“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.

“Tzveta Sofronieva’s poetry sparkles, not in her native Bulgarian, but in German; like her compatriot Bulgarian Julia Kristeva, she changed tongues to reach a wider world. Her A Hand Full of Water is the most compelling volume in German verse since the work of Ingeborg Bachman and Hans Magnus Enzensberger. Her memories go from Homer and Dostoievski to Charlie Chaplin’s dance steps. Above all Sofrinieva is a mythological poet. Each narration is a Cavafian voyage, never completed in order to compel wonder. George Seferis wrote that a poet must find a symbolic landscape for one’s diction. She creates her visionary landscape and lexicon as she adventures through the Greek islands and the Mediterranean. The surreal is natural when she says, "She makes her bed with sheets of Pompeian red. / The sea roars in her bed." Subtly, Tzveta Sofronieva refreshes and re-jewels the German language, making it plainer and richer by her global iridescence. The lucent version by Chantal Wright captures the verve and fluid images of Sofornieva’s poetry. Though close to original song, she plays with syntax in English to convey the strength and spontaneity of the German. In the best sense her translation stands as an original book of poetry.”

                                                —Willis Barnstone

A physicist and historian of science by training, Tzveta Sofronieva is the author of nine collections of poetry. She also writes short stories, essays and texts for the theater. Born in Sofia, Bulgaria, she settled in Berlin in 1992 but remains a frequent traveler. Sofronieva’s first collection of poetry Chicago Blues (1992, bilingual, Bulgarian and English) was written during her travels through the US and Canada in 1989 and 1990. Among her most recent publications are a collection of short prose texts entitled Diese Stadt kann auch weiß sein (2010) and the poetry art book Touch Me (2012 ,

bilingual, English and German). Her work also encompasses literary installations, the latest of which are Borrowed Pillows (Lille, France, 2011 ) and My Cyborg Identity (Boston, USA, 2012 ), and she

has edited several anthologies, including Forbidden Words (2005) and 119 Webstreaming Poetry (2010). She has translated poetry by Chris Abani, Margaret Atwood, Michael Krüger and Yoko Tawada into Bulgarian, among others. Her own work has been translated into a number of languages, among them French, Finnish, Hungarian, Polish, Serbian, Spanish and Uzbek. Tzveta Sofronieva attended a master class with Joseph Brodsky in 1992. In 1988 she was awarded a prize for poetry by the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. She has been writer-in-residence at the Academy Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart (1996), at KulturKontakt in Vienna (2003), at the Villa Aurora in Pacific Palisades (2005), and at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin (2010). In Spring 2012 , she was Max Kade Writer-in-Residence at MIT in Boston. Eine Hand voll Wasser (2008) was Tzveta Sofronieva’s first full-length collection of poetry in German. In 2009 Sofronieva was awarded the Adelbert-von-Chamisso-Förderpreis, a prize given to German writers whose cultural background is not Germanic.

For more information visit www.tzveta-sofronieva.de.

Chantal Wright is Assistant Professor of German and Translation at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. She grew up in Manchester, England, and studied at Girton College, Cambridge,

and the University of East Anglia, Norwich.

"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

This collection introduces English-speaking readers to the hallucinatory yet lucid world that Orozco’s young narrator, Lía, inhabits and animates with her prodigious imagination and the reality of small-town life on the Argentine plains in the 1920s. It is this landscape of her childhood home that shapes her narrative voice.

It is the landscape of her childhood home that shapes her narrative voice. In this mirage-like world of shifting dunes, shimmering horizons, crumbling buildings and vibrating fields of sunflowers, the young girl Lía—Orozco’s alter ego—watches and wonders, acts and is acted upon. Fixed in the center of the erratic exterior world is the family home, the refuge to which the child retreats for protection and solace, but which at times resembles a space of mystery and menace. 

Olga Orozco (1920 – 1999) is considered to be one of the major Argentine writers of the 20^th century. She won over a dozen major prizes and awards for her poetry and short stories, and has been translated into at least fifteen languages.

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,  The Landscape of Castile by Antonio Machado and The Poet and the Sea by Juan Ramon Jimenez. She teaches at Harvard Extension and Brandeis University.

