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In this collection of linked lyrical and narrative essays, experimental translations, and reinterpreted myths, Lina Maria Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas launches into an exploration of home and identity, family history and belonging, continually examining what it means to feel familiarity but never really feel at home. Don''t Come Back intermixes translations of Spanish adages and adaptations of major Colombian myths with personal essays about growing up amidst violence, magic, and an unyielding Andean sun. Home is place and time and people and language and history, and none of these are ever set in stone. Attempting to reconcile the irreconcilable and translate the untranslatable-to move smoothly and cohesively between culture, language, and place-Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas is torn between spaces, between the aunt who begs her to return to Colombia and the mother who tells her, "There''s nothing here for you, Lina. Don''t come back." Don''t Come Back is an exploration of home and identity that constantly asks, "If you really could go back, would you?" 

Sometimes June in Eden occupies a garden in a wild landscape. Other times, we''re given a terrain where the coveted tree is one that hides a cell tower, where lungs are likened to ATMs and prayers are sent via text message. Rosalie Ruth Moffett''s debut collection of poetry, June in Eden, questions the human task of naming in a time where there are "new kinds of war that keep / changing the maps," where little mistakes-preying or praying, for instance-are easily made. The heart of this book is an obsession with language, its slippages and power, what to do when faced with the loss of it. "Ruth," says our speaker, is "a kind of compassion / nobody wants anymore-the surviving half / of the pair of words is ruthless." There is, throughout this collection, a dark humor, but one that belies a tenderness or wonder, our human need to "love the world / we made and all its shadows."Rosalie Moffett''s June in Eden gives us a speaker bewildered by and in awe of the world: both the miracles and failures of technology, medicine, and imagination. These darkly humorous poems are works of grief and wonder and give us a landscape that looks, from some angles, like paradise.