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Authors: Ryokan
Translators: Dennis Maloney, Hide Oshiro
Genre: Poetry
Series: Companions for the Journey Series
Volume: 19

Ryokan (1758-1831) was a poet, master calligrapher, zen hermit, and is one of the most beloved poets of Japan. Taking the name of Daigo or “Great Fool”, he was often seen playing games with the village children or begging for food. Instead of becoming the head of a zen temple he preferred the simple and independent life of a hermit.Ryokan’s poetry is simple, direct and colloquial in expresion, influenced by the Chinese poet Han-shan and the Japanese poet Saigo.
The book includes a selection of Ryokan’s poems from both Japanese and Chinese as well as a poetic exchange between Ryokan and Teishin, a Buddhist nun.
What shall remain
as my legacy?
The spring flowers
the cuckoo in summer,
the autumn leaves.
Dennis Maloney is poet and translator. His works of translation include The Landscape for Castile by Antonio Machado, Dusk Lingers: Poems of Issa, and the forthcoming Tangled Hair, Tanka of Yosano Akiko.
Hide Oshiro is a Japanese visual artist living in the U.S. He has illustrated Basho’s travel journal, Back Roads to Far Towns, and Tangled Hair: Poems of Yosano Akiko.
Accolades
"Just as Ryokan's life is inseparable from his poetry, the translation's clarity of diction is inseparable from the sensitive brushwork on each page. A book to be gazed into again and again."
—Charlotte Mandel, Small Press
“Ryokan's poetry is both muscular and mysteriously empty of self, like the tracks of a bounding deer left in snow. Yet the clarity and lightness of his Zen mind are fulfilled by the warmth of his Zen gaze and heart. Whether in poems describing ball games with village children or in an extended correspondence with a Buddhist nun forty years his junior, Ryokan's writings, beautifully presented in this collection, offer a direct, intimate, and renovating conversation with the deep landcape of human life.”
—Jane Hirshfield
| $14.00 | 96 pages (Original Trade Paperback) | ISBN: 1-935210-05-4 | 2009 |
Editors: Norman Minnick
Genre: Poetry

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.
Reviews
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.
Accolades
“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
| $17.00 | 320 pages (Original Trade Paperback) | ISBN: 1-935210-07-8 | 2009 |
Translators: Ian Haight, Tae-young Ho
Genre: Poetry
Series: Korean Voices Series
Volume: 13

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.
Reviews
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.
Accolades
“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
| $$16.00 | 128 pages (Original Trade Paperback) | ISBN: 1-935210-08-5 | 2009 |
Authors: Luis Cernuda
Translators: Stephen Kessler
Genre: Poetry

