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The first English translation of one of Japan's most important haiku poets.

Youth, ideals, and life of the “sent-down” (rusticated) youth during the cultural revolution.Journal of the Cultural Revolution is a collection of poems depicting the lives of educated youth during the cultural revolution. The author uses poetry to reminisce about many friends and memorable experiences during their time as educated youth, reflecting how the era influenced individual destinies. The language is poetic and with bursts of unexpected insights with strong emotions and rhythms. At once a work of narrative lyricism and an act of personal courage, this memoir in verse documents the human cost of a period of political turmoil in China’s recent past.The “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” marked a critical passage on China’s road to modernity, as momentous for the world as it was for one boy caught up in its throes. In poetry that juxtaposes the political and the personal, the social and the individual, Luo Ying depicts a time when ultra-leftist mass movements and factional struggles penetrated the deepest level of private daily life. In bleak yet vivid portraits he reveals how the period indelibly marred him. “I am a red guard just as I always was,” he writes.Giving voice to the inner life of a man haunted by his experiences, Journal of the Cultural Revolution bears witness to a traumatic time when ideology threatened to crush individuality. Luo Ying’s poetry stands as eloquent testimony to the power of the individual voice to endure in the face of dire social and historical circumstances.

What is real and what is not, how to preserve history and self in a changing landscape, and how to build roots where the ground does not accept them.Easy Victims to the Charitable Deceptions of Nostalgia grapples with the tensions associated with being exiled to home, with the environment and gentrification when there is a lack of land, and what that does to family, history, and family history. It is about the personal islands we all inhabit. Nostalgia is deceptive and seductive. We live in a time of tumult, a time therefore where the past may be, perhaps too easily, romanticized. There is a tendency to fall for these deceptions. Not just our own, but those of the generation before us, as well as the nostalgia of the generations that came before them, that they fell for. On the small island where this manuscript is largely set, there is such transience and such dependency on the narrative born of tourism that the truth and fiction of a place’s history become skewed. As the water rises and the cost of living becomes such that working people and families rooted on the island for years cannot afford to live here, cannot risk staying, the distance to mainland seems lengthened. This is the perspective from which this book wrestles with the tough pull of nostalgia and the questions of what is real and what is not, how to preserve history and self in a changing landscape, and how to build roots where the ground does not accept them.

Celebrating the prose poetry sequence in twentieth century literature.Sequences, some narrative and some fragmentary emerged as a form early in the twentieth century with the work of  Ernest Hemingway, Amy Lowell, T.S. Eliot, Thornton Wilder, H.D., and others. Braids & Sequins traces the form to contemporary writers including Donald Hall, Holly Iglesias, Robert Bly, Michael Benedict, Kay Boyle, David Young, Robert Duncan,  N. Scott Momaday, Jim Hazard, Nin Andrews and many others.

In poems that echo those of his classic ancestors Luo Ying captures the natural world.Luo Ying is best-known for poems that give voice to his experiences during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) when he was one of the “sent-down youth.” The poems in Water Sprite show us that despite his experiences during those years, his individual voice was not crushed beneath the weight of ideology. In poems that harkens back to the observations in classical Chinese poetry, Ying focuses on small and often unobserved aspects of the natural world.  His words paint delicate pictures of a world, and a psyche, that remained intact—though not untouched—through turmoil and chaos.

A deep meditation on the power and resonance of the sea.In a stunning collection of prose poems, Agosin reflect on the sea as a force of transformation,  a creative force of energy, spirituality, and redemption. She writes about the patterns of the ocean, its moods day and night, and the sea as a constant companion.

A iterary testament to friendship and the ways in which a vibrant collaboration can inspire poets to plumb the depths of their experiences.The concluding volumes of a ten-year-long conversation in prose poetry between the award-winning poets Marvin Bell and Christopher Merrill. They write from different generations and places around the world on a range of themes from memory to politics, aging and mortality, the vagaries of desire and the imagination.Bell and Merrill wanted to create a wide-ranging dialogue to explore the meaning not only of their separate experiences but of the very ways in which a collaboration fosters a deeper engagement with each other—and the world. In his penultimate message to Merrill, written just hours before he suffered a heart attack from which he never recovered, Bell said that what he loved about their collaboration was that each new prose poem defined his immediate future—which was what After the Fact provided both of them for ten glorious years.

