Through the 64 narrative poems in this collection, Jessie Carty illustrates one woman's coming of age in the face of neglect and unmet social expectations. However, these are not poems of woe. Instead, Carty flings open closet doors and jumps in, describing the dark recesses with an innocent acceptance of what is rather than what should be. The births of babies and love. The deaths of elders and allusions. The reconstruction of homes and lives. An unflinching honesty folds them all into "boxes in boxes like Russian dolls," waiting for us to lift the lids.

Paper House

Literature & Fiction

Carty, Jessie

Poetry

Folded Word

Through coincidence on a global scale, a traveler from Europe and a teacher from Asia met within the threads of the World Wide Web. A single photo serves as an intersection point from which they share their diverse journeys that include joys, longings, and life lessons. As the dialog unfolds across continents, cultures, media, and time, Smitha Murthy and Dorothee Lang discover that though they are worlds apart geographically, they are merely a few words apart relationally. Their mutual discovery is captured in this collection of letters, essays, stories, poems, and photographs that reach from China and India to Germany and the Mediterranean Sea.

Worlds Apart

Lang, Dorothee

Murthy, Smitha

Literary

Sophronia Lambert, a schoolteacher on the island of Martha's Vineyard, lives a quiet life; that is until Nantucket whaling captain James Folger comes ashore. Realizing he is the man who killed her deaf brother, she decides to pursue vengeance - first at home, then at sea-sailing to the far side of the world as his bride. As she grapples with madness and morality, Sophronia's quest mirrors that of her island community: to find a way forward amidst the pressures of a brutal industry, a nation mired in Civil War, and a past darker than the ocean's abyss.

Sophronia L.

Bridwell, Tim

Our 2018 Mosaic Novel, this book contains a series of prose poems that spins the tale of a woman haunted by the unloosening tendrils of need and the man she braids from them. Khaty Xiong, author of Poor Anima, says: "In this verse novel, we follow the bewitching journey of a woman whose life becomes entangled with a visiting ghost. Befriended, loved, and borrowed for his wounds, we traverse, prayer by prayer, along 'the ridgelines, the movement of the stars.' Amy Ratto Parks bestows unto us a body of 'thin air, ' which is, 'any air we fall through, ' where hellish muses, gifts, and otherworldly forces may come before us, troubled and far from sin. In a world teeming with familiar devastations, charted and uncharted, Radial Bloom is a body of dreams, 'blowing smoke into the cold night, blowing...like rescue...like love...[like] the long bell of evening.' As we descend below waters, we are astonished that somewhere in a field of honeysuckle lives a song moored in our hearts -- a song of wrought paradise, 'throwing knives, throwing knives into trees.'"

Radial Bloom

Amy Ratto Parks

morning calmthe pacing of pages between us In this collection of haiku & senryu which earned the Haiku Foundation's 2018 Touchstone Distinguished Book Award, Ben Moeller-Gaa explores the unguarded space between a moment's initiation and its resolution through evocative word choice, masterful turns, and a touch of humor. Whether his subjects are external or internal, wild or domestic, he shows us perspectives that never disappoint. In addition, these poems are paced by the Carolingian hand of JS Graustein so that readers may savor each one.

Wishbones

Ben Moeller-Gaa

This collection of 29 poems explore the various roles of Guan Yin, the embodiment of compassion and wisdom in Buddhism, in both historic and modern contexts.Jane Hirshfield says, "Dennis Maloney's poem-glimpses of the fascinating Buddhist figure of Guan Yin draw richly on an almost infinite set of teaching stories and folk tales. Maloney's poems offer a many-sided, personal, and idiosyncratic introduction to this shape-shifting, gendershifting embodiment of freed thought, feeling, and action. These poems hold a much-needed, supple, inventive reminder of the central teaching of all Buddhism, as held by Guan Yin: that the key to ending suffering is an untethered, unstinting, unlimiting, and utterly unconventional compassion."

The Faces of Guan Yin

Dennis Maloney

On this pilgrimage through frozen vineyards and shadowed chapels to cross borders that never were, on this trek among all we have discarded and forgotten -- a pot with one handle missing, a ladder with splintered rungs -- we walk past whispers of strange flowers, only to find thorn trees that "twist and hover." And yet, as we wade along the shrinking shoreline, the sun "glosses over the mountains." And looking toward silver spires as evening comes, we find ourselves "unhinged by stars." Jeanine Stevens' Citadels is a luminous read.

Citadels

Jeanine Stevens

MOSQUITO RAIN is a story of discovery as travel writer Dan Szczesny (THE NEPAL CHRONICLES and THE ADVENTURES OF BUFFALO AND TOUGH COOKIE) searches Alaska for the true meaning of its nickname: The Last Frontier. From Anchorage to Denali to Fairbanks to Valdez. From the Arctic Circle to Delta Junction. From glaciers to pipelines to the ferry through Prince Edward Sound. Szczesny and his wife bomb their way over dirt roads and broken highways, making their adventure up as they go. Whether he's finding a hidden salmon-fishing spot, walking inside a glacier, or watching eagles soar over Valdez Bay, Szczesny's Alaska is terrifying and beautiful: a land of equal parts danger and wonder. So brush off the mosquitoes, boil up some dehydrated noodles, and enjoy discovering an Alaska you never knew existed. William O'Daly, author of THE ROAD TO ISLA NEGRA and translator of Pablo Neruda's WORLD'S END, says: "With his clear, vivid narrative and deep humanity, Dan Szczesny invites us to join him and his wife, Meenakshi, as they ride in their small SUV along Alaskan highways and back roads, camping in the ceaseless light of summer wherever the journey takes them - a Walmart parking lot populated with fellow campers, the wilderness of Denali National Park, the interior of the Worthington Glacier, the Yukon River, the Arctic Circle, and astonishing settings in between. Amid a wilderness both achingly beautiful and treacherous, the spirit finds sustenance in the teeming salmon and the wind, in the mineral water of the melting glacier, and in the unforeseen."

Mosquito Rain

Travel

Dan Szczesny

Travel Writing

In POINTS OF REFERENCE, Matthew James Babcock takes us on a roadtrip through poems as vast and straight as Montana highways. On this roadtrip, the sun is unleaded. The air smells of diesel and thawed manure. The laughter of fifth graders accompanies the migration of crows. POINTS OF REFERENCE takes us to a land where a park-invasion by teenagers transforms into the Battle of Agincourt, where Henry Ford is simultaneously reviled and revered, and where family still - always - comes first.

Points of Reference

Matthew James Babcock

Reference

If you sit up at night thinking about leaves realizing "they're each alone / and out on a limb," or wait for "each day to be sliced in half" - even if you don't admit you do - David Oestreich is your poet. Like Thoreau, he begins by turning to nature; like Whitman, he sees every plant, every animal (even the newly-departed) as a brother. COSMOPHAGY is a love song to the earth, to language, and to you. Come. Listen. The voice you hear may speak to your own. | Benjamin Myers, Oklahoma State Poet Laureate and author of LAPSE AMERICANA, says: "With a sensibility deeper than the merely contemporary, David Oestreich is writing in the company of Herbert, Hopkins, and a great cloud of witnesses. These poems insist on the meaningfulness of creation, on the full weight of the logos, and they do so with romantic energy and classical wisdom. Here you will find that rare treasure: poems for those in love not just with language but also with the world residing just beyond language's reach."

Cosmophagy

Oestreich, David

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