Bearing passionate testimony to private and public memories, this gathering of poems and prose fragments documenting the intimate challenges of homosexual longing gives voice to an invisible minority still struggling to be recognised today. Now published at last, this book, full of fierce confessions, ambivalences and flinty epiphanies, will shock and devestate. Here is an uncompromising confluence of unfulfilled desires wrought through language by one of Singapore's most outspoken and critical voices.

    In the static that follows the loss of a job or an apartment or a boyfriend, what can you grab onto for orientation? The narrator wonders what happens to the sense of self when the illusion of security has been stripped away. And for an indigenous person, how do these lost markers of identity echo larger cultural losses and erasures in a changing political landscape? In part taking its cue from A.R. Ammons’s Garbage, Teebs names this liminal space “Junk,” in the sense that a junk shop is full of old things waiting for their next use; different items that collectively become indistinct. But can there be a comfort outside the anxiety of utility? An appreciation of “being” for the sake of being? And will there be Chili Cheese Fritos?

    —"Earth"With gravity and resplendence, Colosseum confronts ruin in the ancient world and in the living moment, from historical accounts and from firsthand experience. Displaced from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, Katie Ford returns this powerful report attesting to the storm's ferocity and its aftershock. Ford examines other catastrophes—those biblical, obscured by time, and those that play out daily, irrefutably, in the media. Colosseum is an essential, moving book in its insistence that our fates are intertwined and that devastation does not discriminate.

    In these nineteen poems, the body is personal and communal, hunter and hunted: "My mother says / women who sleep with women / are redundant: the body symmetrical / to its crime. Between your knees / I mistake need for belief / in a father figure: once, we renamed / our fathers by burning them / out of our bodies, smoking the sky / into meat." PAST LIVES, FUTURE BODIES is a knife-sharp and nimble examination of migration, motherhood, and the malignant legacies of racism. In this collection, family forms both a unit of survival and a framework for history, agency, and recovery. Chang undertakes a visceral exploration of the historical and unfolding paths of lineage and what it means to haunt body and country. These poems traverse not only the circularity of trauma but the promise of regeneration—what grows from violence and hatches from healing—as Chang embodies each of her ghosts and invites the specter to speak. "Kristin Chang wields the line break like a sword cutting through dimensions of reality and language. Each break offers another surprise gut-punch or gutting grace on the other side as these fiercely sharp poems turn and turn, Chang never faltering to rise to the occasion of these blood-filled verses. Chang, quite simply, can write her ass off. I read these poems and I feel like I'm discovering poetry all over again. Chang makes a spell rise from every wound, and I'm caught all the way up in this magic. Kristin Chang is one of the best emerging writers out there, and this chapbook is one step into a career we will all be transformed by. PAST LIVES, FUTURE BODIES couldn't be a better way to be introduced to your new favorite poet. It's Kristin's world, thank God we're reading in it."—Danez Smith "Kristin Chang's PAST LIVES, FUTURE BODIES is full of mouths swallowing food, language, home, memory, and bodily desires to finally arrive at explosive demonstrations of what happens when the unspeakable is uttered and shouted. Each poem shows the process of turning a painful reflection on history, sexuality, race, family, and nation into a prismatic object of beauty. We are lucky to witness Chang's use of silence as a productive narrative frame."—Emily Jungmin Yoon "In PAST LIVES, FUTURE BODIES, Kristin Chang's knotty examination into the complexities of intergenerational relationships, we come to understand the fraught nature of both the known and the unknown. These meditations on family, pain, and the ways we communicate untangle the threads of what it means to love those who have hurt us. Chang writes, 'Every language has different / words for the same want,' and the poems in this collection stunningly reveal those words and leave us wanting for more."—Eloisa Amezcua

    Translated from the Polish by award-winning translators John and Bogdana Carpenter, these sixty-eight verse and prose poems span forty years of Herbert's incredible life and work. The pieces are organized chronologically from 1950 to 1990, with an emphasis on the writer's early and late poems.Here Zbigniew Herbert's poetry turns from the public--what we have come to expect from this poet--to the more personal. The title poem, "Elegy for the Departure of Pen Ink and Lamp , is a three-part farewell ode to the inanimate objects and memories of childhood. Herbert reflects on the relationship between the living and the dead in "What Our Dead Do," the state of his homeland in "Country," and the power of language in "We fall asleep on words . . . " Herbert's short prose poems read like aphorisms, deceptively whimsical but always wise: "Bears are divided into brown and white, also paws, head, and trunk. They have nice snouts, and small eyes.... Children who love Winnie-the-Pooh would give them anything, but a hunter walks in the forest and aims with his rifle between that pair of small eyes."Elegy for the Departure and Other Poems confirms Zbigniew Herbert's place as one of the world's greatest and most influential poets.

    Coeur de Lionis an intensely personal, monologic meditation on longing, sex, and love between a speaker and the object of all her passions, which include thinking and writing.