Melanie Nicholson is Associate Professor of Spanish at Bard College.  She is the author of Evil, Madness, and the Occult in Argentine Poetry (2002).  Her articles on Latin American poetry have appeared in Latin American Literary Review, Letras  Femeninas, Crítica Hispánica, and Studies in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature, among others. She has published translations in Yale Review, Puerto del Sol, and Denver Quarterly.

Orozco’s stories portray, in impressionistic, and dreamy language, a childhood spent in a small town on the Argentine pampa.

“This is a gem of a collection of Olga Orozco stories, beautifully rendered into English. This wise selection of stories reveals Orozco's lyrical as well as mysterious prose. The translators provide an excellent introduction to Orozco's haunting and illuminating saga of childhood on the Argentine pampa.”

— Marjorie Agosin, Wellesley College

“A Talisman in the Darkness presents, for the first time in English, the spell-binding short stories of Olga Orozco (1920-1999), the Argentine surrealist poet, astrologer, and student of Gnosticism. The stories reconstruct scenes from a childhood on the pampas while drawing the reader into an intensely paradoxical universe of mysterious signs and omens, alternately enchanting and unnerving. At the core of the narratives is a girl child who, though episodes of unsought illumination, encounters for the first time aspects of both the visible and the hidden worlds.”

—Naomi Lindstrom

“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

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

"Hector's life with Mussolini"s Black Shirts during the Spanish Civil War was not all that he... portrays it to be. Through hallucinatory flashbacks, he relives his experiences, and his attempts at justifying his past and present actions are deluded, ironic, and comically moving. Pearlman handles his material smartly, streching the comedic limits of every situation and allowing the most irascible of characters to be humerous and even, occassionally, sympathetic. Erudite and irreverently composed, it just might teach readers a valuable lesson."

—Publishers Weekly 

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

Distant Lands is a tour de force, this faux anthology of 21 invented poets, with their poems and biographical notes, belongs in the company of world literature’s distinguished fabulists—Jorge Luis Borges, Fernando Pessoa, Franz Kafka, and Italo Calvino—in blurring the boundary between the textual and actual worlds.

Agnieszka Kuciak (b. 1970) is the author of two collections of poetry, Retardacja [Delay] (2001) and Dalekie kraje: antologia poetów nieistniejących [Distant Lands: An Anthology of Poets Who Don’t Exist] (2005), both highly regarded by critics. Kuciak’s work has been translated into English, Russian, French, Flemish, Slovak and Slovenian.

Karen Kovacik directs the creative writing program at Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis. Her translation of Agnieszka Kuciak’s faux anthology Distant Lands is forthcoming in March from White Pine. In 2011, she received an NEA fellowship in literary translation for her work on Kuciak. She’s currently editing an anthology of Polish women poets, Calling Out to Yeti.

“I have a shelf in my library I refer to as my sacred shelf, which contains only those books I love so much,  I could reread them a hundred times and never tire of them.  The shelf includes books by Rilke, Marquez, Borges, Pessoa, Michaux, Calvino, Milosz, Kafka, and others.  I am forever looking for the next poet or writer who will inspire me and surprise me, not once, but again and again. Agnieszka Kuciak’s Distant Lands is my latest discovery.  Mystical, mischievous, and musical, Kuciak enchants me with the scope of her imagination, her whimsical flirtations with identity, theology, and the very nature of human existence. I am delighted by her lyrical flare, her wit, and her remarkable ability to be both one and many poets, or one poet with twenty one voices.”

—Nin Andrews 

“A fact is a thing done, and a fiction is a thing made. In Distant Lands, Agnieszka Kuciak makes up for all the making up by transforming these fabulous fabrications into sublime art. Like water into wine, a sly stealth of miracles.” 

—Michael Martone, author of Four for a Quarter

“ 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

Gary Young is one of the most well-known practitioners of the prose poem and his unique sinuous, brief style has a flavor all its’s own. This collection includes work selected from six previously published volumes and two unpublished sequences of new work. 

Gary Young is a poet and artist whose honors include grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Vogelstein Foundation, the California Arts Council, and two fellowship grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2009 he received the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. He has received a Pushcart Prize, and his book of poems, The Dream of a Moral Life, won the James D. Phelan Award. He is the author of several other collections of poetry including Hands, Days, Braver Deeds (which won the Peregrine Smith Poetry Prize), No Other Life (winner of the William Carlos Williams Award of the Poetry Society of America), and most recently, Pleasure.

