“The Golls’ love poems of thier thirty year love affair, the “10,000 dawns” are little known even by those who know of the Goll’s poetry. But given these translations, this book might just take on new importance by seeing these as “mystical ecology” poems. They are about the act of loving within the context of the natural world, which in the end is about the only thing of real importance. The book is part of White Pine’s “Companions for the Journey” series, described as “designed to be carried along on your journey thorugh life.” And there couldn’t have been a better fit for this thought provoking series than this book.”

—Joe Napora - Asheville Poetry Review

"Unlike the Surrealists, Goll loved a real woman, who was an unchanging presence in his life. He and his wife Claire formed a turbulent love-world of which he wrote continuously. And it may be that Goll will be remembered finally for these poems. Their simple visionary grace, the ease with which they build a spiritual moment out of commonplace, almost conventional images, make the love poems unique in modern poetry." - Paul Zweig

"There are very few things like this in modern literature: Yvan and Claire Golls' Ten Thousand Dawns--Dix Mille Aubes--the very title of which has always brought tears to my eyes." -Kenneth Rexroth

Three Hundred Tang Poems may very well have been the best selling, the most avidly read, and the most diligently studied, of any poetry book in history anywhere in the world, from the moment in 1763 or 1764 when it first appeared in bookshops throughout China, until well after the start of the twentieth century. Educated readers of Chinese all over the world continue to enjoy its very broad and representative selection of poets, including great names like Li Bai (Li Po), Du Fu (Tu Fu), and Wang Wei, as well as a splendid sampling of poems by the rest of the poets who helped to make the Tang the “Golden Age” of Chinese poetry.

The instant success of Three Hundred Tang Poems isn’t surprising, since its contents were, after all, the essence refined from the best of many earlier collections and anthologies, the finest poems from the greatest poets. If you’re an avid reader of Chinese poetry you will be delighted to find old favorites here. All the forms of poetry as it was practiced in the Tang were represented, as well as its best and its most famous poets, a fact that certainly contributed to its success among readers who were aspiring writers.

Geoffrey Waters received a PhD in Classic Chinese from Indiana University and worked most of his life in international banking. He died in 2007. His other books of translation include Broken Willow: The Complete Poems of Yu Xuanji , White Crane: Love Songs of the Sixth Dalai Lama, and Three Elegies of Ch'u.

Michael Farman is a  retired Electronics Engineer. Early in his career he studied Mandarin at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London University, but began translating Chinese classical and ancient poetry comparatively late in life. His translations have since appeared frequently in literary and translation journals and several anthologies. His chapbook Clouds and Rain  was published by Pipers’ Ash in 2003. As an active member of ALTA, he has organized and contributed to conference panels and workshops and also published articles and book reviews in Translation Review.            

David Lunde is a poet and translator. His most recent books include: Blues for Port City, Heart Transplants & Other Misappropriations, Nightfishing in Great Sky River, Instead, and The Carving of Insects, Bian Zhilin's collected poems co-translated with Mary M.Y. Fung, which won the 2007 PEN USA Translation Award. He is also the translator of Breaking the Willow: Poems of Parting, Exile, Separation, and Reunion.

“The road to Shu is hard, but harder still is to convey the spirit with which these poems were first written over a thousand years ago. And yet Geoffrey Waters has done just that.  Joined by his friends Michael Farman and David Lunde, he has given us translations that feel alive, as if they were more like a dance between poet and translator, both of whom live on through the beauty of these poems.   The night is young, and this book is full of music.” 

—Red Pine

“Three Hundred Tang Poems are three hundred gold birds singing in mountains, in mist, outside his brushwood gate. Three canny mellifluous translators, Waters, Farman & Lunde, have carried Tang song into English songs. I must pause at Geoff Waters, my favorite student, my later master in Chinese thought and verse, and now horribly disappeared in midstream. In Wang Wei, Geoff's gold birds are "singing madly in front of Five Willows' gate. On his exquisitely recreated "Mountains empty after a fresh rain," I ask, with tears, "Will you be staying longer my fine young friend?"”

—Willis Barnstone

A stunning story about a woman's return from the U.S. to a homeland that no longer exists.

Pushing forty and an oversized load of responsibility, a clash of cultures finally causes a Yugoslav-born woman to go to Yugoslavia to reclaim her father, her responsibility, her mooring. Bit by bit, she unearths the past, examining the emotions and conf licts of her immediate family and the motley, indomitable nation she stubbornly loves. Strong enough to cope with the conflicting demands of modern womanhood, she is undone by the slow, maddening disintegration of the old, disillusioned, card-carrying bu ilder of Yugoslav Socialism. As she watches him and everything he fought for crumble into dust, she loses her sense and measure of who she is.

“the horrors that have befallen the former Yugoslavia, it is not surprising that many would look back on the Communist era nostalgically. Franklin revisits the twilight years of the Tito era, a world full of eccentric family and friends. Serbs, Croats, and Muslims coexisting happily before being engulfed in civil war. In this semiautobiographical novel, an Americanized Yugoslav woman returns home for a visit and to check up on her aging father, a war hero and former dip lomat whose declining health mirrors the inevitable disintegration of the nation. The interpersonal dynamics between characters are reminiscent of Neil Simon's bittersweet comedies. Franklin's love for her country comes through in every sentence. Franklin has written the “perfect”expatriate novel for the end of the century.”Ted Leventhal

“you know nothing about Zen but wish to capture the spirit easily, this is the book for you. Simple elegance at its best.” -NAPRA Journal

Poems and prose by Latin America’s first Nobel Prize Laureate.

“This beautiful anthology holds the first English translation of Gabriela Mistral’s extraordinary prose and poetry . . . hidden to the mainstream no longer, here is the breathtaking lifework of a most gifted and enigmatic muse.” —NAPRA Journal

Jacqueline Joan Johnson has been awarded the Gregory Millard Fellowship for the New York Foundation for the Arts and Mid-Atlantic Writers Association Creative Writing Award in Poetry. Her poetry has appeared in numerous journals and magazines. She is th e author of Stokely Carmichael: The Story of Black Power for children and contributed to UpSouth: African American Migration and Streetlights: Illuminating Black Urban Tales.

"Carlota Caufield has given us a work of great sensuality and rare luminosity, suffused with an intelligence that is both playful and meditative. Her pleasures and discoveries become ours, her tender, often sly observations are crafted for inheritance. But it is Caulfield's devotion to the daily sacred that helps inspire our own. " --Cristina Garcia The poetry of Carlota Caulfield is characterized by journeys, by a wandering memory that seeks to travel all the world's roads, to sail to all its islands. The speakers in her poems are voyagers in perpetual transit, symbols of that wandering creature that human beings inevitably turn into when they are exiled from paradise, that is to say, from their mother's womb. The poet's eye yearns to see everything, take possession of everything, with never a pause to draw a breath. An eye that perceives all, including the fleeting passage of time and space. -Issac Goldemberg "Haunting incantatory poems by Carlota Caulfield, beautifully translated by Mary G. Berg. Writing about loss and memory and the redemption that comes of confronting the wound, Caulfield summons up the inner life in the dream music of the inexpressible." --Chana Bloch

“ In this volume Caulfield writes of lenses, mirrors, dictators, numberous writers, painters, and myths, frm all period of time, which have inspired her work. She is not a feminist nor a typical Latina poet. She does not write of her memories of Cuba, but not anguishing over its loss. Nor does she lament any descrimination, even about her background: “No one knows anything about me, only that I am a poet in transit/that I speak English with a certain indefinable accent/and that my nationality is cryptic”. She is a poet of the world, once exiled, but now she has matured, and she attempts to connect more with images her readers can comprehend.”

—Lou Pearson -  Chasqui

“Loynaz sees a shimmering world alive with emotion and high spirit. Even disappointment takes on a charged life, a flight, in her hands.” –The Small Press Book Review

“Hoping to widen the view of transnational art and break down the… barrier between so-called fine art and popular art forms, Agosin has placed fabric artists and dancers next to sculptors and painters… This collection of essays is a glorious celebration of unsung… women artists of Latin America.”

–Multicultural Review

The essence of Zen is contained in the phrases and poems presented here, along with an introduction by Gary Snyder. The sayings range from profound to mystifying to comical and appear in vivid, poetic English. First compiled in 15th century Japan, the book contains Zen phrases and verses taken from Zen classics, sutras, and the poetry of China.

In Adamantine, the poet explores the strength of stone and spirit, disarming hardness to explore the power of the human spirit to transform itself through adversity. Drawn from global news stories, the subjects of these poems range from the tallest man in the world, an Olympic medalist, and a burning monk to a family stranded in the Oregon wilderness. An ongoing investigation of the poet’s interest in the visual arts, a suite of poems contemplates the work of Goya, Warhol, Rothko, Cornell, and Calder, as well as master artists and craftsmen from the Eastern traditions.

“The freshness, luster, and charm of these poems derive not only from a superb and seemingly easeful craftsmanship, but indelibly from a generous infusion of the poet’s good heart.”  

                                    —Mike O'Connor   

 “Shin Yu Pai’s new collection Adamantine bristles with taut, startling language that continues to yield surprises even after readers realize that they are at serious play within the fields of the human heart, a realm in which "we must know when to give in." Diverse personae inhabit these poems, rendering insight into their traumas, sacrifices, and psychic pathos: from the "ruined man in a wheelchair" strapped in place on a city bus; to the Chinese migrant worker who suffered a brain hemorrhage that left her comatose, and who was almost cremated alive because her family couldn’t afford her hospital care; to the Vietnamese Buddhist monk immolating himself in protest at Indochinese oppression, "his heart refusing to burn"–this line repeated thrice like a mantra or prayer. This is poetry of compassion and clarity that "sees past the icon" as the poet makes a journey to China to explore her own ambivalence toward "traditions that constitute / a personal inheritance." These poems, "incised with oracle / markings" whose urgency is heightened in the poet’s ancestral legacy, both "crush illusion" and take "the Buddha back to his origins." Reading these poems, we are gratified that the poet has "come / to make this offering" of language to us.”

