They were married in 1931, just as tension between their two countries was mounting, and their constant dream was of a "rainbow across the Pacific," a bridge of peace between Japan and the United States.In the following ten years, Mr. Terasaki's service with the Japanese Foreign Office took them to Japan, China (where their daughter Mariko was born), Cuba, and Washington, where they were living at the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor. As head of Japanese intelligence in the Western Hemisphere, Terasaki took enormous personal risks to avert war between the two countries. Mrs. Terasaki describes with rare perception and fine humor her months of internment with the Japanese diplomatic corps at Hot Springs and White Sulphur Springs, the long voyage back to Japan via Africa on the famed exchange ship Gripsholm, and the struggle of the war years in Japan which were marked by illness and near starvation. After the surrender, Mr. Terasaki, a courageous and brilliant man who had risked everything to avert the war, was appointed liaison between the Emperor and General MacArthur, and in this capacity, he made a lasting contribution to post-war relations between the two countries.

    She was able to escape, and eventually positively identified Ronald Cotton as her attacker. Ronald insisted that she was mistaken-- but Jennifer's positive identification was the compelling evidence that put him behind bars. After eleven years, Ronald was allowed to take a DNA test that proved his innocence. He was released, after serving more than a decade in prison for a crime he never committed. Two years later, Jennifer and Ronald met face to face-- and forged an unlikely friendship that changed both of their lives.In their own words, Jennifer and Ronald unfold the harrowing details of their tragedy, and challenge our ideas of memory and judgment while demonstrating the profound nature of human grace and the healing power of forgiveness.

    With a pen faithful to the actual yet dipped at times in the ink of the surreal, Hirshfield considers the inner and outer worlds we live in yet are not confined by; reflecting on advice given her long ago—to avoid the word “or”—she concludes, “Now I too am sixty. / There was no other life.” Hirshfield’s lines cut, as always, directly to the heart of human experience. Her robust affirmation of choice even amid inevitability, her tender consciousness of the unjudging beauty of what exists, her abiding contemplation of our moral, societal, and biological intertwinings, sustain poems that tune and retune the keys of a life. For this poet, “Zero Plus Anything Is a World.” Hirshfield’s riddling recipes for that world (“add salt to hunger”; “add time to trees”) offer a profoundly altered understanding of our lives’ losses and additions, and of the small and larger beauties we so often miss.

    The result is the Chokehold: laws and practices that treat every African American man like a thug. In this explosive new book, an African American former federal prosecutor shows that the system is working exactly the way it’s supposed to. Black men are always under watch, and police violence is widespread—all with the support of judges and politicians.In his no-holds-barred style, Butler, whose scholarship has been featured on 60 Minutes, uses new data to demonstrate that white men commit the majority of violent crime in the United States. For example, a white woman is ten times more likely to be raped by a white male acquaintance than be the victim of a violent crime perpetrated by a black man. Butler also frankly discusses the problem of black on black violence and how to keep communities safer—without relying as much on police.Chokehold powerfully demonstrates why current efforts to reform law enforcement will not create lasting change. Butler’s controversial recommendations about how to crash the system, and when it’s better for a black man to plead guilty—even if he’s innocent—are sure to be game-changers in the national debate about policing, criminal justice, and race relations.

    Ammons, ancient Kumeyaay Bird Songs, and Beyoncé’s visual albums. It follows Teebs, a reservation-born, queer NDN weirdo, trying to figure out his impulses/desires/history in the midst of Brooklyn rooftops, privacy in the age of the Internet, street harassment, suicide, boys boys boys, literature, colonialism, religion, leaving one's 20s, and a love/hate relationship with English. He’s plagued by an indecision, unsure of which obsessions, attractions, and impulses are essentially his, and which are the result of Christian conversion, hetero-patriarchal/colonialist white supremacy, homophobia, Bacardi, gummy candy, and not getting laid. IRL asks, what happens to a modern, queer indigenous person a few generations after his ancestors were alienated from their language, their religion, and their history? Teebs feels compelled towards “boys, burgers,booze,” though he begins to suspect there is perhaps a more ancient goddess calling to him behind art, behind music, behind poetry.