An illustrated work of lyric poetry and prose on drinking green tea as a meditation.An Homage to Green Tea is an illustrated collection of poetry and prose on the beneficence of green tea, and ways to experience that beneficence. It collects two works of classical Korean literature into a single volume.“A Poem for Green Tea” is a long poem that includes short-short stories, legends, anecdotes, other related poems, excerpts from reference books about green tea, religious and spiritual (Buddhist/Taoist) writing, and Ch’oŭi’s notes to the poem. Taken as a whole, the poem seeks to authenticate the value of Korean green tea relative to Chinese green tea in a pleasing, aesthetic manner. “A Poem for Green Tea” ends with an epilogue poem in praise of Ch’oŭi’s unparalleled green tea.“The Divine Life of Tea” is a collection of instructions on how to arrive at the best cup of green tea. It begins with superb locations for the cultivation of green tea, when to pick the leaves, how to prepare and store leaves, ideal types of water, grades of boiling water, the utensils to use in preparation of a cup of green tea, and the type of company one should keep—a list by no means comprehensive. “The Divine Life of Tea” ends with an epilogue by Ch’oŭi, describing his purpose and efforts in writing the manuscript.

Tao Yuan-ming stands first in the line of China’s great lyric poets. Tao Yuan-ming, who lived around 400 A.D., stands first in the line of China’s great lyric poets. Just as the Impressionists taught us to see in a new way, Tao taught the Chinese a lyrical attitude toward life. Creator of an intimate, honest, plain-spoken style, Tao was a man whose life spoke as eloquently as his art. Indeed, no poet’s life and art have ever been more of a piece. Born into corrupt and turbulent times, Tao resigned his post as Magistrate, choosing to live the humble and difficult life of a farmer. He and his family would pay dearly for this choice, enduring hunger, cold and poverty. But he never wavered from it, holding steadfastly to the Confucian virtue of “firmness in adversity.” For a scholar to live this kind of reclusive life, giving up wealth and power, represented the highest moral virtue to the Chinese Tao was given the posthumous title “Summoned Scholar of Tranquil Integrity.” Integrity is certainly the first word that springs to mind in thinking of Tao.

Building the Barricade, harrowing and demanding, here takes its place in English among the twentieth century's master works of war-witness.”—Jane HirshfieldBuilding the Barricade, is poetry of witness, and a lyric account of the sixty-three day Warsaw uprising.Caught between German occupation and the advancing Soviets, the Polish Resistance Home Army barricaded central Warsaw in hopes of liberating the city and gaining Polish sovereignty. Building the Barricade is Anna Świrszczyńska’s first-person account of the atrocities that destroyed over 60% of the Polish capital and left over 100,000 civilians and 16,000 Polish resistance fighters dead.Świrszczyńska had joined the resistance as a military nurse and later wrote: “Day and night German bombers raged over the capital, burying the living beneath the rubble.”

Poems that travel with a sense of urgency, bearing witness to precarious beauty, fleeting joy and the unfinished work required to survive. The poems in this collection are located in many places including Italy, Russia, Hawaii, Florida, France, Texas, Minnesota and elsewhere. These different places are roots of the same tree that stands in the midst of a threatened and still beautiful earth. Through multiple locations, White explores how we might continue to live inside this vanishing with all the tools that have always been at our disposal: wonder, grief, hope and joy. The poems are meditations on this perilous moment in time and the demands that this moment places on anyone to stay curious and grateful even in the midst of our inability to change course or self-correct with a view toward the greater interconnectedness of all things.

Windows That Open Inward: Images of Chile is a stunning collaboration of visions: the vision of a great photographer and the vision of a great poet. Windows That Open Inward is a mosaic of visual images fused with words that create a compelling image of Chile. Rogovin, a well-known photographer, journeyed to Chile in 1967. At Nerudäs suggestion, he went to the island of Chiloe, in the south. Rogovin¿s visit was most fruitful. He came away with some extraordinary photographs, capturing the stark beauty of Chiloe and the unromantic life of its people. His portraits depict individuals and families and the tools and elements of their existence. There is a symbiotic relationship between Rogovin and Neruda, a common interest in and respect for the ordinary. Editor Maloney has selected a diverse cross-section of Nerudäs poems to complement the photographs. White Pine Press is reissuing this classic to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the press.

