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From the white horse appearing like an apparition, to the massive skeleton of a whale on the coast, Diane Thiel’s The White Horse: A Colombian Journey takes us on a magically real journey into the Pacific Coast rain forest of Colombia. Equal parts travel narrative, ecological essay, history, and memoir, this book allows us to experience a reality stranger than fiction. Thiel’s writing beckons us deeper into the heart of the forest, reawakens our consciousness about the natural world, and evokes the spirit of adventure. “What a beautiful book. I knew it was going to be poetic, but I was knocked over twice by its compelling narrative drive and quiet sense of humor.”—Sherman Alexie -
The poems in Drift Ice view the natural world through a lens of ecological and spiritual concerns. They focus especially on Prince William Sound in Alaska fifteen years after the Exxon-Valdez oil spill, Long Island Sound at the estuarial mouth of the Connecticut River, and Sri Lanka before (and, in one poem, after) the tsunami. The poems address the myth of a once-pristine wilderness and the indifferent, ever-changing nature of “nature” and our human place in it, as they also investigate the flexibility and lambency of lyric form. “In her new and marvelous book, Drift Ice, Jennifer Atkinson evokes the natural world with preternatural clarity…This is a beautiful book, mature, exciting, innovative, and unforgettable.”—Alan Shapiro -
“In this, his most intricately composed book, his most important yet, Bruce Bond has achieved a sonorous grandeur.”—Bin Ramke “With the luminous precision of music, Bruce Bond has crafted, in Cinder, a generous and urgent collection of poems, a work that celebrates the human condition and terrifies us with it in equal measure. The result is a book of poems weighted with dark vision, set loose. Bruce Bond is one of our generation’s best poets, and this is his best book.”—Laura Kasischke -
In this book of voices, speakers resurrected from the deeper past and the dead chafe against the circumstances of love, sex, loss, and longing. The Casanova Chronicles & Other Poems includes forty sonnets, each written in a relaxed meter. Each sonnet is a persona poem, told from the point-of-view of a real-life character. In The Ballard Sonnets those characters include Alba Ballard, her husband, her son, and two of her pet parrots, all of them dealing with the effects of her death. "In this wild, sexy, exuberantly off-the-wall collection, parrots, puppets, and the great Casanova take turns force-feeding Viagra to the stuffy old sonnet. But it's Myrna Stone's Rabelaisian gift for language that really steals the show. My head's still spinning."—George Bilgere -
When Isidore Mirsky’s sister-in-law Joan loses her apartment, she moves in. Mirsky’s world is already in flux—his job lost, his bayside town under siege by developers—and now he must struggle with his bewildering attraction to Joan, who evokes for him all the qualities that once drew him to his wife. How can a warm, unpredictable man remain true to himself and to the woman he loves? Desire, and the renewal it brings, might just be the thing that causes damage. Outrageous, tender, and alive with the sound of Isidore’s voice, The Burning House captures a man at his most vulnerable moment, on the brink of something new. "A vigorous, interior-driven narrative... Lisicky is a beautiful and powerful writer; his prose has a palpable energy that demands close attention...."—Publishers Weekly "An extraordinary fiction in that it sustains a believable poetic voice throughout... Lisicky's longer prose piece...often feels like a long, beautiful narrative poem about what it is to be flawed and human in a world that often seems, at best, indifferent."—The Boston Globe “Paul Lisicky’s The Burning House smolders with muscular, beautiful language, and shines with love for two sisters as each blossoms darkly into her own future. Lisicky’s odd man out finds his way deeply inside the reader’s desires and hopes. The answer to the question, ‘what do (good) men want?’ may well be answered in this elliptical, pitch-perfect gem of a novel.” — Jayne Anne Phillips -
Accessible, erudite, and ebullient, these essays delve into the workings of the poetic mind and offer incisive assessments of contemporary American poets and poetics. Hix not only maps the landscape, he reshapes it: taking on nabobs like John Ashbery (“Every age adores a few poets in whose work posterity maintains no interest”) and presenting such disparate figures as Charles Bernstein and Dana Goia in new light, discovering the missing link between the Neo-Formal and the Post-Modern. As Easy As Lying is the best book on Modern American poetry since Robert Hass’s Twentieth Century Pleasures. “Hix turns out keen metrics at once playful and soulful, suggesting that there may still be room for a philosophical modernist come lately.”—Harvard Review -
Art Into Life is a collection of essays by the late Frederick R. Karl that showcases his experience and advice for writing literary biographies. Karl is best known for his biographies of Franz Kafka, George Eliot, William Faulkner, and Joseph Conrad. Part memoir, part detective story, part literary exegesis, part psychological exploration, this comprehensive collection of essays remains free of critical or theoretical jargon. Whether he’s writing about Conrad’s suicide attempt, Faulkner’s drinking bouts, Kafka’s maternal bond, or George Eliot’s love life, Karl never wavers from his focus on individual experience shaping modern art. -
American Fugue (Amerikaniki Fouga) is Stamatis’s first book published in America and available to U.S. readers. The book, which was translated by Etruscan author Diane Thiel and by Constantine Hadjilambrinos, follows a Greek protagonist who visits America, travels across the country, and has a strange and compelling adventure. American Fugue examines the basic themes that are persistent in all of Stamatis’s works of fiction: an all-consuming past, the flight to escape one’s personal demons, and, most importantly, the search for personal identity that is ultimately revealed only through what is unknown to the self. The treatment of these themes is also characteristic of the author’s other novels—travel narrative on the surface, mystery or thriller with an existential dimension at another level, but ultimately a quest for self-discovery and personal redemption. “One of the most gifted writers of his generation.” —Francoise Noiville, journalist at Le Monde “Alexis Stamatis always starts his books smoothly, seductively so, but one chapter in you find yourself rushing the pages, intrigued, amazed, surprised. . . ”—Nicholas Papandreou, author of A Crowded HeartAward
[icon color="#dbb95c" size="16" type="icon-star" unit="px" ] 2007 Winner – NEA 1st International Translation Award -
In poems at once playful and grave, H. L. Hix pits excerpts from the speeches of George W. Bush against arguments from Osama bin Laden in a poetic dialogue embracing politics, literature, language, and culture. Reframing Beltway sound-bites and Islamic fundamentalist rhetoric, God Bless delves into the minds of two men whose intransigence has had global consequences. To break the stalemate, this original sequence of poems plucks the antagonists from their bunkers in Oval Office and Afghani cave and presents them, for the first time, face to face. Hix then opens the conversation to a diverse panel of experts, including the Iranian Ambassador to the United Nations, CNN’s terrorism analyst, distinguished professors of Arabic and Islamic studies, and other prominent writers and authorities, who shed light on the issues raised by the poems. "[H. L. Hix is] one of the most distinctive writers of our time.”—David Mason, The Hudson Review