    Each word in this little book might rise up from somewhere deep in the earth, but they turn into stars." - Nick Flynn"In Islam prayer is not transactional, poetry is not divorced from the quotidian and portraiture is embraced only in the abstract. And yet here in Kaveh Akbar's book, entreaty is earnest, aimed at the human and particular more often than the divine but at the same time the language and form elevate themselves to the fevered register of desperation. Yes, sure, fine, you would think that a Muslim writing about being a drunk would have to adopt unconventional approaches, but drunkenness in the Islamic literary tradition is a long and time-honored metaphor. For what? Abandonment to God, a cessation of the self--but not so here; no. Here it's real, it's coarse, it's dangerous. The reason we Muslims do not pray for things is that it is similarly dangerous for one to call God's attention onto oneself. But for Kaveh Akbar, whose very name means 'poetry, ' it is a risk every poem takes with gusto. And speaking purely for myself, these poems give me life because 'for so long every step I've taken/ has been from one tongue to another.' Be careful, little brother. God's got His eye on you now." - Kazim Ali

    In this daring first novel, tour-de-force experiments in narrative structure, pidgin and perspective roll every "are" and throw new light on gay identity and the trauma of assimilation. Rolling the R's goes beyond "coming of age" and "coming out" to address the realities of cultural confusion, prejudice and spiraling levels of desire in humorous yet haunting portraits that are, as Matthew Stadler writes, "stylish, shameless and beautiful."

    Of all the presenters, Clive James was a clear favourite, and now, for the first time, his original pieces - 60 in total - and all new postscripts are collected together in one volume.

    The poems in this collection are at once seductive and dangerous; they are possessed by a singular lyricism and awareness, and her call to action has a major presence in her work.

    "Jen Bervin has reimagined Shakespeare as our true contemporary. Her little poems sing" Paul Auster. In NETS, poet and artist Jen Bervin strips Shakespeare's sonnets "bare to the nets," chiseling away at the familiar lines to reveal surprising new poems, while pointing obliquely at the unavoidably intertextual ground of writing. Using visual compositional strategies as effectively as verbal ones, Bervin allows the discarded text to remain on the page as a ghostly presence, while she highlights the marginal line-numbers that allude to the sonnets' canonization."

    Marilyn Hacker's poems have been praised for their technical virtuosity, forthright feminism, political acuity, and unabashed eroticism.Included are selections from Hacker's first book, Presentation Piece (1974), the Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets and a National Book Award Winner; Separations (1976); Taking Notice (1980), which was claimed as an integral part of the burgeoning feminist and lesbian canon; Assumptions (1985), which explored the conundrums of gender, race, and identity in contemporary life; and Going Back to the River (1990), which received a Lambda Literary Award.

    In Bordering Fires, the first anthology to combine writing from both sides of the Mexican-U.S. border, Cristina Garc’a presents a richly diverse cross-cultural conversation. Beginning with Mexican masters such as Alfonso Reyes and Juan Rulfo, Garc’a highlights historic voices such as “the godfather of Chicano literature” Rudolfo Anaya, and Gloria Anzaldœa, who made a powerful case for language that reflects bicultural experience. From the fierce evocations of Chicano reality in Jimmy Santiago Baca’s Poem IX to the breathtaking images of identity in Coral Bracho’s poem “Fish of Fleeting Skin,” from the work of Carlos Fuentes to Sandra Cisneros, Ana Castillo to Octavio Paz, this landmark collection of fiction, essays, and poetry offers an exhilarating new vantage point on our continent–and on the best of contemporary literature.ContentsPrelude: Excerpt from The use of thought / Samuel Ramos Early influences:Major Aranda's hand / Alfonso Reyes My cousin Agueda, and In the wet shadows / Ramón López Velarde Excerpt from Pedro Páramo / Juan Rulfo L.A. nocturne : the angels / Xavier Villaurrutia Chicano/a voices I: How to tame a wild tongue / Gloria AnzaldúaIndia / Richard RodriguezMeditations on the South Valley: Poem IX / Jimmy Santiago Baca B. Traven is alive and well in Cuernavaca / Rudolfo Anaya Contemporary Mexican voices:Excerpt from The death of Artemio Cruz / Carlos Fuentes Introduction from Here's to you, Jesusa! / Elena Poniatowska The day of the dead, and I speak of the city / Octavio Paz Excerpt from The book of lamentations / Rosario Castellanos Chicano/a voices 2: Daddy with Chesterfields in a rolled up sleeve / Ana Castillo Never marry a Mexican / Sandra Cisneros Maria de Covina / Dagoberto Gilb Excerpt from Crossing over : a Mexican family on the migrant trail / Rubén Martínez New departures:Hagiography of the apostate / Ignacio PadillaAunt Leonor, and Aunt Natalia / Ángeles MastrettaIdentity hour or, What photos would you take of the endless city / Carlos Monsiváis Fish of fleeting skin / Coral Bracho

    In Shivanee Ramlochan’s first collection of poems, Trinidad and Caribbean poetry finds an exciting new voice, one that displays a sharp intelligence, and iconoclastic spirit and fertility of imagination.