Efe Duyan is an internationally recognized poet, his work in the US includes the Hurst Professorship at St. Louis University and a residency at the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa.He is a young Turkish poet influenced by his mentor, Nazim Hikmet

Floating between memoir and philosophical inquiry, Mariella Nigrös Memory Rewritten explores the ongoing impact of a childhood trauma and the power of poetry to come to terms with loss, even finding beauty in it. "Sister souls of mine, never look back!" admonished Uruguayan modernist poet Delmira Agustini (1886-1914) in an elegy that reminds us of the fate of the biblical Lot¿s wife as well as the ill-fated Orpheus. But sometimes, looking back is necessary ¿ particularly when it is a sister who has been lost. Uruguayan poet Mariella Nigrös Memory Rewritten is a meditation on the insufficiency of language to provide a container for human emotion and memory¿ and yet the reality that it is the only means we have. "I¿m writing an elegy / and so I¿m arranging a dark bouquet of useless words /with their eloquence of broken petals / and burning in the rhetoric of embroidered leaves / the poem grows in black water / of the fragile overflowing vase," Nigro states. The ghost of a beloved sister dead in childhood haunts these poems, as does the need for repetition, the compulsion to return to the sites of loss and pain. However, rather than merely repeating memories, Nigro elegantly transforms them, salvaging beauty from the wreckage: ¿In a box I locked like Eleusian mysteries the poems we¿d shared the previous year under the January moon, along with the colored ribbons and glass beads that we¿d fought over, now mine alone.¿ In a poetics reminiscent of Helene Cixous¿s ecriture feminine, Nigro transforms the visceral, bodily experiences of loss and brings the reader along with her on a journey where grief does not proceed in any orderly stages, where pain and healing coexist within the mess of language, and out of them emerges a poem.

The Abduction details the terror and sorrow surrounding the abduction of Maram Al-Masri's only child by her then husband who fled to Syria, where due to the patriarchal nature of society and the social/political problems she was unable to fight for custody. The Abduction refers to an autobiographical event in Maram Al-Masri's life. When, as a young Arab woman living in France, she decides to separate from her husband with whom she has a child, the father kidnaps the baby and returns to Syria. Al-Masri won't see her son for thirteen years. This is the story of a woman denied the basic right to raise her child. These are haunting, spellbinding poems of love, despair, and hope, a delicate, profound and powerful book on intimacy, a mother's rights, war, exile, and freedom. Maram Al-Masri embodies the voice of all parents, who one day, for whatever the reason, have been forcibly separated from their loved ones. She writes about the status of women, seeking to reconcile her role as a mother with her writing work. The terrible war that has devastated her native country since 2011 has painfully affected her. Also included in The Abduction is The Bread of Letters, comprised of two poems addressing the act of writing: "Isn't the act of writing / an outrageous act in itself? Writing / is getting to know / one's innermost thoughts. / Yes, I am scandalous / because I show my truth and my nakedness of woman. / Yes I am scandalous / because I scream my pain and my hope, / my desire, my hunger and my thirst." For Al-Masri, writing is a vital and deeply human need: "When I write what I feel, I'm afraid of nothing. Poetry is my freedom and touches me where it lands most deeply. It offers me life vibration, the flush of a river, where feet and dreams meet." The Guardian described her as "a love poet whose verse spares no truth of love's joys and mercilessness."

Vincenz is a prolific author and translatorHe is the editor of MadHat Press & publisher of New American WritingHe will organize a zoom tour for the book and a regional in person tour

“The best poet of the younger generation, and deserving of more recognition than most of the poets in the older generation: that is, mine and the one beyond it.” — James DickeyTillinghast’s poems continues to stay curious and engaged, involving himself with the twists and turns of American history and how they manifest themselves in the social issues of today. Entering his ninth decade, Tillinghast addresses his own sense of mortality and personal vulnerability. He is at heart a lyrical poet, but his inherent impulse to celebrate life is troubled by the changing world he finds himself living in.

A book about living in foreign places as opposed to traveling in them.

"Three Hundred Tang Poems" is one of the key twentieth century primers for western readers of Chinese poetry.

