Some might say he's a strange boy. He's smart, sensitive—and convinced he has secret super-powers. Life for him and his brother is a constant whirl of would-be step-families and overbearing friends and relations. And even aged ten, he's finding he's not sure what he thinks about girls when 14-year-old John down the road seems so much more interesting.

    Brown’s poetic concerns are both broad and intimate, and at their very core a distillation of the incredibly human: What is safety? Who is this nation? Where does freedom truly lie? Brown makes mythical pastorals to question the terrors to which we’ve become accustomed, and to celebrate how we survive. Poems of fatherhood, legacy, blackness, queerness, worship, and trauma are propelled into stunning clarity by Brown’s mastery, and his invention of the duplex―a combination of the sonnet, the ghazal, and the blues―testament to his formal skill. The Tradition is a cutting and necessary collection, relentless in its quest for survival while revelling in a celebration of contradiction.

    The poems in this collection reach dazzling heights while being firmly grounded in the everyday. Traveling by train, lying on a beach, and listening to jazz on the radio are the seemingly ordinary activities whose hidden textures are revealed by Collins's poetic eye. With clarity, precision, and enviable wit, Collins transforms those moments we too often take for granted into brilliant feats of creative imagination. Nine Horses is a poetry collection to savor and to share.

    Dajani and his swans; Sitti Khadra, who never lost her peace inside.Maybe they have something to tell us.Naomi Shihab Nye has been writing about being Arab-American, about Jerusalem, about the West Bank, about family all her life. These new and collected poems of the Middle East -- sixty in all -- appear together here for the first time.

    Fusing pornography and postfeminist theory, transcript and tell-all, these playful, penetrating poems and stories reach off the page in search of what it is to be known, both to the masses and to the "Other."

    There's snow in Israel; the Thames is overflowing; and an iceberg separated from the Fjords in Norway is expected to drift just off the coast of Scotland. As ice water melts into the Atlantic, frenzied London residents evacuate by the thousands for warmer temperatures down south--but not Dylan. Grieving and ready to build life anew, he heads north to bury his mother's and grandmother's ashes on the Scottish islands where they once lived. Hundreds of miles away, twelve-year-old Estella and her survivalist mother, Constance, scrape by in the snowy, mountainous Highlands, preparing for a record-breaking winter. Living out of a caravan, they spend their days digging through landfills, searching for anything with restorative and trading value. When Dylan arrives in their caravan park in the middle of the night, life changes course for Estella and Constance. Though the weather worsens, his presence brings a new light to daily life, and when the ultimate disaster finally strikes, they'll all be ready. The Sunlight Pilgrims is a visionary story of courage and resilience in the midst of nature's most violent hour. It's by turns an homage to the portentous beauty of our natural world, and to just how strong we can be, if the will and the hope is there, to survive its worst.

    Proceeding sentence by sentence, city by city, and backwards in time, poet and essayist Kazim Ali details the struggle of coming of age between cultures, overcoming personal and family strictures to talk about private affairs and secrets long held. The text is comprised of sentences that alternate in time, ranging from discursive essay to memoir to prose poetry. Art, history, politics, geography, love, sexuality, writing, and religion, and the role silence plays in each, are its interwoven themes. Bright Felon is literally "autobiography" because the text itself becomes a form of writing the life, revealing secrets, and then, amid the shards and fragments of experience, dealing with the aftermath of such revelations. Bright Felon offers a new and active form of autobiography alongside such texts as Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee, Lyn Hejinian's My Life, and Etel Adnan's In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country. A reader's companion is available at http: //brightfelonreader.site.wesleyan.edu/

    Famous and beloved during her lifetime all over Latin America and in Europe, Mistral has never been known in North America as she deserves to be. The reputation of her more flamboyant and accessible friend and countryman Pablo Neruda has overshadowed hers, and she has been officially sentimentalised into a 'poetess' of children and motherhood. Translations, and even selections of her work in Spanish, have tended to underplay the darkness, the strangeness, and the raging intensity of her poems of grief and pain, the yearning power of her evocations of the Chilean landscape, the stark music of her Round Dances, the visionary splendour of her Hymns of America. During her lifetime Mistral published four books: Desolation, Tenderness, Clearcut, and Winepress. These are included in the 'Complete' Nobel edition published in Madrid; the Poem of Chile, her last book, was printed years after her death. Le Guin includes poems from all five books in this volume, with particular emphasis on the later work. The intelligence and passion of Le Guin's selection and translation wil

    The problems of everyday living accumulate and begin to torture Joy, who blames her problems not on her work or on the accidental drowning of her illicit lover, but on herself. While painful and deeply serious, this is a novel of great warmth and energy: it's the wit and irony found in moments of despair that prove to be Joy's salvation. First published by Polygon in 1989 and Dalkey Archive Press in 1994, now available again.

    Reveling in form and sound, McKibbens's writing takes back control, undaunted by the idea of sinking its teeth into the ugliest moments of life, while still believing―and looking for―the good underneath all the bruising.

    The story begins with the death of the community's esteemed rabbi, which sets in motion plans for a memorial service and the search for a replacement. The rabbi's nephew and likely successor, Dovid, calls his cousin Ronit in New York to tell her that her father has died. Ronit, who left the community long ago to build a life for herself as a career woman, returns home when she hears the news, and her reappearance exposes tears in the fabric of the community.Steeped in Jewish philosophy and teachings, Disobedience is a perceptive and thoughtful exploration of the laws and practices that have governed Judaism for centuries, and continue to hold sway today. Throughout the novel, Alderman retells stories from the Torah -- Judaism's fundamental source -- and the interplay between these tales and the struggles of the novel's unique characters wields enormous power and wisdom, and will surely move readers to tears.

    Brave in its nakedness, her work like a lucid stream enjoys itself as it keeps its surefooted course. Written with the precision only passion can ensure, the poems commend us to the gay gravity of angels. This is a collection to be indeed relished and prized.' - Theodore Weiss

    Emerging out oa a life in shich, the poet's words, "each day was the only day", Menasches work has a mysterious simplicity, a religious intensity, and a lingering emotional force.

    More than a collection of poems, this book serves as a survival guide for anyone who has ever been a daughter. Knotted with gritty tales of addiction, mental illness, and girlhood, Redhead and the Slaughter King is the prequel to every time someone asked the question, “how the hell did I end up here?”

    Burn Lake weaves together the experience of life in the rapidly changing American Southwest with the peculiar journey of Don Juan de Oñate, who was dispatched from Mexico City in the late sixteenth- century by Spanish royalty to settle the so-called New Mexico Province, of which little was known. A letter that was sent to Oñate by the Viceroy of New Spain, asking that should he come upon the North Sea in New Mexico, he should give a detailed report of "the configuration of the coast and the capacity of each harbor" becomes the inspiration for many of the poems in this artfully composed debut.