 Even So: 
New and Selected Poems

Gary Young. White Pine Press (Consortium, dist.), $18 trade paper (232p) ISBN 978-1-935210-33-7

Since the 1970s, Young has been publishing almost unbelievably intimate and precise poems, most of them in brief, untitled prose blocks, about the small details of love, marriage, parenthood, and close observation of the world at hand. This retrospective gathers many of these pieces, which, despite the small scope of each one, amount to a highly ambitious body of work taken together. What happens in these pieces is hard to summarize, so here is one, quoted in full: “My son wakes screaming. His dreams are real; he’s riding a horse, and the horse falls down. He’s so young, I don’t know how to tell him all our joy is wrung from that terror. Did you like it, I ask him. Fall down, he cries, fall down. Did you like riding the horse? And he looks at me, stops sobbing, and says, yes.” As is the case in the piece above, Young writes with a unique combination of wisdom and terror, engendering a kind of sad calm, a hard-earned acceptance of life’s difficulty and openness to its beauty: “This morning I smelled freesias in the garden and closed my eyes. Suddenly I was young again, and you were still alive.” (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly 

“Gary Young has honed a sinous, brief prose-poem form that carries a flavor, uniquely its own—unflinching, strigent in beauty, austerely moving.”

—Jane Hirshfield

“I was struck by the wisdom of this work, a quiet wisdom that inheres in images so fully imagined that one can never forget them. The language has been so throughly purified that truth becomes, in the telling, austerely beautiful.”

—Jay Parini

“There’s no word for what Young does, only for what he accomplishes—the capturing of small, daily miracles.”

—Dorianne Laux

“Like a modern day realist’s morality tales, these poems are backed by a moral prupose as compelling and dramatic as it is instructive and wise. This is a book one must wrestle with as well as read.”

—Sherod Santos

Most readers assume that the writing of the American prose poem began in the 1960s but in fact there is a long tradition of the prose poem in the first half of the 20th century. Much of this work appeared in literary magazines and was never collected. The anthology collects over 60 voices including such well-known figures as Sherwood Anderson, Paul Bowles, Kay Boyle, E.E. Cummings, H.D., Robert Duncan, T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Earnest Hemingway, Amy Lowell, Kenneth Patchen, Laura Riding Jackson, Gertrude Stein, Jean Toomer, Thorton Wilder  and William Carlos Williams. Margueritte Murphy's scholarly Introduction sets the stage for this collection which traces the history of American prose poetry from 1900-1950.

Robert Alexander is the co-editor of the Marie Alexander Poetry Series. He is the author of two books of poetry, White Pine Sucker River and What the Raven Said; and a book of creative nonfiction, Five Forks: Waterloo of the Confederacy. He previously served as an associate editor at New Rivers Press.

Margueritte S. Murphy is the Associate Provost at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York.  She is author of A Tradition of Subversion: The Prose Poem in English from Wilde to Ashbery and Material Figures: Political Economy, Commercial Culture, and the Aesthetic Sensibility of Charles Baudelaire, and co-editor with Samir Dayal of Global Babel: Questions of Discourse and Communication in a Time of Globalization. 

“I thought the last thing we needed was another anthology of prose poetry, but I was woefully wrong. Alexander’s choices of American prose poems between 1900 and 1950 prove  the genre, in many different guises, was preparing itself to be honed by the masters of the 1960s. If you have any doubt the prose poem was flourishing over this fifty-year period, “Hysteria” by T.S. Eliott, “Family Portrait” by Kenneth Patchen, a number of short beauties by Fenton Johnson (among many other startling entries), suggest otherwise. If you need to be further convinced , Marguerite Murphy’s excellent introduction fills a gap in prose-poem criticism that was sorely needed.  As a bonus we get Alexander’s witty afterward, tracing one’s man’s personal history writing prose poems, grappling with all the complexities of the genre. This is a book I’ll be returning to often and with pleasure, and anyone who has ever considered writing prose poetry should be familiar with it.”

—Peter Johnson

“Family Portrait doesn't just rewrite the history of the prose poem in America - it sets the record straight. Robert Alexander has done a great service for everyone who loves this sinewy, quirky, delicious form. Margueritte Murphy's scholarly Introduction sets the stage for a book that traces the history of American prose poetry from 1900-1950. Simply put, this collection belongs on every poet's - and poetry lover's - bookshelf. From here forward, no one will be able to write about the prose poem without referencing Family Portrait." 