This novel unravels a tale of vengeance and vigilante justice, in the voice of a fourteen year-old girl.

A career-spanning volume drawn from forty years of work and a selection of new poems. Stephen Corey's work is intelligent, moving and engaging. Poem after poem is beautiful, effortless, and thought-provoking. The range of style and subject matter, the depth of thought and emotion, the elegance and resonance and simplicity of language, the affectionate voice and tone-all work to make this a truly important and memorable book. "Here is a life, and a life, and / a life," Stephen Corey writes in the opening poem's instructions to on how find the faded leaf-also a metaphor for the end of life-that one must imagine still colored after he is "gone." The poem is echoed near the end of this stunningly rich and encompassing book in a poem addressed to his four daughters about what he has missed during his life. In between we encounter a world we thought we knew but have not seen in this way before: things as varied as Monarch butterflies, telephones, calligraphy, and bread, as well as other writers and texts that become lenses to show us "How we are growing undoes what we are" and see. Like the glassblower's art in one of these major poems, "Breath makes another world." And like his Michelangelo in a sequence that masterfully covers centuries, we see "the way a life we love can be steered, / beyond our control, beyond us." And so, thanks to this important and needed book we too can live beyond ourselves; that, indeed, is the highest praise for any art."-Richard Jackson, author of Broken Horizons and Where the Wind Comes From"Stephen Corey's, As My Age Then Was, So I Understood Them, is sometimes bookish, in the best ways, and in addition to welcoming many of the stars in our pantheon (Shakespeare, O'Keeffe, Keats, Ginsberg, Woolf, and Whitman for example) there's also the dual elegy for the poet's father and Dickinson (the latter also has her own baseball poem), Emerson 'at the moment of his first masturbation," and a sequence in which Li Po and Tu Fu hop on a jet and tour America. What this means is that when Corey forays into "the real world" -keeping a hospital death watch, exploring and exalting carnal love, or delighting in his young daughter "playing Beethoven on my chest" - the poems are informed by both of his masters... by the "shelves of books" that are "the bones of my brain.""-Albert GoldbarthStephen Corey worked at the Georgia Review for thirty-six years in various positions including thirteen year as Editor before retiring in 2019. His first two poetry collections, The Last Magician (Water Mark Press, 1981) and Synchronized Swimming (Swallow's Tale Press, 1984), were winners of national competitions. All These Lands You Call One Country (University of Missouri Press, 1992) and There Is No Finished World (White Pine Press, 2003) followed, and a half-dozen poetry chapbooks were interspersed along the way. His first prose collection was Startled at the Big Sound: Essays Personal, Literary, and Cultural (Mercer University Press, 2017), and a second is in process.

The poems in Aleš Šteger¿s The Book of Bodies roam across personal experience, human history, and the natural world to unlock intellectual and emotional connections.Aleš Šteger¿s The Book of Bodies directly follows¿and builds on and veers from¿The Book of Things. The 50 poems in The Book of Things focus on such everyday objects as umbrellas, chairs, and candles, and in so doing illuminate the human condition, particularly its propensity for violence, deception, and forgetting. The 50 poems in The Book of Bodies manage to be simultaneously more and less restrictive: half the poems are prose poems (of five paragraphs each) that roam across personal experience, human history (individual and collective), and the natural world to unlock intellectual and emotional connections; the other half are narrow stanzaless poems that focus on a single word. These poems have a sinuous, almost vaporous quality on the page¿lines so thin that they serve as a response to the prose that dominates the first half of the book. Both types of poems in The Book of Bodies are essential to Šteger¿s understanding of the world.¿Esteemed American readers, Aleš Šteger is the real thing! He is the poet of inimitable gifts! He is one of the best Eastern European poets of his generation! It is the truth: Šteger is a marvelous voice, one that takes some of the playfulness of his Yugoslavian compatriots Vasko Popa and Tomaž Šalamun to the whole new level.¿¿ Ilya KaminskySlovenian writer Aleš Šteger has published eight books of poetry, three novels, and two books of essays. A Chevalier des Artes et Lettres in France and a member of the Berlin Academy of Arts, he received the 1998 Veronika Prize for the best Slovenian poetry book, the 1999 Petrarch Prize for young European authors, the 2007 Rožanc Award for the best Slovenian book of essays, and the 2016 International Bienek Prize. His work has been translated into over 15 languages, including Chinese, German, Czech, Croatian, Hungarian, and Spanish. Four of his books have been published in English: The Book of Things, which won the 2011 Best Translated Book Award; Berlin; the novel Absolution; and Above the Sky Beneath the Earth. He also has worked in the field of visual arts (most recently with a large scale installation at the International Kochi-Muziris Biennale in India), completed several collaborations with musicians (Godalika, Uroš Rojko, Peter N. Gruber), and collaborated with Peter Zach on the film Beyond Boundaries.Brian Henry is the author of eleven books of poetry, most recently Permanent State. He co-edited the international magazine Verse from 1995 to 2018 and established the Tomaž Šalamun Prize in 2015. His translation of Aleš Šteger¿s The Book of Things appeared from BOA Editions in 2010 and won the Best Translated Book Award. He also has translated Tomaž Šalamun¿s Woods and Chalices (Harcourt, 2008), Aleš Debeljak¿s Smugglers (BOA, 2015), and Aleš Šteger¿s Above the Sky Beneath the Earth (White Pine, 2019) and Berlin (Counterpath, 2015). His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, the New York Times, Poetry, The New Republic, American Poetry Review, and many other places. His poetry and translations have received numerous honors, including two NEA fellowships, the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, a Howard Foundation fellowship, the Carole Weinstein Poetry Prize, the Cecil B. Hemley Memorial Award, the George Bogin Memorial Award, and a Slovenian Academy of Arts and Sciences grant.

