one another, we see how, despite pain and guilt, they can reach out to one another, find a new equilibrium, and survive.Told through multiple points of view in naturalistic free verse and stream of consciousness, this is an unforgettable, haunting tale.

Ceremony for the Choking Ghost


Karen Finneyfrock - 2010
    Her voice came back, whispering at first, then screaming. Ceremony for the Choking Ghost contains the sound of that voice returning, bringing poems about grief and its effect on the body, the body politic, memory and, of course, poems about love. From the intensely personal, "How My Family Grieved," to the political, "What Lot's Wife Would Have Said (If She Wasn't a Pillar of Salt)," Finneyfrock engages the reader with the chiseled images of a precise storyteller.