–Carolyne Wright

“The heart of these poems broke open even before this poet was born.  Shin Yu Pai has maintained a practice to keep it this way, so that she and all of us might live in that open, compassionate field with neither boundary nor end.  How wise of her to know that what is adamantine is the open heart. Fearless seeing, ancient mutterings on contemporary pathways and boulevards, inventive poetics, merciless memories and tender, knowing hands all take their proper place here, where she finds “every event a mirror / of mind & heart.”  Her eyes will help you open what you’ve held onto too tightly, too long, and her heart will open the rest of you from the first word to the last.”

—Peter Levitt

Practice

Pema Norbu Gompo

shares with me a story:

at reaching thirty

thousand prostrations,

glancing into the vanity

to see a trimmed down

waist w/out love

handles – starting over

from zero, more than

once to better

polish his intent

my own practice:

carving holes in

poetry books w/

exacto blade & straight

edge, intervention as

design concept

a hole too uneven

a hole too big

a hole too ragged

a hole too small

every event a mirror

of mind & heart,

imperfect despite

a template for success,

but isn’t there

only this work?

day after day

heaps of words piling

up on my writing desk

Shin Yu Pai, born in 1975, is a second-generation Taiwanese-American poet and photographer. She grew up in Southern California and received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, with additional graduate level studies conducted at the Naropa Institute where she received the Hiro Yamagata and Zora Neale Hurston Scholarships. Currently, she is assistant curator for the Wittliff Collections.

Shin Yu Pai is the author of structure of the inner ear (Cinematheque Press, forthcoming), Haiku Not Bombs (Booklyn Artists Alliance, 2008), Works on Paper (Convivio Bookworks, 2007), Sightings: Selected Works [2000-2005] (1913 Press, 2007), The Love Hotel Poems (Press Lorentz, 2006), Unnecessary Roughness (xPress(ed), 2005), Equivalence (La Alameda, 2003), and Ten Thousand Miles of Mountains and Rivers (Third Ear Books, 1998). Her work is anthologized in America Zen: A Gathering of Poets (Bottom Dog Press) and The Wisdom Anthology of North American Buddhist Poetry (Wisdom Publications).

 In addition to her work as a poet, Shin Yu has exhibited her visual work at The Paterson Museum, The Dallas Museum of Art, The McKinney Avenue Contemporary, and The Three Arts Club of Chicago. She has collaborated with individual artists and groups as diverse as Hedwig Dances and the Hudson Exploited Theater Company.

“Zawacki deftly assembles a panorama of viewpoints that provide us with a portrait of a fragmented, troubled, but always dedicated populace… What strikes the reader is the refreshing lyrical moment, that transcendent wellspring of the poet who finds in the world the stuff of beauty and then creates a language to communicate it to us.”

–Multicultural Review

“A generous anthology of poetry, expository prose, and fiction… [with] uniformly intense fiction offerings… A very interesting collection.” –Kirkus Reviews

“Few works can compare with this anthology of Slovenian literature… this book exudes a gentle, civilized, almost Viennese sadness that contrasts with the often harsh subject matter.”

–Library Journal

The “us” of Frost’s title evokes both the intimacy of lovers and the anonymity of strangers, the negotiations of domestic life and the chance encounters that shape our daily, public lives.  Throughout the narratives in All of Us, miscommunication threatens havoc, as time and again, these poems present misfires of communication, gaps in memory, and the simple limitations of language that cause frustration and isolation. The title poem explores a cityscape where community is vertically compressed, and strangers – who are also neighbors – appear eye-to-eye at the peep holes of their locked doors.  What is the nature of what Ezra Pound called “commerce” between us? Frost explores this question with passion, humor and pathos.  

Elisabeth Frost is the author of The Feminist Avant-Garde in American Poetry and co-editor of Innovative Women Poets: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry and Interviews (both from Univ. of Iowa Press). Her chapbook, Rumor, is available from Mermaid Tenement Press. She is Associate Professor of English and Women's Studies at Fordham University.

“The persistence of bad dreams, the meaning of illness, the acquaintances and the distractions of apartment life ("the stairs in the walk-up ringing"), erotic attachment and filial attention energize the elegant poems, mostly in prose paragraphs, of this debut. Frost already has some reputation as a critic of difficult poetry, but those who expect provocative, frame-breaking poems will not get them. Mostly, Frost's work is more straightforward. Her people view the ordinary life course--birth, growth, health; parenthood, illness, death--with a tenacious combination of fear and devotion. A grandmother holds her first grandchild "as if she had always known how," and a "tall man in his sixties" recovers almost completely from amnesia: "He remembered everything except how he had gotten to where he was after boarding the train. It hardly mattered, now his life was back." One couple tries to decide whether to have children, whether to devote their lives "to the well-being of another, unformed and vaguely like oneself." Another couple watches a medical show together and then decide "They ought to watch less TV. It seems too much to hope for, health, now that they've seen it up close."”

—Publishers Weekly

“Frost’s debut collection, All of Us, uses the seemingly narrative prose poem to turn the unconscious conscious. What is unseen but seen and what is unspoken but spoken becomes apparent, as quotidian moments create layers to a voice that probes its own resonance only to find itself to be in all of us. Through the deep intelligence of these poems, Frost has composed transparent channels into our own lives―a stunning achievement.” 

―Claudia Rankine 

“In the white space out beyond Elisabeth Frost’s cropped tales, subtle situations, plausible and bizarre fantasias, you may sense the ghosts of Kafka and Borges strolling. But these delicious, low-key, disturbing and always surprising prose poems, with their train of lyric elegance, are a world unto themselves. All of Us is a compulsively readable book.” 

―Alicia Ostriker 

“Reading Elisabeth Frost’s extraordinary debut collection, All of Us, we enter a postmodern scene edged with irony, precise and elegiac. . . . Frost refuses the artifice (and comforts) of closure, observing that ‘All talk is slippery.’ The ground of these brilliant poems slips from caustic wit to still-palpable mourning, and All of Us opens to a tender and finally capacious vision.” 

―Cynthia Hogue 

“Elisabeth Frost’s poems explore romantic love, family, and the outer social realm with passion and uncanny perception. The question that sparks Frost’s creation is deeply philosophical and epistemological: how do we know each other? She asks how we read and more particularly how we read each other. . . . All of Us presents a discerning vision of possibility and hope about the way all of us stand in relation to the concrete and spiritual universe.” 

―Aliki Barnstone

Always Filling, Always Full is an exciting collection of tanka, the ancient Japanese five-line poem. Chula’s tanka are concise, moving, alive perceptions of the full range of human feelings. Working within the sinuous tradition of the Japanese tanka form, Chula has found a voice that bows both in the direction of earlier works and towards the unknown:the next poem, whose perception is always ungraspable until the words fall into place.

The ancient Japanese form of tanka has been used since literature was first recorded in the Kojiki in 712. By the 1600s, however, tanka had fallen out of favor. The form was revived in the early 1900s, and has grown steadily since. "I do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the men of old; I seek the things they sought," said Basho, and the same could be said by Chula. This collection blends Japanese tradition with an American sensibility to produce poems concise, moving, and filled with vivid perception of the range of human feeling. Maggie Chula spent twelve years living and studying in Kyoto, Japan, and has published three collections of haiku. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

This major anthology presents one hundred poems drawn form a tradition spanning one thousand years of Korean poets writing in Classic Chinese. Kim Joh-gil captures the elegant simplicity and emotional complexity of the originals in three stunning translations. Up until the 17th century, the bulk of Korean poetry was written in Chinese, the language of poets, scholars, and monks. This work became an integral part of Korean literary tradition. Among the Flowering Reeds, which introduces this important poetic tradition to the English-speaking audience, includes 100 poems spanning more than 1,000 years. Lovers of Chinese and Japanese poetry will delight in these translations, which capture both the elegant simplicity and the emotional complexity of the originals.

Kim Jong-gilis a Professor Emeritus of English at Korea University in Seoul and is a member of the Korean Academy of Arts. His works of translation include The Snow Falling on Chagall’s Village: Poems of Kim Ch’un-Su. He is presently completing an anthology of modern Korean poetry.

“The poems are by turns personal, spontaneous, reflective, and occasionally dangerous—that is, politically suicidal—works penned by thoughtful Koreans from the ninth- through the early twentieth-centuries. Anyone interested in tasting classical Korean poetry… cannot do better than to start with this collection.”

– Multicultural Review

“Occasion of Sin is not to be missed.” -Small Press

“explores dark emotions and thoughts with wonderful subtlety; he has a deliciously wicked wit and great range.” -Publishers Weekly

“It's unusual to call a book of poetry a 'page turner,' but this collection, with the knocking and jostling of words that mark the peculiar rhythm and appeal of the prose poem, is just that. Holly Iglesias has an uncanny ability to capture whole sweeps of history in a few lines, while her eye and ear for the quotidian result in the characters pulling us from one remarkable incident to another as if they had physically taken us by the elbow, whispering urgently. Here is nostalgia without sentimentality, menace without despair, confession without bathos.”