—Peter Conners

“Once again, we have Robert Alexander to thank for expanding our vision of the tradition of American prose poetry. Fifteen years ago, his co-edited anthology The Party Train demonstrated a tradition that pre-dated the poetic experimentations of the1960s and the 1976 publication of Michael Benedikt’s The Prose Poem: An International Anthology, long considered the gateway to contemporary interest in the form in English.

In Family Portrait, Alexander’s vision is solidified, clearly demonstrating the roots of prose poetry taking hold in the early years of American Modernism. This volume offers an invaluable selection of prose poems by a broad array of writers born before 1925, including William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, Sherwood Anderson, Kay Boyle, Laura Riding and Kenneth Patchen. As importantly, Margueritte Murphy’s introduction and Alexander’s afterword provide the aesthetic framework and historical context for the poems, together making a solid case for the importance of prose poetry to the American literary canon. 

The prose poems of these Modernist writers illuminate not only the particularly supple strength of American language, but also how the form itself, “the child of two worlds” (in Alexander’s words), “serves to bring together, at long last, the sacred and mundane.””

— Holly Iglesias

“Family Portrait contains a rich variety of American voices—the well-known side by side with the completely new—speaking from their shared time and their individual sensibilities in language that ranges from the straightforward folksy talk set down by William Carlos Williams to the provocative linguistic disjunctions of Gertrude Stein and e. e. cummings.  This volume provides a delightfully colorful, eye-opening, and essential addition to our library of American literature.”  —Lydia Davis

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.

“Reading poems from another language, culture, and century, I often feel like a foreigner excluded from the original’s greatest subtleties. Not so in Hyesim’s miraculous time-traveling poems, which might have been written yesterday or tomorrow, and anywhere. There’s not a single opaque word in the book. The poems are Buddhist, yes, and Zen (Sŏn) in particular, but they’re written for anyone interested in human consciousness: what it is, how it perceives the world, how it can be transformed, and what pure perceptual clarity and joy result from the realization of its ultimate transparency. Through eight hundred years Hyesim’s voice delivers the gift of his wisdom, modesty, humor, and profound understanding of the human mind. These are important poems.”

— Chase Twichell

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; Ian is also the editor of Garden Chrysanthemums and First Mountain Snow: Zen Questions and Answers from Korea. 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. With Ian Haight, he is the co-translator of Borderland Roads: Selected Poems of Ho Kyun.  Working from the original classical Chinese, Tae-young’s translations of Korean poetry have appeared in Runes, New Orleans Review, and Atlanta Review.

“Korea’s first Zen Master-poet wrote simple yet elegant poetry of the world he inhabited, both physically and spiritually, and of daily insights—a pause along the way for a deep clear breath, a moon-viewing moment, a seasonal note or a farewell poem to a departing monk. His poems speak softly and clearly, like hearing a temple bell that was struck a thousand years ago.”

—Sam Hamill

"Hyesim's poems: transformative as walking high granite mountains by moonlight, with fragrant herbs underfoot and a thermos of clear tea in the backpack. Their bedrock is thusness, their images' beauty is pellucid and new, their view without limit. The shelf of essential Zen poets for American readers grows larger with this immediately indispensable collection."

—Jane Hirshfield

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."

Necessities by Christopher Merrill. Necessities is a meditation on the deepest promptings of the spirit that could be discovered through language. Influenced by his reading of Kafka, Calvino, Zbigniew Herbert, Czeslaw Milosz, Charles Simic, James Tate, and other explorers of the marvelous, these poems are parables, which, with any luck, deepen with each reading.

Christopher Merrill has published four collections of poetry, including Brilliant Water and Watch Fire, more than a dozen edited volumes and books of translations; and five works of nonfiction. His writings have been translated into twenty-five languages. He is the director of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. 

“Christopher Merrill is one of the few genuine men of letters left on our literary scene.  He excels at everything – history, memoir, translation, poetry, and now Necessities. What are Necessities?  A sequence of prose poems, we’ll say. Sometimes they read like Jack London re-written by Rimbaud and Baudelaire working together. There’s something as well of a quest theme or journal of exploration within a kind of dissolving dystopian narrative. And it’s all a kind of theater.  A poetics perhaps deriving from post-war east European poetry is an important part of the mix, along with some habits of old-fashioned surrealism. The repeating motifs sometimes suggest a huge prose sestina.  And what Auden called Paysage Moralisé. In one of the later poems we read: “Canonize those who make pilgrimages into the marvelous archives of chance.”  This poet is hardly asking for canonization, but all praise should be forthcoming for this marvelous work.”