Written between 1950 and 1962, the poems in this collection amount to the final poetic testament of one of Spain's most important twentieth-century poets. These last two volumes of Cernuda's life work, Con las horas contadas (With Time Running Out) and Desolación de la Quimera, show a master at work with nothing left to prove. Exiled in Mexico after more than a decade in the inhospitable northern climates of Scotland and New England, the poet savors the warmth and cultural continuity of his new residence while maintaining his long argument with his Iberian homeland, a love/hate relationship explored directly and indirectly. Love in its various cruelties and pleasures is the other constant theme of these books; Cernuda's open homosexuality and passionate connection with younger men are invoked with a range of emotions and from perspectives of gratification and acutely felt loss. A lifelong devotion to Beauty in both its ideal and physical incarnations informs his philosophical investigations of time, art, love, grief, and exile. The title poem, “Desolation of the Chimera,” is a powerful invocation of the poetic archetype and a meditation on the fate of poets and poetry at the midpoint of the century.
Luis Cernuda (1902-1963) was a leading member of Spain's legendary Generation of 1927-Lorca, Alberti, Aleixandre, Guillén, Salinas, Buñuel, Dalí, et al. He left Spain during the Civil War in 1938 and never returned, teaching first in Great Britain and then in Massachusetts before settling in Mexico in 1952. His collected poems, La realidad y el deseo (Reality and Desire), is regarded in Spain and Latin America as one of the seminal works of modern Hispanic poetry. Thus far only two major collections of his writing are available in English in the US, Selected Poems, translated by Reginald Gibbons (Sheep Meadow Press), and Written in Water, his collected prose poems, translated by Stephen Kessler (City Lights Books). Written in Water received a 2004 Lambda Literary Award.
Stephen Kessler is a poet, translator, essayist and editor whose work has appeared in hundreds of publications across the United States since the late 1960s. He is the author of eight books and chapbooks of original poetry, most recently Burning Daylight (Littoral Press), and more than a dozen books of poetry and fiction in translation, including works by Julio Cortázar, César Vallejo, Pablo Neruda, Vicente Aleixandre, Ariel Dorfman, and Fernando Alegría, as well as a major contributor of translations to the Selected Poems of Jorge Luis Borges. He is the editor of The Redwood Coast Review and a contributing editor for Poetry Flash. For more about the works of Stephen Kessler, visit www.stephenkessler.com.
Accolades
“Few modern poets, in any language, give us this chilling sense of knowing ourselves to be before a man who really speaks, effectively possessed by the fatality and the lucidity of passion. If it were possible to define in a phrase the place Cernuda occupies in modern Spanish-language poetry, I would say he is the poet who speaks not for all, but for each one of us who make up the all. And he wounds us in the core of that part of each of us 'which is not called glory, fortune, or ambition' but the truth of ourselves.”
--Octavio Paz
| $17.00 | 214 pages (Original Trade Paperback) | ISBN: 1-935210-00-9 | 2009 |
Authors: Eric Gansworth
Genre: Poetry

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.
Reviews
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.
Accolades
“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
| $18.00 | 120 pages (Original Trade Paperback) | ISBN: 1-935210-10-8 | 2009 |
Authors: Ansie Baird
Genre: Poetry
Series: White Pine Press Poetry Prize
Volume: 14

“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
Reviews
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.
Accolades
“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
| $$16.00 | 120 pages (Original Trade Paperback) | ISBN: 1-935210-09-2 | 2009 |
Authors: Santoka Taneda
Translators: John Stevens
Genre: Poetry
Series: Companions for the Journey Series
Volume: 20

Mountain Tasting gathers a wide cross section of haiku and a selection of the diaries of the wandering Japanese poet, Santoka (1882-1940). Santoka lived his life in the long zen hermit wandering poetic tradition of Japan that includes Basho, Ryokan and Saigyo. His zen practice was that of solitary walking and begging. The open road was to become both his home and monastery. As he said “ Days I don’t enjoy: Any day I don’t walk, drink sake, and compose haiku”. His haiku are admired both in Japan and around the world for their unadorned style.
John Stevens is the author or translator of over twenty books on Buddhism, Zen, Aikido, and Asian culture. He has practiced and taught Aikido all over the world. His books include Lotus Moon: Poems of Rengetsu and Wild Ways: Poems of Ikkyu.
| $16.00 | 186 pages (Original Trade Paperback) | ISBN: 1-935210-03-0 | 2009 |
Authors: Robert Bly
Genre: Poetry
Series: Marie Alexander Poetry Series
Volume: 12

This volume, for the first time, collects all of Bly's prose poems he has chosen to include in a significant volume arranged by him. The collection includes over 100 prose poems, written over a period of five decades, includes the bulk of the landsmark out of print volumes: The Morning Glory Poems, This Body is Made of Camphor and Gopherwood, and What Have I Ever Lost by Dying along with uncollected poems, and new material. Robert Bly has been one of the leading writers of the prose poem since the reemergence of the form in the 1960s.
Robert Bly is one of the leading poets of his generation and has been publishing for six decades. In addition he is a noted translator and has been instrumental in introducing new international voices to U.S. audience. His recent books include Eating the Honey of Words: Selected Poems and My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy.
“Joyous, inspired meditations that demonstrate Bly’s talent for conveying in the simplest language the richness and complexity of the universe around us.”
— Library Journal.
| $16.00 | 112 pages (Original Trade Paperback) | ISBN: 1-935210-02-3 | 2009 |
Authors: Juan Ramon Jimenez
Translators: Mary G Berg, Dennis Maloney
Genre: Poetry

