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In Other Times, Midnight, her debut collection, Andrea Ballou explores the aftermath of loss-death, divorce, and departures-and asks the toughest questions: how do we contend with grief and remorse, and where does the spirit go to wait out trauma? Ballou's poems fight our "impulse to not speak," aware that naming, and that speech itself, is a matter of life and death. Her startling and often humorous images rooted in the fields, forests and domesticity of rural life are juxtaposed with oblique, at times irreverent, adaptations of Celtic and Greek myth and biblical stories. For Ballou, language is both tool and weapon, as useful and durable as a hoe, wheelbarrow, sword, thread. Caught "in the mouth of midnight," these poems wrestle with the numinous, their voices-cranky and cajoling, always compassionate and vulnerable-urging us toward the fullness of being human, daring us, despite it all, to love again.

"Ingenious out of necessity, A Mother Is an Intellectual Thing centers around the scapegoating and exile of the author by her mother. In these essays, Kimberly Grey harnesses her formidable intellectual and creative resources to create coherence for an unstable, traumatized self. To do so, she calls on-beseeches-dozens of brilliant thinkers and artists for help, among them Etel Adnan, Roland Barthes, John Cage, Anna Freud, Mina Loy, Elaine Scarry, Gertrude Stein, and Simone Weil. Grey's engagement with these figures (and many others) is part of her effort to stabilize, if not fully comprehend, the inconceivability of her maternal banishment. By thinking her pain rather than feeling it, Grey becomes an expert witness to her own trauma, a ponderer of motherhood even as her identity as daughter has been rescinded"--

We Call to the Eye and to the Night is an amalgam of eminent poets -Hayan Charara, Leila Chatti, Nathalie Handal, Fady Joudah, and Naomi Shihab Nye, among them-and those who have just begun to make their mark. These poets are descended from diverse countries and represent a breathtaking intersection of voices, experiences, and perspectives. Divided into whimsical sections (named for lines from poems they include), the anthology features an evocative array of erotic and romantic selections, as well as ones portraying love of family, friends, heritage, and homeland. Exquisitely curated and introduced by acclaimed authors Hala Alyan and Zeina Hashem Beck, We Call to the Eye and to the Night is at once sexy, sensuous, adventurous, and nostalgic-a treasury of love emanating from the Arab world and its diaspora.

Curt Flood was a dazzling center fielder for the St. Louis Cardinals when, in 1969, he was traded to the Philadelphia Phillies. But instead of accepting his fate, Flood shocked baseball by suing the sport over its Reserve Clause, an age-old rule that bound players to their teams in perpetuity. His extraordinary case went all the way to the Supreme Court and helped pave the way for major advancements in the rights of professional athletes.Stepping Up is Flood's astonishing story. Accessible to teens but of interest to baseball fans of all ages, it begins with Flood as a an artistic black kid in Oakland, and continues with his eye-opening experience as a minor leaguer in the racist South. It describes Flood's years with the exciting Cardinals teams of the 1960s (with teammates like Stan Musial, Joe Torre, and Bob Gibson), and his increasing frustrations with baseball's mistreatment of players-especially blacks. The book culminates with his historic suit, which changed his life and the sports world forever.In lively, conversational prose, Alex Belth provides fascinating details and anecdotes about Flood's Cardinals, the Negro Leagues, and many of the dramatic differences in baseball-and America-between Flood's era and today. Including a foreword by acclaimed broadcaster Tim McCarver (who, as a player, was traded with Flood to the Phillies), Stepping Up is the compelling tale of a ballplayer's desire to make a difference.

When Hector and his friend Mando, seventh-graders, visit Uncle Julio, a photographer in Fresno, they have more excitement than they ever imagined. On a photo shoot in a rickety old plane, they spot an armored car heist, and Uncle Julio snaps some shots of the robbers. After they report what they saw, the two robbers decide they have to teach Hector and Mando a lesson. When the bumbling thugs meet up with the quick-witted boys, the results are hilarious.

In this exquisite anthology, esteemed poets from America, Italy, and elsewhere follow the renowned Piero Trail, a route through Tuscany and Umbria that features some of the most acclaimed frescoes by the legendary Renaissance painter, Piero della Francesca. The resulting poems-including ones by Henri Cole, Jorie Graham, Charles Wright, and Patti Smtih-capture Piero's incomparable influence in the artistic, literary, and spiritual worlds, generated as they are by the transcendence of Piero's timeless powers. Including twelve reproductions of Piero's frescoes, a foreword by Rosanna Warren, and an introduction by anthologist Dana Prescott, Feathers from the Angel's Wing is unforgettable collection, a book to be cherished by lovers of art, artists, and the spirits that move them.

