Black Mountain College had an explosive influence on American poetry, music, art, craft, dance, and thought; it's hard to imagine any other institution that was so utopian, rebellious, and experimental. Founded with the mission of creating rounded, complete people by balancing the arts and manual labor within a democratic, nonhierarchical structure, Black Mountain was a crucible of revolutionary literature. Although this artistic haven only existed from 1933 to 1956, Black Mountain helped inspire some of the most radical and significant midcentury American poets. This anthology begins with the... View More...
2021 LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD FINALIST Finalist for the Publishing Triangle Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature Editors Andrea Abi-Karam and Kay Gabriel offer We Want it All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics as an experiment into how far literature, written from an identitarian standpoint, can go as a fellow traveler with social movements and revolutionary demands. Writing in dialogue with emancipatory political movements, the intergenerational writers assembled here imagine an altogether overturned world in poems that pursue the particular and multiple trans relationships to desir... View More...
"Ryan Adams, one of America's most consistently interesting singer/songwriters, has written a passionate, arresting, and entertaining book of verse. Fans are going to love it, and newcomers will be pleased and startled by his intensity and originality. The images are vivid and the voice is honest and powerful."--Stephen King, author of Duma Key "Ryan Adams writes with equal parts precision and recklessness; the blood he draws from the text is easily as unnerving as its unapologetic tenderness. He is proof that poetry will find its writer."--Mary-Louise Parker, actress "Infinity Blues is Ryan A... View More...
Beginning in the middle of crisis, then accelerating through plots that grow stranger by the page, Naja Marie Aidt's stories have a feel all their own. Though they are built around the common themes of sex, love, desire, and gender, Aidt pushes them into her own desperate, frantic realm. In one, a whore shows up unannounced at a man's apartment, roosts in his living room, and then violently threatens him when he tries to make her leave. In another, a wife takes her husband to a city where it is women, not men, who are the dominant sex--but was it all a hallucination when she finds herself tied... View More...
Kaveh Akbar's exquisite, highly anticipated follow-up to Calling a Wolf a Wolf With formal virtuosity and ruthless precision, Kaveh Akbar's second collection takes its readers on a spiritual journey of disavowal, fiercely attendant to the presence of divinity where artifacts of self and belonging have been shed. How does one recover from addiction without destroying the self-as-addict? And if living justly in a nation that would see them erased is, too, a kind of self-destruction, what does one do with the body's question, "what now shall I repair?" Here, Akbar responds with prayer as an act o... View More...
Poetry. Fiction. Native American Studies. In this first full collection in nine years, Alexie's poems and prose show his celebrated passion and wit while also exploring new directions. Novelist, storyteller and performer, he won the National Book Award for his YA novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. His work has been praised throughout the world, but the bedrock remains what The New York Times Book Review said of his very first book: Mr. Alexie's is one of the major lyric voices of our time. View More...
Poetry. Fiction. Published in 1992, well before Sherman Alexie became well-known as the screenwriter for the film SMOKE SIGNALS, THE BUSINESS OF FANCYDANCING has now been turned into a film with none other than Alexie himself in his directorial debut. The screenplay for the movie, which recently won the Audience Award at the San Francisco Film Festival, is loosly adapted from this book. Many film-goers will want to visit or revisit the elegaic poems and stories that set the tone for the film itself. In an age when many 'Native American' writers publish books that prove their ignorance of the r... View More...
Titled for the influential singer left almost voiceless by a terrible syndrome, the poems bring sweet melodies and rhythms as the voices blend and become multitudinous. There's an honoring of not only survival, but of persistence, as this part research-based, pensive collection contemplates what it takes to move forward when the unimaginable holds you back. View More...
Poetry. Asian & Asian American Studies. LGBTQIA Studies. History is really an invitation / by way of arranged language / to read the occulted / in plain sight: / a poem. // This book is a commingling of archives / with copious attributions / without peer review or a known market. / A history in which the document / is contemporary nonfiction / represented in verse // language's contemporaneity taken back / from archive-as-Empire's governance / and my poem journals are archival.--from CODA View More...
Homecoming is Alvarez's first published collection of poetry, a work of great subtlety and power in which the young poet returned to her old-world childhood in the Dominican Republic. Now this revised and expanded edition adds thirteen new poems. Long before her award winning novel, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, and In the Time of the Butterflies, Julia Alvarez was writing poetry that gave a distinctive voice to the Latina woman and helped give to American letters a vibrant new literary form. These more recent writings are still deeply autobiographical in nature, but written with t... View More...
Poetry. "In a jam, the poet packs his own signals, jams sound against the grain of sense and words against the wall of the margins, jamming with both the message in the bottle and the bottleneck of its messy (distorted by time) arrival. 'Did you say something tomorrow?' Think feedback, think big guitar god solo, and fasten your eyes and ears to a book that'll belt you. Joe Amato plays his urgent material 'just for kicks' and 'for keeps, ' and this absolutely fearless and volatile mix of clowning and erudite commitment gives his work a life like nobody else's. Breaking rules we might not have b... View More...
Poetry. 'An ingenious gathering of poignant leapfrogging...a muscular memorializing...a sly haunting.' This is the book that's everything Amato says it is and is not. It bounces on water, refuses to be paraphrased, and invites itself to dinner. Buy it by the case while there's still time--Cole Swensen. Joe Amato is the author of Symptoms of a Finer Age and Bookend: Anatomies of a Virtual Self. His poems and critical essays have appeared in numerous journals, including 88, Chain, Jacket, Bombay Gin, Denver Quarterly, New American Writing, Postmodern Culture, Notre Dame Review, Nineteenth Centur... View More...
A superb long poem by the contemporary master of the form, Glare comprises two sections, "Strip" and "Scat Scan." The poem demonstrates, yet again, why A. R. Ammons's poetic voice is a national treasure: by turns cosmic, self-inflating, self-deflating, eloquent, intimate, bawdy, comic, precise and always unmistakably his own." View More...
To the "visions of clarity and terror" in that volume the poet now adds the most important poems from his three books published since. The resulting collection is the essential starting place for new readers, the quarry for those familiar with his work. Among the new poems is "Easter Morning," which the critic Helen Vendler called "a classic poem . . . a revelation." View More...
