About the Author\nAfeefah Khazi-Syed, Aleena Shabbir, Ayse Guvenilir, Maisha M. Prome, Mariam Dogar, and Marwa Abdulhai met as undergrads at MIT, where they often wrote poetry in each others dorm rooms. Now, they're scattered across the country for graduate studies as they train to be doctors, engineers, mathematicians, and scientists. While the six write poetry from different backgrounds and expertise, they share the common goals of redefining literary spaces and breaking barriers through poetry. The poets hope their anthology will foster empathy and mutual reciprocity for the many intersectional facets they encapsulate.\nSix Muslim women. One poetry collection exploring family, identity, and homeland.\nOur Ancestors Did Not Breathe This Air brings fresh voices of poignancy and a much-needed representation in modern poetry. From the scents of a bustling street market in India to the warmth of stories rooted in Venezuela to snippets of college days shared at MIT, the poetry in this book features an ache for grounds no longer walked upon. With a range of distinct styles and voices, the poets’ nuanced self-expression amounts to a piece that is both a prayer and a rebellion. Their words, introspective and reminiscing, witty and thoughtful, are an ode to that which makes them who they are and where they come from. Simultaneously, their voices are a rejection of dangerous stigmas, cultural taboos, and oppressive systems. In both verse and image, Our Ancestors Did Not Breathe This Air is a bold and unfiltered collection recounting moments, tears, and dreams that have been generations in the making. The poems in this collection are accompanied by full-color illustrations and photographs.

Our Ancestors Did Not Breathe This Air

Literature & Fiction

Khazi-Syed, Afeefah

Shabbir, Aleena

Angela Guvenilir, Ayse

Munawwara Prome, Maisha

Eman Dogar, Mariam

Abdullhai, Marwa

Poetry

BELTWAY EDITIONS

Throughout 2021, as COVID and climate change battled for supremacy in the hearts and minds of the world, American poet Heather Bourbeau and Irish-Australian poet Anne Casey engaged in a poetry conversation back and forth across the globe, alternating each week, to create 52 poems over 52 weeks. With poems anchored in their gardens, they buoyed each other through lockdowns and exile from family, through devastating floods, fires, wild winds and superstorms. Some Days The Bird, a collection of internationally recognized and award-winning poems, is the result of their weekly communiqués from different hemispheres (and opposing seasons) in verse.

Some Days The Bird

Casey, Anne

Bourbeau, Heather

"Karen Poppy's much anticipated debut poetry collection, Diving At The Lip Of The Water,is to be published on May 1, 2023 by Beltway Editions. Poppy, a poet and lawyer, has written a book “that will rough a reader up and then wrap their scrapes in silk,” according to Francesca Bell. Scott Ferry observes that Karen Poppy “wields the power of the immortal in each word, each song.” Sonia Greenfield writes that “ the poems...are wide-ranging...whether they're leaping off from the lines of Whitman or Plath, exploring failures of intimacy, or gathering animals in a menagerie of the symbolic, their untamed characteristics bristling at the book's edges and representative of the speaker's own wild sense of self.” This book confronts family systems and societal gender expectations, to reclaim what makes us powerful and whole. It revels in and demonstrates what Judy Grahn calls “paradox and power”. Hence, the diver dives at the lip of the water. What waits for her when she enters? You will find the answer in these luminous, arresting poems."

Diving At The Lip Of the Water

Poppy, Karen

Like a Viewfinder with overlapping reels, Safia Jama examines the way inherited trauma--her parents and brother fleeing military dictatorship in Somalia--can overlay the present day "when my husband and I parted/ways it seemed natural to me to pack as if for a day trip/ telling no one save two friends." As a new life comes into focus, the speaker of the poems turns her attention to the tiny theater of "my small room"---"gazing out the window I call it windowing" and marveling at bathroom mold that looks like Charles Bronson. The poems in Crowded House captivatingly delve into the complexities of the self and what constitutes home--Matthea Harvey

Crowded House

Safia Jama

An autobiography (in sonnets) by Michael Lally, Poetry honors include: NYC 92nd St. Y Poetry Center’s 1972 Discovery Award for The South Orange Sonnets; two National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowships (1974 and 1981, the second attacked in Congress―the NEA accused of rewarding “pornography” for the poem “My Life”―in the first attempt to defund the NEA); 1997 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award for “Excellence in Literature” for Cant Be Wrong; 2000 American Book Award for It’s Not Nostalgia. In 2018 Another Way To Play: Poems 1960-2017 published. Also worked as script writer/“doctor,” editor, columnist, book reviewer for The Village Voice and The Washington Post among other publications, and TV and film actor (as Michael David Lally). Writes the blog Lally’s Alley on poetry, politics, movies, and other arts.

Say It Again

Michael Lally

If William O’Daly’s poetry, like Neruda’s or Lorca’s, suggests an understanding of surrealism," writes Peter Weltner in his foreword to The New Gods, it is "a surrealism of the vital world, of a language that marries 'spirit and action' to a pure purpose, a sustained improvisation 'between roots and sky' that binds the near with the far, distance with the here and now." Wise, beautiful, and lyrically grounded in the elemental, the poems comprising O'Daly's first full-length volume chart a trajectory well beyond the self and with a stunning breadth of vision. They span cultural and historical geographies and the expanse of time to celebrate the relationships that sustain the human family and challenge the solipsistic origins of our inhumane words and actions. The New Gods invites us to participate in the authentic, in “the solace of not seeking,” even as "we give the earth back to our feet.

The New Gods

Education & Teaching

William O'Daly

Higher & Continuing Education

Two Novembers A Memoir of Love 'n Sex in Sonnets

Liza Achilles

A book of elegies inspired by the poet's late twin brother Joe and others.

Two Novembers: A Memoir of Love 'n' Sex in Sonnets

Parenting & Relationships

In this heartbreakingly beautiful book, Steven Ratiner constructs a seamles fabric of grief, weaving threads of memory, keen observation of the natural world, variations on religious tradition,and an active awareness of language.Among the book's smaller pleasures are complex metaphors,varied syntax, and constant attention to the word: the poet is "marred by, married to this compulsive/ language and cannot shut it(shout it) out even in this house of silence." Which is fortunate for us who follow him as he moves from the personal before of witnessing illness and dementia, through a spiritually -deepened and globally-expanded exploration of death itself, to an after that finds solace in "love's continuance, grief's temporary reprieve," as well as the more permanent gift of art. Steven Ratiner has been championing other poets for many years. This gorgeous collection of his own fine work is long overdue.--Martha Collins author of Casualty Reports (University of Pittsburgh Press)

Grief's Apostrophe

Steven Ratiner

In this bilingual collection of succinct poems, Washington DC-based poet david alberto fernandez offers a reader a journey into the pandemic; into the redemptive power of nature; and the paradoxes of political conditions and the human heart. 
En esta colección bilingue de poemas concisos, el poeta david alberto fernandez, radicado en Washington DC ofrece al lector un viaje a la pandemia; al poder redentor de la naturaleza; y a las paradojas de las condiciones políticas y el corazón humano.

Mundo se consume/World consumes itself

David Alberto Fernandez

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