    Reginald Dwayne Betts confronts the funk of postincarceration existence and examines prison not as a static space, but as a force that enacts pressure throughout a person’s life.The poems move between traditional and newfound forms with power and agility—from revolutionary found poems created by redacting court documents to the astonishing crown of sonnets that serves as the volume’s radiant conclusion. Drawing inspiration from lawsuits filed on behalf of the incarcerated, the redaction poems focus on the ways we exploit and erase the poor and imprisoned from public consciousness. Traditionally, redaction erases what is top secret; in Felon, Betts redacts what is superfluous, bringing into focus the profound failures of the criminal justice system and the inadequacy of the labels it generates.Challenging the complexities of language, Betts animates what it means to be a "felon."

    From August 23, 2005, the day Tropical Depression Twelve developed, through August 28 when it became a Category Five storm with its “scarlet glare fixed on the trembling crescent,” to the heartbreaking aftermath, these poems evoke the horror that unfolded in New Orleans as America watched it on television.Assuming the voices of flailing politicians, the dying, their survivors, and the voice of the hurricane itself, Smith follows the woefully inadequate relief effort and stands witness to families held captive on rooftops and in the Superdome. She gives voice to the thirty-four nursing home residents who drowned in St. Bernard Parish and recalls the day after their deaths when George W. Bush accompanied country singer Mark Willis on guitar:The cowboy grins through the terrible din,***And in the Ninth, a choking woman wailsLook like this country done left us for dead.An unforgettable reminder that poetry can still be “news that stays news,” Blood Dazzler is a necessary step toward national healing.Patricia Smith is the author of four previous collections of poetry, including Teahouse of the Almighty, winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the Paterson Poetry Prize. A record-setting, national poetry slam champion, she was featured in the film Slamnation, on the HBO series Def Poetry Jam, and is a frequent contributor to Harriet, the Poetry Foundation’s blog.

    As Rumi said, "Love will find its way through all languages on its own". In 'teaching my mother how to give birth', Warsan's debut pamphlet, we witness the unearthing of a poet who finds her way through all preconceptions to strike the heart directly. Warsan Shire is a Kenyan-born Somali poet and writer who is based in London. Born in 1988, she is an artist and activist who uses her work to document narratives of journey and trauma. Warsan has read her work internationally, including recent readings in South Africa, Italy and Germany, and her poetry has been translated into Italian, Spanish and Portuguese.

    Told in her own inimitable style, this book transcends genres and categories: guidebook, memoir, poetry, and pure delight.Here in short spellbinding essays are glimpses of the tumultuous life that led Angelou to an exalted place in American letters and taught her lessons in compassion and fortitude: how she was brought up by her indomitable grandmother in segregated Arkansas, taken in at thirteen by her more worldly and less religious mother, and grew to be an awkward, six-foot-tall teenager whose first experience of loveless sex paradoxically left her with her greatest gift, a son.Whether she is recalling such lost friends as Coretta Scott King and Ossie Davis, extolling honesty, decrying vulgarity, explaining why becoming a Christian is a “lifelong endeavor,” or simply singing the praises of a meal of red rice–Maya Angelou writes from the heart to millions of women she considers her extended family. Like the rest of her remarkable work, Letter to My Daughter entertains and teaches; it is a book to cherish, savor, re-read, and share.“I gave birth to one child, a son, but I have thousands of daughters. You are Black and White, Jewish and Muslim, Asian, Spanish speaking, Native Americans and Aleut. You are fat and thin and pretty and plain, gay and straight, educated and unlettered, and I am speaking to you all. Here is my offering to you.”–from Letter to My Daughter

    Tell My Horse is an invaluable resource and fascinating guide. Based on Zora Neale Hurston’s personal experience in Haiti and Jamaica, where she participated as an initiate rather than just an observer of voodoo practices during her visits in the 1930s, this travelogue into a dark world paints a vividly authentic picture of ceremonies and customs and superstitions of great cultural interest.

