Description
Carlota Caufield might be defined as a verbal acrobat, a juggler of words and images, a magician of memory. A Mapmaker’s Diary gathers a selection of poems from both published and unpublished work in a bilingual format. The center of the book is travel and what it means to be perpetually in transit from her childhood home of Havana thru Zurich, New York, New Orleans, and San Francisco with stops in London, Dublin, and Barcelona.
Reviews

"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

 

Accolades
Carlota Caulfield was born in Havana, Cuba. She is the author of nine books of poetry including The Book of Giulio Camillo and Ticket to Ride. She teaches at Mills College.

Description
In a gloomy mansion in Madison, Wisconsin , a sheltered and sensitive young man slips a visitnig professor his secret manuscript - a staggering and beautiful fantasy of knights, knaves, and fools, a rich tale of timeless battles with the Devil himself over power and destiny. Originally published in 1980 we are proud to return this classic to print.
Reviews
“John Gardner is an accomplished and inventive novelist... this book is beautiful” - The Los Angeles TImes “Freddy’s Book reverberates with mythical overtones that are rich, deep and full of compassion for the human condition.” -Newsday “This tale left me mystified and satisfied to the highest degree. Who could ask for anything more?” -Ursula LeGuin/ Washington Post Book World “Combines the facination of a tairy tale... with beautifully defined characters and an underlying seriousness of purpose that makes it something far more important... Freddy’s book is the work of a master storyteller.” -Anne Tyler
Accolades
John Gardner (1933-1982) was a major figure of 20th century letters. He is the author of a number of acclaimed novels including: The Sunlight Dialogues, October Light, and Grendel. He was also the author of several seminal works of non-fiction including The Art of Fiction and On Moral Fiction as well as volumes of poertry, translation,,and children’s stories.

Description
Haiku Master Buson is the only translation of the work of this important haiku poet in English. Buson (1716-1783), along with Basho and Issa is recognized as one of the three Japanese masters of the haiku. In addition to a large selection of haiku the book also includes a selection of Buson’s prose and a critical introduction. In addition to his poetry Buson was also recognized as a painter.
Reviews

Accolades
Edith Shiffert is a poet who has lived in Kyoto, Japan since the 1960’s. Her most recent volume is Pathways. The late Yuki Sawa was a professor at Kyoto Seika University.

Description
This new edition of Homegirls and Handgrenades draws together all Sanchez’s poems of the 1980’s including the original collections of Homegirls and Handgrenades and Under A Soprano Sky, containing some of her seminal work.
Reviews
“Only a poet with an innocent heart can exorcise so much pain with so much beauty.” -Isabel Allende “With an unblinking and critical poet’s eye, Sanchez has been setting her readers straight, telling the ‘terrible beauty,’ and reflecting images in ways that simultaniously solicit tears and laughter.” -Juanita Johnson-Bailey, Ms magazine “Sonia Sanchez is a lion in literature’s forest.” -Maya Angelou
Accolades
Sonia Sanchez is a poet, activist, and scholar. She was the Laura Carnell Professor of English and Women’s Studies at Temple University until her retirement and is one of the most important writers of the Black Arts Movement. She is the author of sixteen books.

Description
Magdalena is a finely-drawn collection of prose poems which, with sometime painful honesty, examine the vagaries and vicissitudes of a heart in conflict with itself. Eros, the erotic world, is never far from the poet’s mnd: “each spring brought new hands touching my body”. The poems invoke the nature of an independent woman embracing her own sexuality, her travels,and being in the world.
Reviews

“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

 

Accolades
Maureen Gibbon is a the author of a novel, Swimming Sweet Arrow. She teaches at Bemidji State University.

Description
Peter Conners is founding co-editor of Double Room: A Journal of Prose Poetry & Flash Fiction. He also edited PP/FF: An Anthology which was published by Starcherone Books in 2006. Poems from Of Whiskey and Winter have appeared in various journals including Mississippi Review, Mid-American Review, Sentence, Salt Hill, and Drunken Boat, as well as in the anthologies Sudden Stories, 100 Contemporary Prose Poems, and An Introduction to the Prose Poem. Peter lives in Rochester, NY with his wife and two children. He works as Editor and oversees marketing for BOA Editions. His web site is: www.peterconners.com.
Reviews

“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

Accolades

Description
Paper Pavilion captures the theme of transnational adoption and a powerful seach for a personal history and identity from Korea to America. Jennifer Kwon Dobbs utilizes both traditional and experimental forms, including Korean sijo to explore this passionate quest for identity.
Reviews
“In Paper Pavilion, Jennifer Kwon Dobbs, ‘child of mixed up rivers,’ captures in stunning form, the powerful search for her own personal history, and constructs an entryway into a mythic past, a place we all in some way yearn for. In this passionate quest for identity, rooted in Korea: ‘.. my lost castles, land of my birth and longing,’ the poet finds her way home and, through language, both fresh and startling, the reader becomes her astonished companion.. Born of exile and homecoming, of elegant sensibility and intelligence, these are poems not to be forgotten. Hers is an ambitious and brilliant new voice. ” —Genie Zeiger “Jennifer Kwon Dobbs writes a harrowing poem of very precise measurements or hidden operations in lyric wheelwork, but if you’re thinking of clocks and time, please, rather think of space. Think of Wallace Stevens worrying about the traversing of the void, yes, folded and jeweled like time. Her brilliant distant sources in these poems freshen and give pleasure like a daily meal. This is a marvelous book.” --Norman Dubie “Jennifer Kwon Dobbs is an astonishing poet. The poetry in Paper Pavillion is by turns lyric and incisive, operatic and sweeping. There is a resonant passion that fills every page. With this heart-breaking and exhilerating debut, Jennifer Kwon Dobbs has established herself as one of the most compelling and important poets of her generation.” -- David St. John
Accolades
Jennifer Kwon Dobbs holds degrees from Oklahoma State University and the University of Pittsburgh. She is presently an Edwin Mem fellow and in the PhD program, in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Southern California. Her poetry has appeared in Crazyhorse, Cimarron Review, Cream City Review, Tulane Review, and in the anthologies: Echoes Upon Echoes: New Korean American Writings, and Contemporary Voices form the Eastern World.