                                   —Marie Harris

“Reading Angles of Approach is like getting out of the car after a road trip, having followed a map of blue highways through places both strange and familiar. The poems uncover the peculiar, contending histories of transplanted cultures that shape the American landscape, and a resilient self in the midst of conflict. Through a sensory weave of rich detail and intimately exhilarating language, Iglesias places us in the light of those small answers that mean the most.”
                       —Gary Copeland Lilley

“The cumulative effect of Holly Iglesias’ gorgeous prose poems in Angles of Approach is both hypnotic and disturbing. She is witness and actor alike, a citizen of American soil both running from and caught deep in its grand mistakes and its sharp-edged minutiae. There is humor to keep us from despair, and there is a dark vision that begs questions. Iglesias, as a lover of history and a chronicler of its shared and intimate details, pronounces no judgments with her trim elegies. She simply renders them musical and faultless, places them side by side, and invites us to listen.”

 —Maureen Seaton, author of Cave of the Yellow Volkswagen

RHETORIC

You avoid breezy questions, the musings they call forth that do not pass for answers but nod, rather, toward some small intimation of a reason to be here, the black tulip plucked from a neighbor’s yard, or jottings on note paper the color of dusk when you nursed a carafe of vin ordinaire until the light completely faded and it was no longer safe to walk back to the hotel. You shun the phrase body of work, buckling at the image of your words in a satin-lined box, the family gazing at sentences, paragraphs, grief-struck but composed as they recall your writing implements, their evolutionary path from crayon to pencil, typewriter to laptop, a series akin to the March of Progress in school books that always started with an ape at the left margin, walking toward the low-browed homo sapiens, then an erect Neanderthal, his posture promising years of hunting and gathering, the mastery of tools that will spawn pyramids, aqueducts, monasteries sacked by barbarians, Scripture translated into vulgar tongues, kings with their own churches, conquistadors claiming entire hemispheres in the middle of the page, then bolts of textiles, kegs of rum, leg irons and cotton gins, belching smokestacks and fireproof safes loosed upon the world by titans of industry, and finally, the barrel-chested man in a homburg checking his pocket-watch as a locomotive called The 20th Century edges toward him from the right.

PROJECTOR

Motor whirring, screen emitting a smell like floor wax, Brother’s fist in front of the lens, blotting out Aunt Ruth’s head as she extends the pickle dish for the camera to see. Dust in the tube of light, antic as 8 mm film.

Children in the dark, untouched by war and all the parents know but never say. They stare at the rush of images—birthday cakes, Mother’s prize roses, a red Schwinn—jittery icons to comfort them in some future Babylon.

SERMONETTE

This morning I take as my text the third book of Ralph, where we learn of his wanderings and the conversation with demons on the open road that led to his first conversion—yes, his first, for there were to be many more, and yes again, because for him conversation was The Way, not the books by which we remember him, those most silent of conversations, but the garrulous meander that flowed so easily in the presence of strangers, that river of words with no apparent source which was—amen—the route to redemption as surely as Paul’s fall from his horse or Thomas’s probe of the Most Precious Wound.

SAINT OF SHENANIGANS  

On the lip of dark ages, a canker, a queen of deceit, her felicitous tongue but babble to boys fattened on empire. Fidgety quick, she feeds a hem inch by inch to the ravenous needle, hair littered with pins and lint, shirtwaist crusted with starch for modesty's sake. The sass of that girl, a mouth that won't quit. Barbarians, the lot of them, filthy Harps, always drunk or saying their beads.

 Oh Bridget, we pray ye, spare us the Know-nothings, their nativist spleen. Grant us patience to soothe the rage-racked heart. 

Holly Iglesias is the author of Souvenirs of a Shrunken World (Kore Press), a collection of poems focused on the 1904 World’s Fair, and a critical work, Boxing Inside the Box: Women’s Prose Poetry (Quale Press). She teaches at the University of North Carolina -Asheville and has received fellowships from the North Carolina Arts Council, the Edward Albee Foundation and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. 

“Those who cannot visit Fredonia… will be entertained and informed by this tour between book covers… [Reiff’s] exemplary study… records not only the architecture… but the history of the place itself.”

–Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians

This large, bilingual collection contains more than twenty years of poetry, including new work, arranged by themes fundamental to Agosin's artistic and critical oeuvre. Her rich Eastern European and Latin American heritage, her experiences in exile, and her profound humanistic vision all play a role as she writes about ancestors, women, children, the poor, and the disinherited. Despite the difficult material, Agosin expresses a need to rejoice in life and to believe in the possibility of change. Always searching for life's bare essentials, often in a spare language that reveals the common threads that unite us all, Agosin explores such diverse landscapes to "make beauty and order out of chaos and pain."

Marjorie Agosin is well-known as a poet, writer, critic, and human rights activist. She is editor of the critically acclaimed Secret Weavers Series of Latin American Women's writing published by White Pine Press. Agosin is a professor of Spanish at Wellesley College. Her published work includes: Ashes of Revolt, A Cross and a Star: Memoirs of a Jewish Girl in Chile, An Absense of Shadows, and Happiness.

“[An] accomplished and prolific poet offers old and new works… in [this] remarkable collection… Agosin… expresses a pan-Latin American and global sensitivity.”

– Multicultural Review

"Marjorie Agosin is one of the most lyrical and refined voices in Latin America."
-Claribel Alegria

"Agosin's poetic language engages the reader in a mesmerizing journey of inward reflection and exile."
-Isabel Allende

"Marjorie Agosin proves the power of the word to transport us to the center of her humane and human vision."
-Julia Alvarez

“The first volume of Zajc’s poems available in English, this comprehensive selection shows a maturation from early angry lament to love poems both lush and consuming. Although Zajc’s poetry invokes war and its aftermath, it is not reportage. Rather, it is witness of a sort, to an emotional life, resplendent with shadows and the relentless thrust of the earth to continue with its harvestings and sowings.”

– Forward Magazine

“Zajc… is… considered to be one of the greatest Slovenian poets and an important Central European modernist… Translator Erica Johnson Debeljak has done a smooth job of bringing Zajc’s poems into English.” – Rain Taxi

“For those who wish to delve more deeply into the long tradition of Ken poetry in Korea, White Pine Press has released Because of the Rain, the latest installemnt of their beautiful “Companions for the Journey” series. The collection spans over a thousand years, offering a distillation of zen doctrine and practise, glimpsed through a Korean lens. These are wonderful pure nuggets of Zen insight.”

—Dan Zigmond - Tricycle

This anthology presents the poetry of fifteen younger but recognized poets born after 1960 whose work explores the vertical depths of the connection to the inner or spiritual life. Vertical energy must include sensation and imagination and a movement down into the body, appetites, dirt, desires, death, and towards sunlight, time, fulfillment, purity, beauty, and opening. We need substance — poetry that will acknowledge the things of this world and the space between things.

The anthology includes an intriguing and culturally diverse group of voices including Ruth Forman, Ilya Kaminsky,  Malena Mörling, Kevin Goodan, Jay Leeming, Terrance Hayes, Luljeta Lleshanaku, Sherwin Bitsui, María Meléndez, Valzhyna Mort, Eugene Gloria, Brian Turner, Joshua Poteat, Maurice Manning, and Chris Abani. Each poet is represented by ten to fifteen poems and each had contributed new unpublished work to the book.

Norman Minnick was born and grew up in Louisville, Kentucky. He worked for a number of years in advertising and graphic design before attending Marian College in Indianapolis on a cycling scholarship. He received his B.A. in art from Marian and was accepted to the creative writing program at Florida International University in Miami. He earned his M.F.A. in 2001 and was awarded an Academy of American Poets Prize that same year. Mr. Minnick returned to Indianapolis, where lives with his wife and two young children. He was formerly the coordinator of the Vivian S. Delbrook Visiting Writers Series at Butler University.

“Here are poems from a new generation of writers who honor the magnetic fields of the real; who feel and think with full and open-eyed passion; who focus heat as the magnifying glass focuses sun: until the paper catches. Read them.”

                                              — Jane Hirshfield

“I’m impressed by these voices, voices of anxiety, of pain but also of patience and understanding. From angry prayers to prayers of disbelief, a whole gamut of letters to the invisible is present here. Younger poets are not asleep, they have been placed on alert. By who? By poetry itself, I guess.”

—Adam Zagajewski

"From corners near and far—Belarus to Nigeria, America to Albania—come these fifteen fresh poetic voices.  Some are luminous.  Some are dark. Lower your buckets into these wells.  Drink from these waters.  They quench many thirsts."

—David Shumate

Milton Rogovin’s photographs are in many major collections, and his archives were recently acquired by the Library of Congress. A true national treasure, Rogovin, now in his ninth decade, received the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Award in 1983.

“Rogovin’s work stands as one of the best examples of collaboration between the subject and the photographer, one based on mutual respect… Rogovin’s work stands at the frontier of history and contemporary photography, a place where the human subject remains enduringly powerful.”

–Afterimage

Borderland Roads is a selection of poems from the writer Kyun Ho, one of Korea's literary elite in the late 16th and early 17th centuries.  The book catalogs the Japanese invasions of Korea in 1592 and 1597-the only record of its kind of these events in poetry.  As writer, Kyun was an inheritor of the Chinese Tang style, becoming one of its first and foremost promulgators in Korea.  The poems in this book portray issues of social justice, artistic legacy and purpose, and the daily life of a Korean nobleman in the middle years of Korea's Choson Dynasty.

A selection of poems that catalogs the Japanese invasions of Korea in 1592 and 1597-the only record of its kind in poetry.  The poems in this book portray issues of social justice, artistic legacy and purpose., and the daily life of a Korean nobleman in the middle years of Korea's Choson Dynasty.

