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 Each poet is represented by ten to fifteen poems and each had contributed new unpublished work to the book.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

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

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    

 “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