For nearly two decades, Patrick Rosal has been one of the most beloved and admired poets in the United States, bringing together the most dynamic aspects of literary and performance poetry. The son of Filipino immigrants (his father was a lapsed Catholic priest), he has made a life of bridging worlds-literary, ethnic, national, spiritual-through his poetry, and has been recognized with some of the highest honors and countless devoted readers. The Last Thing: New & Selected Poems, gives us a substantial playlist of new work-hard-hitting and big-hearted-along with ample selections from his first four books. Bursting with music, infused with love and awe, this is essential reading from a poet of vigor and conscience.

Fanya, a young Polish Jew, living and working on the Lower East Side, attends a lecture by a famous educator, Henry Scott, that seems meant specifically for her.  Scott calls America "the meeting ground of all the nations of the world" and exhorts Americans to "blaze a trail to a future where people would be judged not by membership in a group  . . . but as individuals on their own merits."   On an impulse, Fanya goes to Scott's university office and boldly asks him to read the autobiography she has written. After a highly charged exchange, the rational, older, American professor is won over by the young, passionate, Jewish immigrant. She is his fascination; he is her "symbol of all she could never be." Scott becomes her mentor, leading Fanya to success as an author.  He also expresses romantic interest in her, but ultimately rebuffs her socially. Although she is crushed, instead of returning to the ghetto to live among "her own people," as so many before her have done, Fanya chooses to advance further into America. She buys a house in a quiet New England village, where, eventually, another newcomer becomes an unexpected soul mate-and she prepares to make a home.This moving portrait of a vibrant and talented immigrant woman is based on the author's true relationship with John Dewey, the important and famous educator who was her most significant influence. It depicts the workings of American society during the 1930s, especially between the privileged class and immigrants who were striving for a better life. It is an early and optimistic story of Jewish assimilation, and grapples with issues still faced by immigrants today.The comprehensive introduction by Dr. Catherine Rottenberg, who rescued the novel from obscurity, describes the novel's significance, placing it in the context of Yezierska's work and life, as well as within the Jewish American literary tradition.

Sappho meets Springsteen in Insecurity System by Sara Wainscott, a wry exploration of memory, motherhood, interdimensional time-travel, and the precarious future. Propelled by existential longing, these poems cycle between tenderness and rage, desire and despair, tracking the intertwined anxieties of making a living and making a life.

In Soft Launch, Aaron Belz takes what might seem normal to other people-a 1/3 full bottle of Prell left in a musty shower stall of a mountain cabin, for instance-and turns it over in the light until its true self emerges, a thirsty dolphin lost in the piney woods. Or so he claims. Regardless, in these poems, the sentimentalized experience of middle-age is about not just connectedness but overconnectedness, and to all the wrong things. Hyperaware, hypervigilant, and abundantly alert, Belz surveys the banal, the grinding quotidian, and asks not, "Is this all?" but rather "Isn't this not all?" And then he bows his head either to pray or to nap.

This heartrending and darkly playful new collection by Alexandra Teague tries to understand the edges of self in a patriarchal culture and in relation to a family history of mental illness and loss. In poems that mix high art and popular culture (from classical Greek statues to giant plaster artichokes, Cubism to Freudian Disney dolls), Teague interweaves self-reflection with the stories and lives of mythic and historic female figures, such as the dangerous-wise witch Baba Yaga and early-20th-century sculptors' model Audrey Munson--calling across time and place to explore desire, grief, and the representation and misrepresentation of the female form.

In Ridiculous Light, Valencia Robin captures the everyday and the ecstatic in a voice all her own. Through poems that live at the intersection of history and experience, she captures the joys and tumult of being alive. She is a storyteller of the first order, a documenter not just of memories but of how we remember.

In Loves You, Sarah Gambito explores the recipe as poetic form and a mode of resistance. Through the inclusion of real recipes that she and her family cook from, she brings readers to the table?not only to enjoy the bounty of her poems but, slyly, to consider the ways in which Filipino Americans, and people of color in general, are assailed and fetishized. In addition, the book explores the manifold ways that poetry can nourish and provide for us. Gambito's poems have always been full zest and bite. Now she literally invites us to dig in with this long-awaited new book: Kain Na Tayo! (Let's eat!).