Kyun Ho (1569-1618)  was born into a noble family that for generations served Korea and her kings with distinction.  Part of Korea's literary elite, Ho wrote the first novel in Korean, Hong Kil-tong, which was recently the subject of a TV dramatization series popular in Asia; his criticism remains relevant in Korean literary studies to this day.  Ho's poetry, stylistically unusual in its time, is a poetry of plainspoken witness.  Ho lived through the Japanese invasions of Korea in 1592 and 1597, and his poetry is the only record of its kind on these events.  An outspoken social reformer, Ho's notoriety as an activist made him an easy target for political intrigues; in 1618, Ho was executed on false charges of treason as part of a political purge.

Ian Haight was the co-organizer and translator for the UN's global poetry readings held annually in Pusan, Korea from 2002-4.  He has been awarded translation grants from the Daesan Foundation, Korea Literary Translation Institute, and Baroboin Buddhist Foundation; in 2003, he was cited for translation excellence by the KLTI.  For more information, please visit ianhaight.com.

T'ae-yong Ho has been awarded several translation grants from the Daesan Foundation and Korea Literary Translation Institute.  Working from the original classical Chinese, his translations of Korean poetry have appeared in Runes, New Orleans Review, and Atlanta Review.  

“Ho Kyun's poetry is in the tradition of his master, the incomparable Tu Fu, while remaining fully his own. Writing nine centuries later, Ho's poetry strikes many parallels--the experiences of war and exile and constant struggle-- and his voice is similarly humane. This is rich and enlightening reading.”

--Sam Hamill 

“Although written four hundred years ago, the profound and spontaneous humanity of these poems will delight readers of any century. At their heart are the twin shadows of war and exile, but they are also a marvelous travelogue and a time-lapse revelation of one man’s personal joys and griefs. By turns feisty, tender, ironic, spiritual, and openly emotional, the collection give us a vivid portrait of a man living through an era of political violence and the disruption and chaos it caused. In reading Ho Kyun, I felt the thrill of discovering lost treasure. This is an important poet, and an important book. His words leave me with the eerie sense of a ghost surviving to speak truth that’s particularly relevant in our own chaotic era of corruption and war. Ho Kyun will live on my shelves next to the poet he most loved and emulated: Du Fu.”  

—Chase Twichell

"All of a sudden I understand why I like Aliki Barnstone's poems so much. They remind me of the one she has studied most - shall we call her her master - Emily Dickinson. Not in the forms, not, as such, in the music, and not in the references; but in that weird intimacy, that eerie closeness, that absolute confession of soul.... In Barnstone, too, the two worlds are intensely present, and the voice moves back and forth between them. She has the rare art of distance and closeness. It gives her her fine music, her wisdom, her form. She is a fine poet." 

— Gerald Stern

"For Aliki Barnstone, poetry seems a natural medium. The vision and cadences of these poems suggest a sensibility for which poetry is as inevitable as breathing or eating." 

—Robert Pinsky 

"Aliki Barnstone is in full bloom, silkily erotic, and radiantly intelligent." 

—Caroline Kizer

Winner of the 1993 Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets, Merrill’s previous work has received wide acclaim. A striking new collection by a poet W. S. Merwin calls "gifted, audacious, and accomplished." A prolific journalist, Merrill's most recent work, two non-fiction books on the crisis in the Balkans, have received tremendous critical acclaim. With this collection, he returns for the first time in seven years to the form closest to his heart: poetry.

"No anxiety of influence prevails here; nor is there evidence of a desire to follow any models too closely. Rather, there is a generosity that names names, offers praise, then contributes something new. Merrill lives in a landscape of names, surrounded by eloquent scraps of language allowing him to chant the senses' progress through the world.”
-John Elder, The Los Angeles Times

Christopher Merrill is Director of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa.

“Merrill renders the physicality of nature better than any other contemporary American poet. Take a look at the intense, precise verb here… and one can see that he is very careful about distributing their energy over the course of a stanza, channeling volts from line to line until it is felt viscerally and electrically.” –Verse

These poems, written during and following the Korean War, reflect the reality of living in a country torn in half by political ideologies. Comparable to the Civil War in that it pitted brother against brother, the partitioning of the country following the war carried the bitterness forward into the present and created a situation that has kept families from reuniting and left an entire generation longing to go home.

Twenty-one poets, male and female, North Korean and South Korean, well-known and long forgotten, appear in this collection, the first of its kind in English. The poems reflect the reality of living in a country torn in half by political ideologies. An introduction by translator Ji-moon Suh places the poems and the poets within a historical context that describes the suffering and despair of pitting brother against brother.

“These poems will wound you and haunt you, but the larger knowing they bring is crucial. Susan Rich is a caring citizen of every heartland.”
-Naomi Shihab Nye

Susan Rich gives us a collection of poems...generous in the range and power of their emotion.
-J. M. Coetzee

Maurice Kenny is professor at the State University of New York at Potsdam. He lives in Saranac Lake in New York State’s Adirondack Mountains. His most recent books, both from the University of Michigan Press, are Tortured Skins & Other Fictions and In the Time of the Present.

“Carving Hawk opens with ‘Truth: The Search,’ and, in a sense, the painfully honest searching continues throughout this excellent collection… Carving Hawk [is] beautifully rendered and memorably inspiring.”

–Multicultural Review

 “This collection represent five decades of work with poems that evoke strong connections to nature, history, love, and the human spirit. Carving Hawk opens with “Truth: The Search,” and, in a sense, the painful honesty searching continues throughout this excellent collection. Kenny’s exquistely crafted poems examine wide-ranging emotions, places, and relationships that yield compelling insights. “

—William Kelly - Multicultural Review

“...we meet an affronted gentleness...in the suburbs, Christ the fox cries, or dies, maimed in a snare. Deane's poems radiate the desire of the spirit to believe despite the harshness of our world.”

This bold new collection by American Book Award winner Maurice Kenny explores the intersections between life and art. Part one explores the lives of well known gay artists; part two focuses on Kenny’s often difficult relationship with his father. 

This is the first new book by this major Native American poet since Carving Hawk: New and Selected Poems.

Maurice Kenny is one of the major voices of Native American letters. His books of poetry include BetweenTwo Rivers, Tekonwatonti: Molly Brant, Blackrobe, and Carving Hawk. He has also published books of fiction and essays.

 “The world Kenny opens for us is personal, yet never sentimental. It is a world in which long-dead relatives can appear when they are needed; in which the drum sounds in rituals of curing; a world vibrant with the natural landscape.”

        —Joseph Bruchac - Small Press Review

 “Maurice Kenny stands at the forefront of his generation. Few writers of any ethnicity are destined to be remembered in the mainstream of literary history; I believe that Kenny’s contributions as a poet are among those few. He writes from the center, as our Elders would say.”

                                                            —Wendy Rose

“A master lyricist.”                       

—Joseph Bruchac

“What distinguishes the best of Kenny’s work is the almost incantory language which works to blur the distinction between the human and the rest of the natural world”

-Barry Silesky - Another Chicago Magazine  

“Hamill reminds us that the pure hunger of solitude and the constant grace of the natural world are most powerfully experienced when touched by human empathy. In the zen blues of our time, Sam Hamill's poems echo like bare bone upon bone.”—St. John

“Hamill reminds us that the pure hunger of solitude and the constant grace of the natural world are most powerfully experienced when touched by human empathy. In the zen blues of our time, Sam Hamill's poems echo like bare bone upon bone.”—St. John

“ Each man’s work [Max Jacob, Francis Ponge, and Jean Follain] represents the fulfillment of some different potential of the prose poem… [Jacob is] closest to the explosive outlaw spirit of Baudelaire and Rimbaud… The return to print ot Beth Archer Brombert’s translations of the obsessive ‘object poem’ writer Francis Ponge would in itself make this volume a significant event… These translations [of Jean Follain] are a pure joy… Anyone wishing to experience the height of the prose poem’s peculiar genius should study these inexhaustible French masters.”

–Ruminator Review

“The book is well worth a read for anyone interested in the more innovative side of the last century’s poetry. The work collected here explores the boundaries of the genre… with vivacity and style.”

–Rain Taxi

“Since the prose poem began its life as an enfant terrible, founded in rebellion against bourgeois consciousness and rejection of literary parents, is there such a thing as the prose poem in its mature form?  For an answer, we must look to where the prose poem as a self-conscious literary form has been practiced longest.  

Dreaming the Miracle is an editorially unattributed reissue of substantial gatherings of three twentieth century French prose poets, Max Jacob, Francis Ponge, and Jean Follain.  Each poet's work represents the fulfillment of some different potential of the prose poem.  Closest to the explosive outlaw spirit of Baudelaire and Rimbaud is Max Jacob, whose poems capture something of Ernst's disturbing surreal collages:

Here darkness and silence! with cloud-shaped pools of blood.  The seven wives of Bluebeard no longer in the cupboard.  All that's left of them this organdy headdress.  But there! out on the ocean, seven galleys with ropes that hang down from topsail to sea like braids on women's shoulders.  Getting closer and closer!  They're here!

(“Metempsychosis,” trans. Kulik)

The return to print of Beth Archer Brombert's translations of the obsessive “object poem” writer Francis Ponge would in itself make this volume a significant event.  Part natural historian and part linguist, Ponge typically amplifies the qualities of an ordinary thing until we perceive it as a kind of existential hero.  His peculiar virtues are suggested in this passage from a 15-page poem on shrimp:

It lies in the midst of its heaped-up weapons, its head under a helmet soldered to its thorax, generously equipped with antennae and feelers of extravagant sensitivity.

Oh, translucent vessel, indifferent to lures, you have too many organs of circumspection:  you will be betrayed by them. . . .