This important volume gathers work from Herman Hesse Prize winner, German-Language Swiss poet Klaus Merz’s fifteen collections of poetry, from 1963-2016.This important volume gathers work from Herman Hesse Prize winner, German-Language Swiss poet Klaus Merz’s fifteen collections of poetry, from 1963-2016. Throughout his career, Swiss Poet Klaus Merz has been praised as an artisan of the understatement, and it is precisely in these smallest of details that the great unexpected has the potential to be illuminated. As Merz himself has said: “The poetry nudges toward a secret, hopefully without ostentation, rather through the power of its own alphabet.” This seminal volume brings together selections from Merz’s fifteen collections of poetry (1963-2016).“Reading Merz' spare illuminating poems is like entering Plato's cave and witnessing the light behind the shadows.” –Nin Andrews“Merz takes careful notes, thinking and feeling himself into his subject as if from fragments. A strange exhilaration, curiously impersonal yet packed with personality.” –Brian Swann“Merz’ world is a shimmering window onto beauty and insight, so precisely understated that many of the poems border on the hypnotic and can be read time and time again. It’s no wonder that so many are short, eight or ten lines or less: his eye and ear are both so incisive that if he wrote at too great length the resultant intensity could be painful. Merz is a poet who expands and deepens with his conciseness, who embodies imagism’s implied aesthetic of ‘less is more.’”—Lit Pub“An artisan of the understatement, a craftsman of finely-tuned precision.” –Neue Zuricher ZeitungKlaus Merz was born in 1945 in Aarau and lives in Unterkulm, Switzerland. He has won many literary awards including the Hermann Hesse Prize for Literature, Swiss Schiller Foundation Poetry Prize and the Friedrich Hölderlin Prize in 2012. He has published over 35 works of poetry and fiction. His latest novel is The Argentinian (Der Argentine, Haymon, 2009) and his recent collections of verse are Out of the Dust (Aus dem Staub, Haymon, 2010), Unexpected Development (Unerwarteter Verlauf, Haymon, 2013), What Helios Hauls (Helios Transport, Haymon 2016) and firm (firma, Haymon, 2019)Marc Vincenz is a poet, translator, fiction writer, editor, musician and artist. He has published over 30 books of poetry, fiction and translation. His work has been published in The Nation, Ploughshares, Raritan, Colorado Review and The Los Angeles Review of Books. He is publisher and editor of MadHat Press and publisher of New American Writing. His newest books are There Might Be a Moon or a Dog (Gazebo, Australia, 2022) and The Pearl Diver of Irunmani (White Pine Press, forthcoming 2023).

