Bøker utgitt av Persea Books

Straddling genres--prose poetry, micro memoir, fairy tale, autofiction--Where Will We Live If the House Burns Down is first and foremost the story of a marriage. Borrowing elements from surrealist writer and artists, it explores the affects of chronic illness, disability, and a spouse's gender transition. All of these issues swirl through the central marital relationship and the daily lives of its two lead characters, Sergeant and Grim--even as the book's narrator, unreliable and unobjective, increasingly takes center stage. Reminiscent as much of contemporary fiction by writers like Sabrina Orah Mark and Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum as of poets or memoirists, this book is as engrossing as it is experimental, traversing complicating difficult domestic and emotional terrain by way of Allison Blevins' vivid imagination.

In poems that bring together traditional American patriotic songs and current American horrors--and in which Yeats' famous apocalyptic figure of the Rough Beast takes a painting class, wears a spacesuit, and listens to public service announcements--[ominous music intensifying] takes on the too-muchness of contemporary, apocalypse-prone America with humor, conscience, and the occasional fiddle duel. In this fourth book of poetry, Alexandra Teague expands her subject matter to include chronic pain, generational poverty, and what it means to stay safe--physically and psychologically. Her new poems are reckonings with sexism and dental trauma, Mitch McConnell and UFOs, torture devices and sad clown paintings--and with some of the most urgent crises of our time: gun violence, pandemics, and climate change.

American Analects uses the Analects of Confucius as an inspiration to mediate upon the life, death, and the subsequent loss of the poet's influential, beloved mentor-the painter Gene Holtan. These poems are juxtaposed with poems about other losses-of parents, of friends and friends of friends. Some of these deaths were caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, others by age and the inescapable journey we all take. Still, this is not a dour book. Many poems celebrate our ability to inspire, to comfort, and to nurture one another, and the collection is leavened with poems about family, about poetry, and about the healing influence of landscape and of nature. In the end, American Analects is about resiliency, about moving on from personal loss, from the pandemic, and from catastrophic fires, to rejoice in what remains. These poems encourage us to acknowledge the fragility of our lives and of those we love, while we celebrate those who guide us, even in memory.

Striking and big-hearted, Glass Jaw depicts the grit and glamor of women's boxing based on the poet's time training as a fighter in New York City. Beginning on the ropes, fighting back against the limitations of gender, Raisa Tolchinsky situates us within the dynamic context of the boxing gym, through both a chorus of named women boxers and a single fighter battling for her selfhood. In a Dantean reimagining, we follow the boxer as she descends into the hellish "rings" of an abusive relationship with her coach. In a count-down from 34 to 1, sputtering at times, the fighter gets closer and closer to the heart of her brutal, solitary metamorphosis. Winner of the 2023 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize in Poetry, Glass Jaw explores a quest as spiritual as it is physical through poems that are muscular, musical, ecstatic.

In this masterfully offbeat second collection, Aaron Belz writes with a deadpan whimsy that fronts mischievously for keen cultural insights in poems like "You Bore Me," "Asking Al Gore About the Muse," and "Thirty Illegal Moves in the Cloud-Shape Game."

This collection portrays the gripping history of polar exploration by channeling its most notable figures-Symmes, Mawson, Scott, Cherry-Garrard, Byrd, and Shackleton among them. From their perspectives and her own, Elizabeth Bradfield relays the wonders and dangers, physical and mental, encountered while endeavoring to reach the earth's least-hospitable regions.

An international bestsellera novel of passion by one of Israel's finest writers. In the unlikely setting of a Tel Aviv nursing home, Hamutal, wife and mother, falls in love with a man in a green jacket. Like herself, he has come to visit a dying parent. As Hamutal's mother reveals unsettling truths about her Holocaust past, Hamutal's obsession with the man grows. With sensitivity and insight, Liebrecht captures the intensity of their sudden love affair and its aftermath.

A happy, middle-class childhood lived in the shadows of sweeping social change and oncoming revolutionsuch was the experience of novelist Pablo Medina. In this memoir, Medina revisits his curious double world, recalling the pre-revolutionary Cuba of his first twelve years, 1948-1960. His recollections move easily from his childhood adventures to warm remembrances of family and friends to his growing awareness of the social conflicts that would ultimately send his family into exile in the United States. Medina also draws on the memories of his elders to extend his memoir back to the Cuban War of Independence and forward through the twentieth century to the fall of the Batista regime, the victory of the Revolution in 1959, and the family's growing disillusionment with the Castro regime. This first paperback edition also includes a new Epilogue describing Medina's visit to Cuba in 1999. 14 black and white photographs, preface, epilogue, glossary.