Perhaps the greatest poet in Dreaming the Miracle is Jean Follain.  These translations by Mary Feeney, Louise Guiney, and William Matthews, also long unavailable, are a pure joy.  Follain's prose poems look back toward the turn-of-the-century France of his childhood, but they are not nostalgia pieces.  Like the photographs of Atget, they open unexpectedly deep vistas of past time in which we realize how many worlds have existed within this one:

On Easter Sunday the old man puts jewelry onto the wrists, ears, and neck of a long-haired woman.  Already hitched to the black and yellow carriage, the glistening bay mare whinnies.  A sailor sings by an engraving of the end of the world with Christ in the billowy heavens, the dead caught in their shrouds, leaving their graves.  Time fills up with a future that may be fearsome.  A child goes by on the road, wearing a motionless garter snake for a bracelet.  How hot this long day beginning a century will be!  Housebound, a deformed girl closes her blue eyes.

(Trans. Feeney and Matthews)

Anyone wishing to experience the height of the prose poem's peculiar genius should study these inexhaustible French masters.

—Thomas R. Smith  - Ruminator Review

Two thousand years have passed since the first of these poems were composed. A new introduction prefaces this expanded edition of Schelling’s remarkable translations.

Sample Poems

Her quick eyes

and animated mouth

unsettle me.

So, of course,

her lifted breasts,

full lips—

soft fruits of desire.

But why should a

single wisp of hair,

stroked beneath her

navel like

some unforgettable

line of poetry,

reduce me to such

anguish?

Bhartrihari

Friend,

the lamp flame was flaring

into night’s darkest

corners. My lover,

an adept in the flavors

of love,

made slow

very slow love

because the bed

grates like a talkative

neighbor.

Anonymous

No one visible up ahead,

no one approaches

from behind.

Not a footprint on the road.

Am I alone?

This much is clear—

the path the ancient

poets opened

is choked with brush,

and I’ve long since left

the public thoroughfare.

Dharmakirti

Once again

you mount this playful

woman’s breasts and touch

the tender region

along her thighs.

Closing one arm around you

she draws forth

your pleasure

with measured strokes

of her hand.

Some other lifetime

what austerities

did you practice, O sitar,

to win this reward?

Vacaspati

Between her little

son and her

husband

the lady sits—

      milk leaks

      from one breast

      teased by a fingernail

      the other one

      stiffens

Hala

Water and scraps of meat

she has trained

the dog carefully—

It receives her lover

but bays loudly

when her husband appears

on the road                                                           

anonymous           

“Refined, intense, wise, stiring, immediate, subtile, all the charmed qualities gather in Dropping the Bow. These translations are precious jewels. Like the erotic moods they investigate, these versions shimmer and startle with a palpable desire to be heard, and a mystical sense of impermanence. This is a transmission of a vital, extraordinary tradition.”

                                                            —Anne Waldman

“These dear ancients deserve a translator like Andrew Schelling: with gentle authority, he helps them raise their hands to bid time halt for a moment in our heads. Their brief translucent poems demonstrate the co-existence of past, present, and future in the perennial vortices of human emotion, they are gists of the heart.”

                                                                        -Anselm Hollo

”Access to such unfamiliar texts - retaining freshness and grace - is only cause to thank Andrew Schelling for his generous effort. He opens us to these frank inspiriting poems without stint. Make us look forward to more such revelations. As Visvanatha says: ‘Language...baring...light’.”

                                                            -Cid Corman

These coyote tales by Native American writer Peter Blue Cloud are funny, profound, sometimes sad and always wise. Blue Cloud brings Native American literature into the twenty-first century with a style and power that have made this book a classic. The tales take coyotes from mythic time to the present in stories that show coyote's enduring vitality. Coyote is obscene, amoral, comic, wise. These Coyote tales are funny, profound, sometimes sad, and always wise.

Peter Blue Cloud is a Mohawk who now lives on the reserve in Kahnawake, Quebec. Winner of an American Book Award, he is the author of numerous collections, including Clans of Many Nations.

Danny Divan is a white teenager in South Africa under apartheid when he falls in love with the daughter of a black domestic servant. His family forces the two apart, and eventually his discomfort with the poisonous political atmosphere drives him from the country and to a new life in America. Within weeks of his arrival in Boston, Danny meets Tesseba, an offbeat but trusting artist who takes him in and marries him so he won’t be deported. Even as they live as a couple and build a life together, and as Danny prospers and his family joins him in exile, the memory of his forbidden first love does not fade. Twenty years later, when Danny returns to the "new" South Africa to salvage what he can of his family’s fortune, he sets out to discover what became of the girl he cannot forget. What he finds instead is the truest version of himself. This novel traces the ambiguities of love within a family and for another, and tests the shakiness of memory. Empire Settings reveals how love, and the memory of love, can be overwhelmed by changing assumptions about race and belonging.

David Schmahmann was born in Durban, South Africa, and is a graduate of Dartmouth College and the Cornell Law School. He has also studied in India and Israel, and his publications include a short story in The Yale Review and articles on legal issues. He lives in Brookline, Massachusetts and practices law in Boston. This is his first novel.

“The way the plot gradually reveals its truths is well done… Recommended.”

–Library Journal

“[A] thoughtful, affecting, and skillfully constructed first novel… Schmahmann’s portrayal of South Africa, past and present, is as poignant—and as nuanced—as his delineation of the characters and their relationships.”

–Los Angeles Times

“This artful, moving novel is told in several voices, male and female, black and white… Schmahmann… displays a sure touch with character, plot and atmosphere alike.”

–Reviews in Brief

“A powerful, engrossing story about a time and place that many would rather forget. Fortunately, authors like Schmahmann aren’t letting that happen.”

–Orlando Sentinel

“Haunting… In his artful battle against cultural and historical amnesia, Schmahmann elevates his novel above the realm of routine family and romantic melodrama… Empire Settings… takes on an unexpected, even unforgettable power.”

–The Washington Post

Good poetry contains the kind of knowledge we search for, the kind that resonates in the heart as well as the mind. The poems in this anthology are timeless, spanning two millenniums, and drawn from many different centuries and cultures. The voices range from ancient China, Japan, and India to contemporary America and Europe. What they share is a living spirit that can help us change the way we see ourselves, and the world.

As Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer says in his poem about the painter Vermeer, “ I am not empty, I am open”.  A good poem may open a door or window we didn’t know existed.  

In this age of the twenty-four/seven media assault from all directions good poetry has the capacity to slow us down, make us listen and pay attention. For the reader this book gathers unique selection of direct and accessible poetry that can awaken and transform. For the poet it is perhaps a source book from which to draw inspiration. The great Japanese poet Basho referred to his practice as Kado, the way of poetry. He thought of poetry as a way of life and source of enlightenment. He also suggested that as poets we ”don’t follow in the footsteps of the masters but seek what they sought.”

Contributors include Han-shan, Du Fu, Li Po, Lu Yu, Ryokan, Issa, Buson, Ikkyu, Chiyo-ni, Nanao Sakaki, Ghalib, Lai Ded, Rumi, Antonio Machado,Juan Ramon Jimenez, Miguel Hernandez, Luis Cernuda, Tomas Transtromer, Olav Hauge, Rolf Jacobsen, Francis Ponge, Charles Baudelaire, Rainier Maria Rilke, Pablo Neruda, Gabriela Mistral, Marjorie Agosin, Roberto Juarroz, Denise Levertov, Jane Hirshfield, Phillip Whalen, Gary Snyder, Lew Welch, David Budbill, Louis Jenkins, Cid Corman, Michael McClure, Peter Blue Cloud, Maurice Kenny, Joseph Bruchac, Sam Hamill, Joy Harjo, James Wright, John Brandi, Joseph Stroud, Ilya Kaminsky, Robert Bly, Chase Twichell, and many others.

Dennis Maloney is the founding editor/publisher of White Pine Press. He is also a poet and translator. His works of translation include The House in the Sand by Pablo Neruda,  The Landscape of Castile by Antonio Machado and The Poet and the Sea by Juan Ramon Jimenez. His most recent volume of poetry is Just Enough. 

From the Western Door to the Lower West Side, is a stunning collaboration between two celebrated artists: photographer Milton Rogovin and Native American poet Eric Gansworth and is an outgrowth of an exhibit  of Milton Rogovin's photographs from his Native American Series. Poet Eric Gansworth has written a book-length cycle of poems that interact with Rogovin's photographs to form a unique experience, blending the written word and visual images. The book and the photographs, taken over a period of forty years, reflect the journey from the Longhouse's Western Door of Seneca reservation culture, a culture distinctly different, from the lifestyles of Buffalo's Lower West Side, the neighborhood many people migrated to when their families left the more rural reservation homes.

Eric Gansworth (Onondaga) was raised on the Tuscarora Reservation and is professor of English and writer-in-residence at Canisius College in Buffalo, New York. His books include A Half-Life of Cardio-Pulmonary Function (Syracuse University Press, 2008) which was included on the spring 2008 “Good Reads” list from the National Book Critics Circle, Sovereign Bones (editor, Nation Books, 2007), Breathing the Monster Alive (Bright Hill, 2006), Mending Skins (Nebraska, 2005, winner, PEN Oakland Award), Smoke Dancing (Michigan State University Press, 2004), Nickel Eclipse (MSUP, 2000), and Indian Summers (MSUP, 1998).

Milton Rogovin has been photographing those he refers to as “the forgotten ones” for over five decades. Born in 1909, he has photographed Buffalo from the storefront churches on the east side, to the lower west side over fifty years, to steel workers and other industrial workers at plants now shuttered, to the Yemeni and Native American communities. With his camera he has roamed the US and the world including Europe, Latin America, and Asia. His work is collected in a number of major galleries and the Burchfield-Penny Arts Center holds a major collection of his photography.