    The passionate nature and originality of Ferry’s prosodic daring works astonishing transformations that take your breath away. In poem after poem, his diction modulates beautifully between plainspoken high eloquence and colloquial vigor, making his distinctive speech one of the most interesting and ravishing achievements of the past half century. Ferry has fully realized both the potential for vocal expressiveness in his phrasing and the way his phrasing plays against—and with—his genius for metrical variation. His vocal phrasing thus becomes an amazingly flexible instrument of psychological and spiritual inquiry. Most poets write inside a very narrow range of experience and feeling, whether in free or metered verse. But Ferry’s use of meter tends to enhance the colloquial nature of his writing, while giving him access to an immense variety of feeling. Sometimes that feeling is so powerful it’s like witnessing a volcanologist taking measurements in the midst of an eruption.     Ferry’s translations, meanwhile, are amazingly acclimated English poems. Once his voice takes hold of them they are as bred in the bone as all his other work. And the translations in this book are vitally related to the original poems around them. From Bewilderment:OctoberThe day was hot, and entirely breathless, soThe remarkably quiet remarkably steady leaf fallSeemed as if it had no cause at all.The ticking sound of falling leaves was likeThe ticking sound of gentle rainfall asThey gently fell on leaves already fallen,Or as, when as they passed them in their falling,Now and again it happened that one of them touchedOne or another leaf as yet not falling,Still clinging to the idea of being summer:As if the leaves that were falling, but not the day,Had read, and understood, the calendar.

    Likewise Swensen’s lyrics, which, with elliptical phrasing and play between visual and aural, change the act of seeing—and reading—offering glimpses of the spirit (or ghost) that enters a poem where the rational process breaks down.From “The Invention of Streetlights”Certain cells, it’s said, can generate light on their own.There are organisms that could fit on the head of a pin.and light entire rooms. .Throughout the Middle Ages, you could hire a man.on any corner with a torch to light you home. were lamps made of horn.and from above a loom of moving flares, we watched.Notre Dame seem small. .Now the streets stand still. .By 1890, it took a pound of powdered magnesium.to photograph a midnight ball.“Goest, sonorous with a hovering ‘ghost’ which shimmers at the root of all things, is a stunning meditation—even initiation—on the act of seeing, proprioception, and the alchemical properties of light as it exists naturally and inside the human realm of history, lore, invention and the ‘whites’ of painting. Light becomes the true mistress and possibly the underlying language of all invention. Swensen’s poetry documents a penetrating ‘intellectus’—light of the mind—by turns fragile, incandescent, transcendent.”—Anne Waldman

    Central to this project is a desire to recognize the lives of Eritrean refugees who have been made invisible by years of immigration crisis, refugee status, exile, and resulting statelessness. The recipient of a 2015 Whiting Award for Poetry, Girmay's newest collection elegizes and celebrates life, while wrestling with the humanistic notion of seeing beyond: seeing violence, seeing grace, and seeing each other better."to the sea"great storage house, historyon which we rode, we touchedthe brief pulse of your flutteringpages, spelled with salt & life,your rage, your indifferenceyour gentleness washing our feet,all of you going onwhether or not we live,to you we bring our carnationsyellow & pink, how they floatlike bright sentences atopyour memory's dark hairAracelis Girmay is the author of three poetry collections, the black maria; Kingdom Animalia, which won the Isabella Gardner Award and was a finalist for the NBCC Award; and Teeth. The recipient of a 2015 Whiting Award, she has received grants and fellowships from the Jerome, Cave Canem, and Watson foundations, as well as Civitella Ranieri and the NEA. She currently teaches at Hampshire College's School for Interdisciplinary Arts and in Drew University's low residency MFA program. Originally from Santa Ana, California, she splits her time between New York and Amherst, Massachusetts.

    These proletarian heroes, with names like Lonnie, Loo, Sweet Pea, and Packy, work the furnaces, forges, slag heaps, assembly lines, and loading docks at places with unglamorous names like Brass Craft or Feinberg and Breslin’s First-Rate Plumbing and Plating. Only Studs Terkel’s Working approaches the pathos and beauty of this book. But Levine’s characters are also significant for their inner lives, not merely their jobs. They are unusually artistic, living ‘at the borders of dreams.’ One reads The Tempest ‘slowly to himself’; another ponders a diagonal chalk line drawn by his teacher to suggest a triangle, the roof of a barn, or the mysterious separation of ‘the dark from the dark.’ What Work Is ranks as a major work by a major poet . . . very accessible and utterly American in tone and language.” —Daniel L. Guillory, Library Journal

    Moments of grace, eros, and beauty are braided with shudders of terror and threats of ecological destruction, as Sze moves nimbly through intersections of the disparate and divergent. Using formal disruption, legible erasure, and a diversity of voices—lichen on a ceiling, salt on the table, a man behind on his rent—each page transmutes simplicity into simultaneity, and chaos into compelling song. Sze is a Pulitzer finalist and a widely-revered poet, whose exquisite craft continues to expand our view: there are “so many / worlds to this world.”