Prose poems and flash fictions revealing the heart-wrenching, absurd, life-changing nature of living through Covid, political chaos, and personal upheaval. Peter Conners’ unique blend of prose poetry, flashfiction, and other spare poetic forms pays witness to the heart-wrenching,absurd, life-changing nature of surviving a global pandemic during one of themost politically and culturally divisive times in American history. As adivorced father living in a blended family with 4 children, navigating a newmarriage, and also caring for elderly parents, pandemic restrictions and theirattendant scary weirdness hit hard. After a decade of publishing highly regardednonfiction books about music and counterculture, Conners knew that only poetrycould do these strange days justice. The result is Conners’ first prose poetrycollection in a dozen years. Moving from raw personal poems like “One of youwent” and “My father wanders” to overt political rants “The beaches are filled”and “Welcome to the last” to comically absurd flash fictions like “Superhero”and “Hello, my name is Larry” to meditations on relationships (“A small house;”“The old husband”) and spirituality (“If each martyr;” “Love everyone”),Conners strikes all the rich notes that illustrate our humanity, desire forlove and connection, and striving for a rebirth that awaits just beyond theedge suffering.“Part Tao, part surrealist dialogue, Peter Conners has penned a book of precise yet effusive runes from the well-gnawed bones of a man reflecting upon his family and nation at midlife. Here we have poet as citizen, philosopher, father, humorist, husband, we have the pandemic (in actuality and as metaphor), we have passing time, memory, ‘our whole dumb history,’ the theater of self with its ‘copious technical difficulties.’ These are minimalist and thin-trimmed parable-like stories, dialogues, and beautiful confessions that in the end haggle down the price we’ve paid through the last brutal years, encouraging the reader to take our problems and ‘Feed them to the squirrels. Those little fuckers will eat anything.’”—Sean Thomas Dougherty“What you know after reading only a handful of these poems is that they have the ease, and share the privileges, of being loved and cared for by a master — not as common a thing in American poetry as you might think. This is an end-of-days story for precisely our times, presented formally in a fluid blending of at least three distinct genres, managing to celebrate them all to rich effects. These poems capture a litany of almost microscopic moments, resolute in how they are illustrative of our stunningly particular days. I love this book and I want you to read it if you care about looking closely at who we are by looking at who we have been.” —Bruce Weigl “Beyond the Edge of Suffering goes beyond life's edges, and not only in suffering. This brilliant collection by Peter Conners is a genius book of our times, with masks and viruses, nasal sprays, elixirs, diseases, and exams. It is deep and poignant, with lovely and surprising sparks of humor: a tiny porcelain woman, plays in language: bodies, memories, dreams. Diamonds. Martyrs. Prayers and non-prayers. Genesis and ribs. Fathers and mothers and a son and daughter. Crying Superheroes. Weeping willows. Mosquitos and monkeys and the highest house number in America. This collection is so holy-ghostingly good, it will continue to stay with you.”—Kim ChinqueePeter Conners is the author of ten books of poetry, nonfiction and fiction, including the prose poetry collections, Of Whiskey and Winter, and The Crows Were Laughing in Their Trees. He also edited the ground-breaking prose poetry/flash fiction anthology PP/FF: An Anthology, as well as an issue of American Book Review dedicated to prose poetry/flash fiction, and was founding editor of Double Room: A Journal of Prose Poetry and Flash Fiction. In his nonfiction books, he has documented music and countercultural communities in such books as Growing Up Dead: The Hallucinated Confessions of a Teenage Deadhead; JAMerica: The History of the Jam Band and Festival Scene; Cornell ‘77: The Music, The Myth, and the Magnificence of the Grateful Dead’s Concert at Barton Hall; and White Hand Society: The Psychedelic Partnership of Timothy Leary & Allen Ginsberg. His books have been published by White Pine Press, Da Capo Press, City Lights, Cornell University Press, Starcherone Books, and Marick Press. He lives with his family in Rochester, NY where he works as Publisher and Executive Director of the award-winning independent publishing house BOA Editions. His website is: www.peterconners.com

This anthology showcases the work of sixteen contemporary Hungarian poets.

The Uncommon Speech of Paradise allows poets themselves to speak through their poems about the art they practice.

The Book of Mirrors is a silver portal opening to the hidden garden of a fragrant universe.

Wronsky is master of the lyric, a visionary never far from the complicated, wondrous relations between world and imagination, body and mind.