“Milton Rogovin, approaching 100, is one of the country’s most revered social-documentary photographers. He turned to photography when his voice was essentially silenced during and after the McCarthy hearings in 1958. What followed was more than 40 years of powerful straightforward pictures of others without voices: the poor and working class of Buffalo’s East Side and Lower West Side, Appalachia, Mexico, Chile, and other countries.”

                                    —Randy Kennedy – The New York Times    

Korea’s Zen tradition has always been vibrant and continues to thrive today. This book gives voice to the “Zen Mind” of Korea’s contemporary Zen Masters, articulated through koans and excerpts of conversations in the form of brief questions and answers with students and other teachers.

“Garden Chrysanthemums and First Mountain Snow is a delightful book that gives us the feel of the vital lively language of Zen in the Korean tradition.  The reader is offered a bird’s eye view of Zen dialogue, sometimes referred to as Dharma combat.  Included are vivid exchanges between Teacher and student as well as between various modern Korean Zen Masters.  A welcome addition to the growing body of literature on the Korean Zen Tradition.”

  —
Richard Shrobe (Wu Kwang) Guiding Teacher, Chogye International Zen Center of New York and author, Elegant Failure: A Guide to Zen Koans and Don’t Know Mind-The Spirit of Korean Zen.

“While reading this book of questions and answers, I stopped long enough to eat an apple and noticed that the seeds hidden inside were not really hidden.  And I wondered, are the enigmatic answers of these Korean Zen masters not also present in these rosy red questions?  The only way to find out is to eat the apple.  But if you do, why not spit out the seeds and plant your own tree? ”

                          —Bill Porter/Red Pine

Ian Haight (editor): Ian Haight is an award winning poet and translator, and the co-translator of Borderland Roads: Selected Poems of Ho Kyun.

Park, Hongjin (translator): is a graduate of Seoul National University School of Law, and Deputy Director of the Korean Ministry of Strategy and Finance.

Eryn Michael Reager (translator): Was ordained as a Zen monk in both Thailand and Korea (1994, 1995).  Currently he is a nurse at Oregon University of Health Sciences.

“Reading Magali García Ramis is always a treat. She knows how to tell a good story and keep you interested to the end. Happy Days, Uncle Sergio, a novel about growing up in Puerto Rico in the fifties, rings with the quiet power of real life recreated with warmth, tenderness, and simplicity.” —Ana Lydia Vega

First imprisioned in 1964, Chiha Kim was sentenced to death in 1974. His crime: writing poetry that provoked the military governmentof Chunghee Park. Worldwide efforts to save him were begun in Japan, and his sentence was commuted in 1980 following the assassination of Park. A legendary figure in SouthKorea, he won the Lotus Prize, generally regarded as the Third World's Nobel Prize, while imprisoned in 1975. Heart's Agony gathers peotry form all phases of his career, including poems that led to his imprisonment and torture and those written from prison.

“Often political poets seem long on politics but short on poetics. This is not the case with Chiha Kim.”

–Multicultural Review

“Kim Chiha is a virtuoso, entertaining as well as brilliant.”

–World Literature Today

The Hsin Hsin Ming, Verses on the Faith-Mind, by the third Chinese patriarch of Zen, Sengtsan, is considered to be the first Chinese Zen document and one of the most widely-admired and elegant Zen writings.

“The Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences.” Seng-t’san

The Hsin Hsin Ming, Verses on the Faith-Mind by Seng-t’san, the third Chinese patriarch of Zen, is considered to be the first Chinese Zen document. Lucidly translated here by Richard B. Clark, it remains one of the most widely-admired and elegant of Zen writings, and is as relevant today as it was when it was written. In a world where stress seems unavoidable, Seng-t’san's words show us how to be fully aware of each moment.

The colorful characters who populate these stories live in Buffalo, NY but they will be readily recognizable to everyone.

Peter Johnson is the founder and editor of The Prose Poem: An International Journal. His books of prose poetry include Pretty Happy and Miracles & Mortifications, the latter of which won the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets.Born and raised in Buffalo, NY, he currently teaches at Providence College in Providence, Rhode Island.

“Johnson’s men lose jobs in the steel plants, get hit over the head with beer bottles, and see their half-articulated dreams thwarted… We know these men… and Johnson moves readers—both women and men—to admiration for their swagger and sympathy for their inept lives.”

–Bloomsbury Review

Selected by Pattiann Rogers as the winner of the Sixth Annual White Pine Press Poetry Prize, these lyric poems convey the emotional life of the artist and show him as deeply human: flawed, burdened, sympathetic, and desperately honest about himself and others. Stephen Frech has published widely in magazines and journals. He lives in Chicago.

 “In Ansie Baird's debut collection In Advance of All Parting, the winner of the fourteenth annual White Pine Press Poetry Prize, formal feeling and Baird's own grief-tempered voice lead us from the fissures of legacy and marriage, through the epiphanies of art and the sorrows of loss, to the "wild interiority" of her own spirit. Although Baird has been one of the Buffalo area's most highly regarded and widely published poets over the past three and a half decades, In Advance of All Parting is her first full-length collection. Half a lifetime in the making, this book is well worth the wait.”

—RD Phol - The Buffalo News

Ansie Baird is Poet in Residence and a part-time English teacher at The Buffalo Seminary, a non-sectarian secondary school in Buffalo, where she has taught for the past thirty-one years.  She has also taught for Just Buffalo Literary Center in their Writers In Education program for the past twenty two years, conducting workshops in elementary, middle and high schools in the Buffalo area. 

“The speaker of the poems in Angie Baird's remarkable first collection is besieged by angels, messengers bearing often bitter, sometimes comic, always complicated home (and broken-home) truths.  Hers is a various, well-stocked world inflected by elegiac understanding and a brisk, unflinching willingness to encounter the hard facts of a life marked by sadness, loss and disappointment, yet never losing its skeptical willingness to see the  absurd, the comic, the ridiculous side of it all. Whether engaging in “bitter battles with the past,” handling the shocks of betrayal, or celebrating the pleasures of the sensuous life, the sharp-tongued yet always in their own way well mannered, astringently honest poems in Ahead of All Parting play out a wonderfully self-aware drama of an eye, a  nervous system, and a heart-all endlessly vigilant, missing nothing. What I especially like and admire is how Baird's language-tuned to lyric, comic, satiric, and elegiac frequencies-manages to write a scrutinised life, an embattled consciousness, into an alive, essentially  entertaining presence that, as she says of the heart, will “hold out.””

—Eamon Grennan

“Hard sorrow,” “dozing old bones,” narrators “besieged by angels,” berating letters from Hayden Carruth, the many sorrows of divorce, family history, love good and bad and painful -- these are only a few of the many  elements of grief and ardor to be in this overdue first book by a poet of intelligence and passion. Ansie Baird has made herself and us wait a long time but In Advance of All Parting is well worth the wait.”

-Philip Schultz

“In Advance of All Parting is a tough, unsentimental examination of marital grief. Musically elegant and inventive, understated and passionate, the poems give us a profound glimpse into how the events of a life can form a center of gravity that fixes the self in its force field. There's a cold, truth-telling clarity about them that makes them as unsettling as they are beautiful. Ansie Baird has created a richly-drawn world in which this elemental drama plays out, and the result is vivid, startling poems in which pain has left its indelible tracks.”

  —Chase Twichell

"It is surely a mark of a fine poem when it comes back unbidden, long after you've left off reading, as though to elucidate some otherwise indescribable phenomenon in the world. This I find happening with Ansie Baird's poems. In Advance of All Parting is composed of flashes and facets of a life as seen through the prism of older age, clear-sighted and sardonic. But beyond this,

her best work possesses a high degree of that intimate strangeness (part living voice, part an attentiveness to formal properties) that is at once rare and essential to the art."

—Roo Borson

Written as a series of montages, this novel, a rare and powerful tale set in the former Soviet republic of Lithuaniafirst Soviet-occupied state to demand and win its independence after a violent confrontation with the Red Army in 1991with imagination, intimacy, and insight of the human consequences of rapid change in the Baltic States. Mayo's American, Paul Rood, vows to bring Walt Whitman's Song of Myself to Lithuanians, yet when he sits with Vilma, his interpreter, on the bank of the Nemunas River to make the translation, the stories she tells him of Lithuania consume all their time and seem truer than any rendering of Whitman. What they finally translate are stories drawn from Lithuania's deep well of myth, folklore, and histories of the human heart. The keeper ironically laments the passing of the strict Societ order; an unemployed sculptor wonders what he will find when he scrubs off the Soviet whitewash covering religious frescoes; a gravedigger is frantic to find a plot for the town's mafioso mayor because everywhere he begins to dig in the cemetery he uncovers the scattered remains of Jews murdered by Hitlerites; a dissident physicist recently returned from “rehabilitation”ordered by the KGB resorts to picking pockets in the open market. Magical, stark, and prophetic, In Lithuanian Wood is a captivating and visionary portrait of a country, a peopleworldvital transition, truly stories of our time.

"Inserted within a specific temporal and spatial framework: Santiago, Chile, September 1973, this novel is without a doubt, one of our most significant portrayals of the convulsive environment that is
today's Latin America. Its appearance enriches the already existent saga achieved by such works as
Portable Country (González León), A Manual for Manuel (Cortázar) and Conversation in the Cathedral (Vargas Llosa), to name just a few." -Ariel Muniz - Plural, Mexico

We needed this novel. The brutal fascist assault against the Chilean people has provoked an endless
array of studies, essays and even defenses of such behavior. But we really needed to have in our hands this fresh, ironic narrative text filled with more comprehension than hatred and resentment towards a sector of Santiago's politicized middle class which, with its romantic escapades, its problems, its confidence in the future, had to confront a reality that was deteriorating day by day before its very eyes.
-Fausto Castillo - El Día, Mexico

“Through a superimposition of characters and chronological and spatial levels, Delano creates an intriguing and pungent political novel… This novel is a must read, engaging the reader throughout.” – Multicultural Review

Spanning the years since the 1995 publication of Heartbeat Geography: New & Selected Poems, these poems traverse distant lands, as well as, the continent of
the heart. In travels that take him through North America, Southeast Asia, the Himalayas, Viet Nam, India, and Mexico, Brandi engages the world with open eyes, ears, and heart.