For years, RandallMann has been hailed as one of contemporary American poetry's most daringformalists, expertly using craft as a way of exploring racy subjects with trenchantwit and aplomb. His new collection, Proprietary,depicts with the insights of a longtime insider the culture of corporateAmerica, in which he's worked for years, intertwined with some of histried-and-true subjects, including gay life in the wildly disparate worlds ofSan Francisco and northern Florida.

In her newest feat of poetic innovation, Amy Newman wanders the lives of mid-century poetry immortals, including Berryman, Bishop, Lowell, Plath, and Sexton, peeking in from the periphery on personal moments both sensational and mundane, imagining their consequences for the poets, their readers, and their shared American century. Affecting and refreshing, a perfect mix of literariness and pulp, On this Day in Poetry History is the latest accomplishment from a poet of incomparable wit and imagination.

Published more than fifteen years after the publication of her Juniper Prize-winning first book, Fugitive Red, the poems in Karen Donovan's second collection continue to mine the language and systems of science and social science as a way of portraying our lineage of experience. Whether through the symbols of an ancient Irish alphabet or the "lost gospel of ribosome," Donovan traces the way our inner and outer expressions and gestures combine to form our humanness.

Rosal finds trouble he isn't asking for in his unforgettable new poems, whether in New York City, Austin, Texas, or the colonized Philippines of his ancestors. But trouble is everywhere, and Rosal, acclaimed author of My American Kundiman, responds in kind, pulling no punches in his most visceral, physical collection to date. "My hand's quick trip from my hip to your chin, across / your face, is not the first free lesson I've given," Rosal writes, and it's true-this new book is full of lessons, hard-earned, from a poet who nonetheless finds beauty in the face of violence.

Thiscollection, winner of the 2014 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor's Choice Award, furtherestablishes Shane McCrae as an indispensible poetic voice. With hisunmistakable cadences, he probes insistently yet big-heartedly into someparadoxes of belief and righteousness, confronting God from the quagmire of hisupbringing: half-Black and raised by White supremacists.

Uncommon Prayer is a book about desire, and about the ways in which desire can and cannot be expressed, contained, or controlled by language.  Invoking the structural organization of the liturgical hours, the calendar, and the alphabet, Uncommon Prayer explores how external forms might compensate for the incommunicability of human want-that is, how the parts of expression that aren't found in dictionary definitions might help to make up for what our words never quite manage to express.

Winner of the 2013 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize, a collection of gemlike poems combining delicacy with unmistakable hardiness. These poems are exquisite, deceptively complex revelations of the domestic and natural worlds: chiseled, unflinching, set beside a "painted paper lake/of gilded folds laid straight,/the gowned hills/on hidden feet/late coming light." Reminiscent of the writing of Robert Creeley, Shinn's debut conveys a life condensed-deeply felt and keenly observed.

Here is an impressive roster of poets from the past 75 years, including Hall of Famers like Richard Hugo, Irving Feldman, William Matthews, Marianne Moore, Ogden Nash, and May Swenson, and contemporary All-Stars like B.H. Fairchild, Linda Gregerson, Donald Hall, Denis Johnson, Yusef Komunyakaa, Thomas Lux, Gail Mazur, and others. In all, nearly one hundred poets represent the spectrum of verse writing about the National Pastime: from stickball and sandlot games to the Majors, from spectators to scrubs and superstars. They underscore baseball's particular poetic sensibility, capturing its rhythms, culture, and timelessness. Includes a Foreword by Daniel Okrent, acclaimed author (Nine Innings, Last Call, and others), inaugural Public Editor of the New York Times, and inventor of Rotisserie League Baseball, also known as Fantasy Baseball. A very classy collection, excellent poetry and excellent baseball-a perfect gift.

Edwin Page, a fussy middle-aged professor, no sooner bids farewell to his obstetrician wife, Cecilia, who accepted a fellowship abroad, when his new neighbors, Mrs. Botts and her sexy, twentyish daughter, Leila, arrive. Since they're locked out of their house, Edwin invites them in-and then can't get them to leave. He becomes obsessed with Leila and convinces himself that she is a perfect surrogate mother for the childless Cecilia. "Wickedly amusing . . . subversive" (New York Times Book Review), The Sugar Mother undoes the institution of marriage.