—John Matthias

“Christopher Merrill is one of the most gifted, audacious, and accomplished poets of an extraordinary rich generation. His range of sympathy, subject, and tone has always been prodigious. His grasp of form is sure and in service of clear attention. This collection shows a complex talent developing and extending its original high promise.”

—W S Merwin

Notes from the Journey Westward is a book that interrogates the idea of America—especially our westering, both historical and contemporary, our rough, rocky journeys through the vast interiors of the continent and of our own hearts. In this wild, wide-open, god-forgotten country blind grandmothers take us by the hand, and lost fathers hide in every prairie shadow, and old devils hunch and watch from craggy peaks. We are orphaned here, all of us, and so must reckon with the very foundations of us, with the myths and stories that make and remake us as people and as a nation.

“Blink and cry but this earth is all/you’ll ever see,” writes Joe Wilkins, and he is a poet who pays attention to this earth, one who looks, looks again and comes back still again to look more deeply. Like the voice in “Mission School,” Wilkins’ poems make and remember in the wide scope of human and non-human experience: “Whatever it is,/she says to me, lost again in story,/you must love it.” One way to define love is fidelity to experience, and if this is so, then Wilkins demonstrates such love over and over in his ruthless, entirely unsentimental efforts to imagine and understand the world he inhabits—and the one that inhabits him. He can say, on the one hand, “There’s nothing to be done/about hope,” and then deliver this:

“now I am telling you I am a small bird,

dun-colored, nervous, rising

again, slamming again

my face against the glass. See there—

blue sky. A hard world away.”

Exactly. And nothing will do but that blue sky.

Wilkins has a fine ear, but he uses it, rather than displays it. For all their toughness, these are wonderfully lyrical pieces. Vowels seem to bounce off one another like stones in a creek bed, but they are ordered, deliberate; subtle sound repetitions chime throughout, like bellwethers.

Wilkins slips from chore boots to house slippers to dress shoes without effort. He has range and staying power. These are the sorts of poems one keeps close by when they’re most needed, when one can feel most lost.” 

—Sam Green

Joe Wilkins is the author of a memoir, The Mountain and the Fathers (Counterpoint 2012), and a previous collection of poems, Killing the Murnion Dogs (Black Lawrence Press 2011). His poems, essays, and stories have appeared in the Georgia Review, the Southern Review, Harvard Review, Ecotone, the Sun, Orion, and Slate, among other magazines and literary journals. He lives with his wife, son, and daughter in north Iowa, where he teaches writing at Waldorf College. You can find him online at http://joewilkins.org/. 

“Moving through this book is, truly, a wondrous journey: across rugged landscapes and the vast unsettled past that WAS the west. "A hard world away." With a ferociously steely eye and equally ferociously tender heart, Wilkins surprises us at every juncture. Echoes of ancestral voices crisscross. Quiet intimate moments intersect with large socio-political issues. Spare poems, long poems, prose poems—I so admire the depth and breadth of work here, in how much Wilkins manages to pack in and carry along in our ever-onwarding little wagon.”

                         —Nance Van Winckel

“Joe Wilkins’ poems are savage and beautiful, full of hard-won lives and a godawful tenderness. In one poem the speaker says they need a myth to tell them “Be alive”, but Wilkins has written that myth, and it is called Notes from a Journey Westward. In this book Manifest Destiny is more than political rhetoric—it’s a call to find the limits of survival. The edge of America has more than an ocean. It has dust-stunned men, hardscrabble women, and a patient devil, sharpening his teeth. We’re in this world whether it belongs to God or not—alive and bearing it.”

—Traci Brimhall

“For Joe Wilkins, the American West is no theme park or romantic diorama. Notes from the Journey Westward offers an earnest glimpse into past and present landscapes that are real and imagined, mourned and celebrated and witnessed—for these, to borrow the words of Nazim Hikmet, are human landscapes. Wilkins isn’t the kind of poet to offer answers or satisfy himself with quaint definitions of self or place. He’s the kind of poet whose writing is as ambitious as it is beautiful, as honest as it is lyrical. The unflinching poems in this collection are a delight.” 

—Michael McGriff