John Brandi was born in Los Angeles in 1943. Since 1973, he has been awarded residencies by the state arts councils of Alaska, Arkansas, California, Montana, Nevada, New York and New Mexico to teach in schools, prisons, and homes for the physically and mentally disabled. Author of more than thirty books of poetry, essays and modern American haiku, he has
received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Witter Bynner Foundation, and the Djerassi Foundation. His poems have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies and have been translated into Spanish and Italian. As a visual artist he has exhibited his paintings and collages worldwide. He lives in El Rito, New Mexico, with his wife Renée Gregorio and is a member of the summer
poetry faculty at Idyllwild Arts, California.

"Brandi has been an open roader for much of his life and like his two great forbearers, Whitman and Neruda, has named the minute particulars, the details of his soujournings ... infusing them with a whole gamut of feelings --compassionate, mischievous, loving and righteous. It's what's made his poetry one of the solid bodies of work that's emerged from the North American West since the 60's." -Jack Hirschman

"Delicate, gracious, and eloquent, John Brandi's moving new collection of poems, In What Disappears, reveals that he remains an extraordinarily profound poet of prayer and praise. His tradition is that of the spiritual mendicant, the perpetual wanderer, the seeker who travels the raw paths of experience in search of the world's wisdoms. His is the most honorable and heroic of ambitions - to dress our broken world in the clothes of language, trust, and hope." -David St. John

“It’s been far too long a wait for this stunning new collection by New Mexico poet/artist/traveler John Brandi… Each poem in In What Disappears is fully realized, each moment carefully wrought, each line a treasure.”

–Southwest Book Views

“Brandi’s vision continues to grow—a healing vision of connection and unity.”

–The New Mexican

“Zeiger’s poems, so earthy and moist with family, love, and everyday things and so gently passionate about finding your own territory, and so full of memory, both tragic and unchanging-these strong and delicate poems offer a way home for us all.”-Thomas Moore

“These are poems of remarkable liveliness.  In their wide-ranging wit and passion for language, their surprising juxtapositions of the ordinary and the exalted, and their willingness to foreground doubt in a search for meaning, they show a fellowship with the work of Dickinson that is deep without ever being solemn.  Here is a fresh, distinctive voice that is consistently engaging and surprising.”

  —Carl Dennis 

“Kelli Russell Agodon writes, "When God knew the gifts He had given me / He said, No givebacks. " She asks, "Still, what can we substitute for childbirth? Bamboozle?  Inferno?  Divinity? "  

A black bra takes on the power of a celestial body--"no light can escape from it."  Playful and tormented, rich in wit, this poet questions the misunderstandings and the miracles all around us.   A wonderful book!”

— Peggy Shumaker

“Letters From the Emily Dickinson Room is a bright, funny, touching meditation on loss, love, and the power of words. Agodon's genius is in the interweaving of God and Vodka, bees and bras, astronomy and astrology, quotes from Einstein and Emily Dickinson, a world in which gossip rags in checkout lines and Neruda hum in the writer's mind with equal intensity. Self-help mantras resurface throughout as a reminder of the ways modern society chooses to deal with today's tragedies, a reminder that a cup of tea and a positive attitude are not always enough when struggling with life's bigger problems. Part of the book deals with the speaker's ambivalence towards marriage and religion, part with the death of the speaker's father, and part with the same themes that Emily Dickinson dwelled on: the natural world and its mysteries and ability to serve as a spiritual guide. This is a book that will linger in your mind with its humor, its honesty and insight, and its fervent belief in poetry and play.”

—Jeannine Hall Gailey, Author of Becoming the Villainess

Being Called Back

Nevertheless its steps can be heard. . .

            —Pablo Neruda, “Nothing But Death”

In case of accident, call a priest,

or so reads the back of

my Saint Christopher medallion.

And I want to engrave:

Or 911. Or an ambulance,

but not just the priest. 

I know the priest would come,

offer everlasting life and pray

over my body, but I’m betting

on the medic, the EMT, the blonde girl

            who works weekends at the fire station 

to keep her daughter in private school. 

I put my faith in the hands of these saviors

before I’ll kiss the white collar

of the man who loves God the same way I love life.

I’m not ready to be called back.  Not now. 

Maybe when my body begins to crumble

and needs every speck of energy to leave

a chair or revise a poem, then I will say:

Just the priest please. 

But for now, call anyone

you think could help, anyone

who could pull me from the land of afterlife

where “eternal bliss” sounds lovely,

roaming the clouds with dead relatives

or wandering a white fog

near the wings of a friend who died too young.

I imagine yards of cotton unrolling.

God is remodeling the space

for the eighty million new souls

who will visit this year, souls climbing

the new spiral staircase.

It be enchanting to encounter people

who have passed before me.  I’ll make a point

to ask Neruda about death

dressed as a broom, as I keep believing I’ll be swept up. 

Preparing Lucky Pea Soup in the New Year

She dices the peppers.  Forty

degrees and falling.  Last night,

her birthday and the woman she was

raised her pen to the moon,

crossed out another year, wrote loss. 

She sees her body in the curve

of letters and not the words.

She sees the letters

she never wrote in the chili powder. 

She places bacon in the skillet

and the pop of grease

surprises her; a celebration of heat.

She cannot tell you why she cried

in the spice aisle of the grocery store,

why she turned away

when she saw a friend she knew.  

It’s easier to suffer alone,

with a cold night and diced tomatoes. 

It’s easier to suffer when the moon

is your best lighting, when fine lines

appear near an open window. 

She cannot imagine her life

without black-eyed peas, without

someone to share them. 

She knows her husband

will return soon.  She knows

she cannot push away what’s already lost.

She adds a dash of cumin

because it keeps the chickens

and lovers from straying. 

All of this, she stirs.

From the Handbook For Emergency Situations

When we were in love

I read you How to Survive

If You Fall Through the Ice.

You were determined not to

listen.  You plugged your ears when I read,

Face the direction from which you came.

You told me love could be confused

with drowning.  I said, Use your elbows

to lift yourself onto the edge of the hole.

You never wanted to live

that coldly.  You moved close, drank

peppermint tea. I read, Reach out

onto the solid ice as far as possible. 

You said our chances were slim,

we lived in a temperate climate.

What if you knew then

that later we’d find reasons to dislike

each other’s sentences,  how many times

I’d look away when you wanted most

to meet my glance?  What if we knew

the instructions—Kick your feet

as though you were swimming and pull yourself up

—could be useful when we were breaking up? 

Or later, when we tried to reunite

how we should have listened—

Once on the icy surface, stay flat,

roll away from the hole.

Kelli Russell Agodon was born and raised in Seattle and educated at the University of Washington and Pacific Lutheran University's Rainier Writers Workshop where she received her MFA in creative writing.  She is the author of Small Knots (2004) and Geography, winner of the 2003 Floating Bridge Press Chapbook Award.  

Her work has been appeared in literary magazines and anthologies such as the Atlantic Monthly, Prairie Schooner, Notre Dame Review, North American Review, Image, 5 a.m, Meridian, Crab Orchard Review, Calyx, The Seattle Review, Poets Against the War edited by Sam Hamill, as well as on NPR’s “The Writer’s Almanac” with Garrison Keillor and in Keillor's second anthology, Good Poems for Hard Times (Viking Press).

Kelli is a recipient of three Washington State Artist Trust GAP grants, the James Hearst Poetry Prize, the Dorothy Rosenberg Poetry Prize, the William Stafford Award, the Carlin Aden Award for formal verse, a Soapstone Writer's Residency, and a grant from the Puffin Foundation for her work towards peace and as a poetry editor for the broadside series: The Making of Peace.

Currently, Kelli lives in a seaside community in the Northwest with her family.  She is the co-editor of Seattle’s literary journal, Crab Creek Review.  Visit her website at: www.agodon.com

“Maureen Gibbon’s Magdalena offers a fresh and profound voice to Americna poetry. Comparisons are impossible because ths book doesn’t remind me of anything I’ve read in years. I loved it.”

-Jim Harrison

“Gibbon delivers a strong, sensual, shimmering, elegant work of  a woman happily alive in her own skin. She welcomes nature — dolphins, birds and “Trees and flowers that give off their smells in the heat, like women.” Magdalena is honest and alive with erotic poems that began to simmer when the poet “was 16 and hungry all the time.”

—Carol Conolly - Minneapolis Star Tribune

These intriguing travel journalists unite and reveal the voices of women who traveled in Latin America during the 19th century. From French nuns early in the century, whose unpublished journals Agosífound in convent libraries, to well-bred English women, these travelers discovered a world beyond anything they had known or expected and recorded it in great detail. Although men discovered the land, these women discovered the heart and soul of the new world and its indigenous peoples. Destinations include Guatemala, Chile, Bolivia, Argentina, Peru, Mexico, Cuba, Venezuela, the Andes, and Nicaragua. Included among the writers are coffee heiress Helena Sanborn, who acted as translator for her father on his trip to inspect coffee plantations, and early feminist Flora Tristán.

How do Bengali women love in times of social transition and political upheaval?  These poems look at how Bengali women tell their truths of the heart and mind through the prism of their struggles for equality, opportunity, and recognition in a changing society.  The poems follow a subtle trajectory through the stages of love-First Love, Marriage, Separation, Aging and Death, and the ultimate Supreme, Universal Love of which romantic love is an imperfect reflection--not unlike the stages of life through the human psyche moves, from beginning to end and back to the starting anew of the cycle.  