Description
The Shape of Light collects the prose pieces that James Wright wrote during and about his trips to Italy and France. The fruits of the season drawn from notebooks that were written at cafe tables and hotel desks and transformed into this luminous prose.
Reviews
“Like a great painter, James Wright, in his work is a master of both light and of love. With this man we are in the presence not only of one of the greatest poets of our time but one of its greatest prose writers as well. Furthermore, I can’t get over the feeling that the treatment of light in his work is at base a concern for God, for as the medieval doctors said, lux est umbra Die: light is the shadow of God.” - John Logan “Wright’s poems, with their grace and intelligence, not only stand as a rebuke to most of the glib work of his time, but remain among the finest examples of the midcentury American Lyric.” -J.D. McClatchy - The New York Times Book Review
Accolades
James Wright (1927-1980) won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1972. His many books include the recent Selected Poems and A Wild Perfection: Selected Letters.

Description
Tsangyang Gyatso (1683 - 1706), the sixth Dali Lama had a temperament and personality formed outside the monastic tradition. Because of his belated ordination, he grew up more a wastrel than a monk, more a minstrel than a king. He is unique in the lineage of the Dali Lama and the bulk of his poems are love songs: laments for lost affection, advice to lovers, and descriptions of his lovers. Other of the poems are direct and simple philisophical verses.
Accolades
The late Geoffrey Waters received a PhD in Classic Chinese from Indiana University. His other books of translation include Broken Willow: The Complete Poems of Yu Xuanji and Three Elegies of Ch’u.

Description
Moon is a poet of wild nature, vigorous energy, and sparking passion. Moon’s short lyrical poems represent poignant self-examination, evoking moments of bewilderment and hopeful resignation to the passage of time and imprisoning conditions of her life. She invites the reader along the tracks of a married woman’s life as she traveres her rite of initiation into maturity.Her work explores the desire to escape the fetters of domesticity as a vehicle for understanding a woman’s journey and her negotiations between the desire for freedom and domestic reality provides the context for longing in her poetry.
Reviews

“Moon Chung-hee, one of the most celebrated poets in Korea, has put out a collection of lyrical poems titled "Woman on the Terrace" that sheds light on the constant conflict between the desire for freedom and the limitations of domestic life. The new English poems, published in New York, reflect her poignant perception about a poetic self-examination, evoking moments of bewilderment and hopeful resignation to the passage of time and imprisoning conditions of her life. The poems also demonstrate Moon's rebellious language concerning the conditions of women, maintaining a certain poetic tension throughout the book. The repeated theme of the poems in the collection is a woman's experience of confinement. Moon twists the restrictive state into the literary expression of an ardent longing for freedom, and what is notable is her sharp observations that put together social and natural conditions. Besides cooking pots, shopping, and the sacrificed lives of women, she gives us a clear vision of human lives amidst natural phenomena: wildflowers, rain, wind, and fields that take her out into the open, to clear and constant awareness of mortality. Moon's anecdotal and autobiographical poems explore chiefly the desire to escape the fetters of domesticity as a vehicle for understanding a woman's journey, but at the same time her contemplative tone suggests that something larger and more mature is at work in life. “

— The Korea Herald

"Moon's translated poems are likable and  readable to Western readers who do not have a knowledge of Korean poetry and literature. Her poems are sophisticated, bold and beautiful.""

-Yearn Hong Choi - Korean Quarterly  

Accolades
Moon Chung-hee, is one of the most celebrated poets living in South Korea today, was born in 1945. Since her literary debut in 1969 Moon has published eleven books of poems including Wild Rose, For Men, To Young Love, False Love, and A Poppy Flower in Your Hair. She has received prestigious Korean poetry awards including The Sowol Poetry Prize, the Chung Ji-yong Poetry Prize, and the Contemporary Literature Award. She is also the recipient of two poetry awards in Europe. Her poems have been translated into nine languages including German, Spanish and Japanese. A participant in the Iowa International Writers’ Program in 1995, Moon currently holds the Poetry Chair at Dongguk University in Seoul, South Korea. Seong-Kon Kim, is a translator, editor and literary critic, has translated Hwang Tong-Kyu’s Strong Winds at Misi Pass and a collection of whale poems by 50 Korean poets, A Galaxy of Whale Poems. He was Dean of the School of Language Education at Seoul National University. Currently, he is conducting research on Asian American literature at the Harvard-Yenching Institute. Alec Gordon,is a poet, translator and professor teaching at the Graduate School of International Area Studies of Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in Korea. Among his published books include Cultural Studies in Asia and A Galaxy of Whale Poems. He is presently writing a book of essays on translation, philology, and language.