Jimenez is a Nobel Prize Laureate and a major poet of Spain's generation of 1898, yet little of his work is currently available in English. The bilingual collection traces his relationship with the sea, a major theme in his work, from his book Diary of a Poet Recently Married and other poems from his body of work.
Juan Ramon Jimenez (1881-1958) was a member of the generation of 1898, which ushered in a renaissance in Spanish Poetry. In 1956 he received the Nobel Prize for Literature. He dedicated over 60 years of his life to poetry and published many volumes of work. He also is well known for his prose work, Platero and I.
Mary Berg is a writer and translator. She has translated a number of books from Spanish, including I've Forgotten Your Name by Martha Rivera, River of Sorrows by Libertad Demitropulos, Ximena at the Crossroads by Laura Riesco, and The Landscape of Castile by Antonio Machado. She teaches at Harvard University Extension and Brandeis University.
Dennis Maloney is a poet and translator. His works of translation include The House in the Sand by Pablo Neruda and The Landscape of Castile by Antonio Machado. His most recent volume of poetry is Just Enough.
Accolades
"This is a very valuable book! Dozens of poems are here that have never been translated into English before, and I think Berg and Maloney have done beautifully transferring Juan Ramon's enthusiastic calm from Spanish to English. Terrific."
—Robert Bly
“As he observes metaphysical somersaults of sea and land, Juan Ramón is the master of replete simplicity. “A steel sea” pops up on a “hard flat field/of exhausted mines/in a devastation of ruin.” Or, like Emily Dickinson’s “hope falls down a hill,” Jiménez has, “Hope, a seagull,/ alights here and there.” The utter nakedness of his verse touched virtually all modern Spanish poetry, directly engendering, for example, Rafael Alberti’s masterful sea book, Sailor on Land, and “I walk the streets of the sea.” In The Poet and the Sea, a delicious book perfectly rendered by Mary Berg and Dennis Maloney, Juan Ramón has made essential pacts of intimacy with the great waters of the world. The seas grow in trickery and gravity in endless dramas as two figures emerge: a blind yet live sea and a poet who sees through the sea. The sea is a changing mirror of the poet who has imposed his vision on the whims of his companion sea.”
—Willis Barnstone
| $17.00 | 230 pages (Original Trade Paperback) | ISBN: 1-935210-01-6 | 2009 |
Authors: Genie Zeiger
Series: Companions for the Journey Series
Volume: 21

Essayist and memoir writer, Genie Zeiger's book, "What Happened Was..." is a concise introduction to the art of personal writing. In her preface, she discusses the how's and ways of personal writing, words that touch the heart. What follows is a varied collection of her work
covering divergent aspects of being a feeling human being. Each essay is accompanied by particular suggestions as to how to explore a archetypal experience in the reader's own life related to the individual piece.
Genie Zeiger is the author of several books of poetry including Leaving Egypt and Radio Waves. She is also the author of two memoirs, Atta Girl and How I Find Her. She lives in Shelburne, Massachusetts, where she has led creative writing workshops and poetry classes for over a decade. Ms. Zieger is a former psychotherapist and crisis clinician at a mental health center; she has an M.Ed. in Counseling Education from the University of Massachusetts and an MFA in writing from Vermont College.
Accolades
Praise for her memoir, "How I Find Her: A Mother's Dying and a Daughter's Life:
“What chases away self-pity is her wry sense of humor, her poet's delight in close observation, her recognition that any change, even death, can open doors to understanding.”
— O, The Oprah Magazine
“In these cool metallic days of high tech work and entertainment, we need to be brought back to human scale, to our basic emotions and relations...To return to strong emotion without sentimentality and to deep human reflection without ideology, read Genie's memoir meditatively. her words can revive a dormant heart.”
—Thomas Moore - author of Care of the Soul
“Whether she is mourning her losses or celebrating her blessings, Genie Zeiger's gorgeous work
breaks my heart and opens my heart.”
—Sy Safransky - Editor of The Sun Magazine
| $15.00 | 106 pages (Original Trade Paperback) | ISBN: 1-935210-04-7 | 2009 |