This collection includes work from a range of Bengali women poets, the eldest ones born in the women's quarters of purdah-observing, high-caste families in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.and the youngest poet included is Taslima Nasrin.

Long neglected or scoffed at by poetry purists, the prose poem is now taking its rightful place as a distinct and accepted genre in American letters. Johnson’s work as editor of The Prose Poem: An International Journal, did much to legitimatize this genre. This book, his second collection of prose poetry, is filled with the mystery, humor, and pathos that make this form so appealing and so accessible.

Peter Johnson lives in Providence, Rhode Island, with his wife and son. He teaches at Providence College.

“As one of the most dynamic writers of prose poetry, Peter Johnson has given the form a future direction and a will to survive. Each of these poems is a world unto itself.”

–Bloomsbury Review

“Here, for the hip, disaffected early twenty-first century reader, is a book that rollicks and romps, a book that rocks… Even readers convinced that poetry is meant to be written only in rhythmic lines will find Miracles & Mortifications to be a fall through the rabbit hole into a weird and amusing alternative universe.” –American Poet

A selection of one-hundred and ten poems, sixty-three of which are new, from the man Alan Cheuse called “a marvelous godfather” to the prose poem.

“Mort Marcus one of America’s hidden literary treasures, has become a suberb master of the prose poem...Often, it’s the situation, the little storyline that captivates...At other times its is language...that sends a shiver up the spine. I couldn’t get enough of this delectable stuff, and there is nothing else like it anywhere.”
--Al Young

Sixty-five new poems take their place beside forty-five poems published in Marcus’s previous two books. Employing and many times parodying the structures of discourse by which we have communicated our sense of the world through the ages, Marcus re-examines the notions on which the human species has understood its place in the universe. In the process, he has created his own cosmology, a cosmology by turns humorous, satirical, poignant, and always compassionate in revealing our beliefs, foibles, hopes, and contradictory actions. Morton Marcus is the author of seven books of poetry and one novel, The Brezhvev Memo. A film historian and critic as well as a poet, Marcus taught film and literature at Cabrillo College in Aptos, California, until his retirement.

“Mort Marcus one of America’s hidden literary treasures, has become a suberb master of the prose poem...Often, it’s the situation, the little storyline that captivates...At other times its is language...that sends a shiver up the spine. I couldn’t get enough of this delectable stuff, and there is nothing else like it anywhere.”
--Al Young

“...the landscape of loss and gain we call exile, seen through the poet’s sharp eye and described in a voice that never wavers from the truth. I felt I was re-encountering Cuba in the light of new imagining, freed of ideology and therefore resplendent and complete.” --Pablo Medina

Selected by This remarkable first book begins with Castillo’s Cuban childhood, and follows her family as they "start over without a language" on one of the last Freedom Flights to Miami. The poems chronicle the visit of a Cuban uncle, who’s surrounded by relatives that "twenty years and English have turned into strangers," and Castillo’s bittersweet return to her homeland: "Even a map cannot show you the way back to a place that no longer exists."

“Peter Conner’s poems in “Of Whiskey and Winter” have a wonderful way of communicating strangeness, displacement, through precise yet unorthodox choice and placing of words within each poem. His poems often have a remarkable stillness to them, giving the reader time to look around once inside their world, and really breathe the poems in. He has a way in finding beauty in struggle, and at the same time celebrating being in the moment, whether in trying to survive a northern winter, or coming to terms with our own mortality. In “Certified Alive” he combines the two, and writes of a year’s passing “each spring I emerge thicker with bear weight. My hair grows, my waist, my growl a truer lament.” Here, as elsewhere in “Of Whiskey and Winter,” he writes of our direct, oft-unrealized connection to the natural world, to being something that like everything else we come in contact with, is terribly impermanent. And he approaches it all with a sense of wonder, of delight. This is reflected both in his language, with its lovely mis-directions, questions becoming answers and then turning back on themselves, and even in celebrating the clarity of madness, of absolutely not having yourself grounded, prepared for what’s next. Peter has a way of placing us immediately in the moment, and then being perfectly willing to disorient us, to explode the familiar, to use the strangeness and odd juxtapositions within these poems to alter our sense of where we are. “Of Whiskey and Winter” grapples with the distance between our reach--our dreams--and our grasp--our hard realities. Like the title of the poem “The Thing Behind the Other Thing,” Peter’s poems invite us to look a little deeper, consider a little more, identify that which is not readily apparent, but requires our utmost involvement. Both is these poems, and in our lives.”

-Glenn Raucher - The Writer’s Voice - New York City

"For a book of prose poetry, Conner's Of Whiskey & Winter is amazingly lithe, almost nimble. Peter Conners has offered a wonderful cycle and proof, for those of us who may need it, that prose poetry requires no more validation: it has arrived."

-Weston Cutter - Mid American Review

“Peter Conners' stunning prose poems are packed with keen sensitivity, dreaminess, and wit. I love his time travels, the vibrant layering of image and detail. Try taking walks as you are reading this book— the dazzle of landscapes, inner and outer, feel replenished and rich. This is language and vision I want to come home to again and again.”

—Naomi Shihab Nye 

“I don’t know what’s more remarkable about the poems in Of Whiskey and Winter, their exquisite music or their startling, acrobatic leaps. In these new poems Peter Conners peels away the fragile membrane that separates imagination from reality, the suppositional from the actual. Lyrical, intelligent and passionate, Conners writes with the suppleness and the grace of a dancer. By turns manic and contemplative, zany and wise, his rollicking poems have the power to simultaneously challenge, illuminate and praise the illusive character of the world. With a blend of irony and affection typical of this collection, Conners insists that “if we are to dream ourselves away, let us dream of this . . .”

—Gary Young

“This book is not a party favor. Not a fairy tale. It is not an escape from life or an alternative to reality. It is, alas, a map of the mind, of its winter landscapes, of the psyche of fatherhood, of marriage, and of the daily drudgery of life. How odd that it is also comic, surprising, magical, even illuminating. I am both enchanted and baffled by this poet. What a completely unique voice, what a bold new collection.”

—Nin Andrews

“These stories offer a glimpse of Cuba that is unique: This is not the exotic island, this is not an island of rebels and caudillos. This is an island peopled with women who are trying to make it from day to day; but to do so successfully, now and then they must take a flight of fancy.”

– Multicultural Review

“With this volume, Chaves makes an outstanding contribution to the books that present classical Chinese poetry in both accurate and enjoyable English translation.” -Choice

“This re-issue of Chaves’ Pilgrim of the Clouds is welcome news. In its handy size, it is the perfect companion for trekkers who feel like taking a break in a tea-house or cafe, or, for those bound to the classroom, an affordable additional text that students in an undergraduate course will find both entertainig and instructive.”

—Ihor Pidhany - Education About Asia

“An important chorus of our south of the border sisters for us Latinas to hear...Here we have much knowing and glorying from Argentina to Brazil to my own Dominican Republic—toes to waist to breasts of the hemisphere!” —Julia Alvarez

Immigrant writer Novakovich records his journeys to
find his roots, some to his native Croatia, some no
farther than Cleveland, where he searches for the
grave of a grandmother, who refused to return to Croatia with the rest of the family. This collection reflects the joys and difficulties in returning to a homeland left behind.

There are, according to Novakovich, "four and a half million Croats in Croatia and an equal number in diaspora around the world." Although he emigrated to the U.S. at the age of twenty, Novakkovich frequently returns to Croatia, which he calls the strongest source for his writing. These essays document journeys he and his family have taken back to his homeland throughout the years, Immigrant writer Novakovich records his journeys to find his roots, some to his native Croatia, some no farther than Cleveland, where he searches for the grave of his grandmother, who refused to return to Croatia with the rest of her family. This moving collection reflects the joys and the difficulties in returning to a homeland left behind.

Josip Novakovich is the author of Yolk, Apricots from Chernobyl, and Salvation and Other
Disasters.

"Novakovich is a strong, original writer. His subtle prose makes me beam with pleasure, and break into an anxious sweat at the same time. He has mastered the tone of bearing witness as a principle of moral literature."
-Philip Lopate, The Art of the Personal Essay

“Plum Brandy: Croatian Journeys mixes autobiographical writing, biographical sketches, travelogue, and journalism as it attempts to give a more personal insight into the past and present realities of that country, It is a rewarding read.”

—Gordana Crnkovic - Slavic and East European Journal

“Novakovitch… is the insider/outsider looking in, and what he provides is… the best portrait of contemporary life in the new Croatian nation… To read this volume is to understand something of the mystery of the Balkans that has always intrigued the West.”

– Multicultural Review

“Novakovitch is a collector, with his ear to the ground. He misses nothing, and these essays are, line by line, so rich with dialogue and description, with perceptiveness and character, you can only wonder how he will ever manage to tell all the stories. It is a kind of genius, this gift for gathering, this ability to grasp the essential elements of situation, story and person.”

–Chicago Tribune

Points of Departures explores the world of male identity, specifically the notions of masculinity, sexual identity, romantic love, and family, in the context of the feminist critiques of culture and identity and the redefinition of the masculinity of the past 40 years. The poems grapple with issues of gender and personal identity surrounding his wife coming out as a lesbian after 14 years together and how those notions must be opened and challenged.

Paul Hogan received an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Buffalo and held the Grey Chair fellowship under Robert Creeley. He served as the director of the Writers-in-Education Program for Just Buffalo Literary Center and has worked for many years in the nonprofit sector and is currently Vice President of the John R. Oishei Foundation.