Like the poetry-mother in this debut novel, Maso works to ensure her readers understand and come to accept sorrow as a knowable and tactile presence. Narrating a family story through the voice of a young writer whose mother has recently been killed, Maso invites readers to experience firsthand both women's love and courage, capabilties of imagination, their persistence of memory, and generosity of spirit.It is this same generosity that allows readers the transformative intimacy Ghost Dance has to offer. Like her artist-protagonists, Maso's subject as well as medium is language, and she is brave and dangerous in her command of it. She abandons traditional narrative forms in favor of a shaped communication resembling Beckett and rivalling his evocative skill. Immersed in dilated and intense prose, the readers view is a privilege one, riding the crest of clear expression as it navigates the tangled terrain of loss and desperate sorrow.

    It is only through music that she finds the freedom to temporarily escape and dream of a better life for herself, nurturing this hard-won refuge throughout the vagaries of unexpected motherhood and an absent husband, and relying on her talent to build a future for her family.Orphaned Mahsa also grows up in the shadow of loss, sent to relatives in Pakistan after the death of her parents. Struggling to break free, she escapes to Montreal, leaving behind her first love, Kamal. But the threads of her past are not so easily severed, and she finds herself forced into an arranged marriage.For Mahsa, too, music becomes her solace and allows her to escape from her oppressive circumstances.When Katherine and Mahsa meet, they find in each other a kindred spirit as well as a musical equal, and their lives are changed irrevocably. Together, they inspire and support one another, fusing together their cultures, their joys, and their losses—just as they collaborate musically in the language of free-form, improvisational jazz.Under the Visible Life takes readers from the bustling harbour of Karachi to the palpable political tension on the streets of 1970s Montreal to the smoky jazz clubs of New York City. Deeply affecting, vividly rendered, and sweeping in scope, it is also an exploration of the hearts of two unforgettable women: a meditation on how hope can remain alive in the darkest of times when we have someone with whom to share our burdens.

    Journeying between his native Ulster and his adopted London, he balances ideas of home and flight, the need for belonging and the need to remain outside. Formally deft, rhetorically fresh, these poems never shy from difficult choices, exploring cruelty and vengeance wherever they may be found: in love, in work and against political backdrops. But these are brave, resolute writings that resist despair at all times, affirming instead the need to rebuild and to right oneself, to dust down and carry on.

    Mythic themes as well as many other topics are masterfully explored in this rich selection of 134 lyrics chiefly selected from six volumes of verse published between 1889 and 1914. Among the poems included are "The Stolen Child" and "Down by the Salley Gardens" (Crossways, 1889); "To the Rose upon the Rood of Time," "The Lake Isle of Innisfree," "When You Are Old," and "To Ireland in the Coming Times" (The Rose, 1893); "The Song of Wandering Aengus" and "A Poet to His Beloved" (The Wind Among the Reeds, 1899); "The Song of Red Hanrahan" (In the Seven Woods, 1903); "No Second Troy" and "The Fascination of What's Difficult" (The Green Helmet and Other Poems, 1910); "To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing" and "To a Shade" (Responsibilities, 1914); and many more. This representative selection offers readers a splendid sampling of the distinctive Yeatsian voice — romantic, yearning, full of the magic and mysticism Yeats imbibed as a boy in the West of Ireland, later counterbalanced by an anguished realism grounded in the poet's nationalistic and political sympathies.

    Summer Knowledge won for him both the prestigious Bollingen Prize in Poetry and the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Award. lronically, indeed tragically, the praise and prizes Schwartz's poems received did not forestall his decline, and this, his poetic testament, proved to be a final one as well. Overcome by mental illness, alienated from his friends and supporters, he disappeared from the literary scene, in the end to die in 1966 in an obscure Broadway hotel. The tragedy of his life pales before the triumph of his art and craft. Selected Poems clearly places him among the foremost poets of his generation.

    Harryette Mullen is the mixer. Street, jive, down-home post-mod speech meet at the meat market. Food may be the subject of these short prose-poems, but look at us, teasing ourselves with endless adverts to buy, consume more and better - so long as its packaged right, full color box and shrink-wrapped.

    Peopled with "ambassadors from the Netherworld"--the orphaned and abused, the lost and addicted--Cruz leads us through this "traveling minstrel show / Called girlhood--" which is at once tragic and magical.

    Sara Peters combines poetry and short prose vignettes to create a singular, unflinching portrait of a Town in which the lives of girls and women are shaped by the brutality meted upon them and by their acts of defiance and yearning towards places of safety and belonging. Through lucid detail, sparkling imagery and illumination, Peters' individual characters and the collective of The Town leap vividly, fully formed off the page. A hybrid in form, I Become a Delight to My Enemies is an awe-inspiring example of the exquisite force of words to shock and to move, from a writer of exceptional talent and potential.

     Juiced on the ecstasy of self-belief: I have to live. A burgeoning erotics of psychic boldness: I have to live. In which sensitivity is recognized as wealth: I have to live. Trumpeting the forensic authority of the heart: I have to live. This is original ancient poetry. It fashions a universe from its mouth.

    "But there is wisdom/ in the hour in which a boy/ sits in his room listening," says the first poem, and Lee's silent willingness to step outside himself imbues Rose with a rare sensitivity. The images Lee finds, such as the rose and the apple, are repeated throughout the book, crossing over from his father's China to his own America. Every word becomes transformative, as even his father's blindness and death can become beautiful. There is a strong enough technique here to make these poems of interest to an academic audience and enough originality to stun readers who demand alternative style and subject matter. — Rochelle Ratner, formerly Poetry Editor, "Soho Weekly News," New York

    Asian & Asian American Studies. Translated from the Japanese by Sawako Nakayasu. The first comprehensive collection of one of Japan's foremost modernists to appear in English translation, THE COLLECTED POEMS OF CHIKA SAGAWA is an essential book. The project received a grant from the Japan Foundation, and poems from it have appeared in Poetry, Asymptote, Fascicle, and elsewhere.

    They were also used as guerrilla theatre. The poems in this edition address some of the history of the past 20 years and were written as the various occasions arose.

    Splendid translations of the poems, with the Russian on a facing page, and a fresh, colloquial version of Mayakovsky's dramatic masterpiece, The Bedbug.

    Galway Kinnell's poetry has always been marked by richness of language, devotion to the things and creatures of the world, and an effort to transform every understanding into the universality of art.

    This book, Olds's first, was published when she was 37, and it launched her Pulitzer-winning career.I am trying to write myway out of the closed boxredolent of cedar. Satancomes to me in the locked boxand says, I'll get you out. SayMy father is a shit. I saymy father is a shit and Satanlaughs and says, It's opening.