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.

Bound is a collection of poems that seeks to carve a space for Blackness and queerness in the world that isn't defined by trauma or lack, where Black and queer folks can seriously play, can create and conjure the worlds they want to live and love in. Beginning with a takedown of the God concept and moving through an incitement to revolution, Bound, along the way, plays with conventional notions of race, sex, sexuality, gender and pleasure, tearing down what we didn't build to make room for what's coming.

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.

This collection of prose poems chronicles a woman's childhood onset and adult journey through obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), which manifests in fearful obsessions and counting compulsions that impact her relationship to motherhood, religion, and the larger world. Cynthia Marie Hoffman's unsettling, image-rich poems chart the interior landscape of the obsessive mind. Along with an angel who haunts the poems' speaker throughout her life, she navigates her fear of guns and accidents, fears for the safety of her child, and reckons with her own mortality, ultimately finding a path toward peace.

"She is a daring act as a poet/athlete . . . but she can also travel the backwoods, pointing out herons, ivy vines and creek water with a kind of divining rod rightness. . . . Her wild lyrics shudder and shine, jubilant and threatening, exuberant."-Carol Muske-Dukes, Huffington Post

In this arresting debut, love poems and interior monologues are reinvented in a time of war. Within them, Laura Cronk writes, "I want to blow up the Law with Language, having run my tongue around my mouth ten thousand times. Instead of not speaking, I want to speak."

Each prose poem in this extraordinary volume is an impassioned letter to a nameless editor from a poet seeking publication for her collection about chess, sainthood, and the poet's lonely childhood. Taken individually, the poems display a dazzling originality; together, they form an exquisite exploration of memory and longing.

Kate Northrop's new poems capture the ephemeral thresholds between natural and supernatural worlds. Through the mist and snowfall of the American landscape (topographical and psychic), they momentarily illuminate figures at once familiar and strange: stray dogs, wayward people, and "fields rising . . . like a shroud / Or a female voice."

On January 6, 2021, at the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic in America, while the U.S. Capitol is under attack, Nicholas Montemarano drives six hundred miles to see his mother, who is hospitalized with COVID pneumonia and in a critical state. For ten days he lives in a hotel minutes from the hospital, alternating between hope and helplessness. This is the story of those ten days. It is the story of the pandemic told through the intimate prism of one family's loss.  Written with visceral urgency in the earliest days of grief, If There Are Any Heavens resists categorization: it is a memoir, a poem, a mournful but loving song. Its form asks readers to slow down and breathe between each broken line. At other moments, a chorus of voices-anti-maskers, COVID-deniers, and doctors-causes the reader to become breathless. It is an almost real-time account of the anxiety, uncertainty, and sorrow brought on by this pandemic. It is also, finally, a devastating homage to a family's love in a time of great loss.  Now, and many years from now, when people want to understand the personal cost of the COVID-19 pandemic, they will turn to this intimate and spare elegy from a son to his mother.

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.

First published in English in 1959 and long unavailable, Rachmil Bryks's vivid stories portray Jewish life in the Lodz ghetto and at Auschwitz. In a spare and tragicomic style, they illuminate the small and large absurdities that arise at the limits of human endurance-from the cooking of "roast meat" made of cabbage leaves to the predicament of Jews forced to cooperate in the hierarchy of their own annihilation. Deceptively simple and often humorous, these stories nevertheless mirror Bryks's nuanced view of major moral dilemmas of the period: action vs. inaction, preserving dignity vs. survival.This new edition brings together Bryks's well-known novellas, "A Cat in the Ghetto" and "Kiddush Hashem;" two short stories; an early poem; and his important but little-known essay, "My Credo," in which he defends his use of black humor in writing about unspeakable tragedy. A new introduction by scholar Adam Rovner and a new afterword by the author's daughter Bella Bryks-Klein illuminate Bryks's life and the work from two distinct perspectives.

With this third collection, Rachel Wetzsteon continues to imprint American verse with her particular brand of smart, tart poems. These new pieces employ her remarkable formal agility in order to showcase an assortment of quarreling themes: learning and loss, autonomy and loneliness, love and work. The result is the rare book that is equal parts sass and sorrow.

Savyon Liebrecht, one of Israel's most distinguished and popular authors, has won an avid readership in the U. S. for her rich, believable fiction about affairs of the heart. Her newest collection includes seven long stories named for placesMunich, America, Tel Aviv, Hiroshimaand features Israelis abroad, women and men in love and in trouble far away from home. A woman living congenially in Hiroshima for nine years becomes involved in a love triangle with an American and a Japanese, and learns with chilling finality that she can never be at home in this city of the Japanese holocaust. The tables turn on an Israeli journalist, in Munich to cover the trial of a Nazi war criminal, when he becomes a witness to anti-Arab violence and to the murder of a beautiful Muslim woman he has secretly desired. In these searing stories setting becomes an accomplice to fate, and history intrudes into the heat of passion. In the end, A Good Place for the Night makes us realize that we are all wanderers, and the safe haven of "home" is only an idea.

Included in this unparalleled collection are Christian Bök, Anne Carson, and Erin Mouré, whose experiments with genre have landed them international acclaim; Lisa Robertson and Ken Babstock, whose explorations of the pastoral and the sonnet, respectively, reach as far back into poetry's history as they do into the future of those forms; George Elliot Clarke, whose striking lyrics have been adapted for opera; and Tim Lilburn, Don McKay, and Jan Zwicky, who have reinvented some of poetry's primordial components from the wilder fringes of the Canadian landscape.Along with Nicole Brossard, Dionne Brand, Christopher Dewdney, Susan Goyette, Dennis Lee, Daphne Marlatt, Michael Ondaantje, Fred Wah, and others, these poets have been carefully chosen to convey the exhilarating commotion and diversity of Canadian verse. For native readers, Open Field represents a handy selection of their country's most vibrant writers, both established and emergent; for readers in the United States and elsewhere, it is the perfect introduction to the skill and daring ubiquitous in Canadian poetry today.

Whether in the title poem, spoken by those who lived longingly and vicariously through the famous missing aviator, or in "Circus Fire, 1944," which intimately recounts a haunting New England tragedy, Gabrielle Calvocoressi uses her prodigious gifts of imagination and empathy to give voice to the hope and heartbreak of small-town America. In painstaking, vernacular verse, she conveys the ambitions and failings of a distraught populacein the edgy jazz portrait, "Suite Billy Strayhorn," for example, or the enthralling, interwoven sequence, "At the Adult Drive-In," which conveys, at once, a personal and communal corruption. Penetrating and compassionate, The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart portrays, with a storyteller's arc, the troubled landscape of the left-behind.

Stories about a Sixties commune in Washington State, a generation later. The quirky residents of Curtain Creek Farm still make sandals, weave blankets, and grow organic vegetables; but now they also have a web site; their children are having children; and into their underground homes, tree houses, and tin-roofed cabins, aging parents are coming to live with them. Nance Van Winckel "merges popular culture and utopian lifestyles with rosy, generous vision" (Publishers Weekly) in these "fully satisfying stories" (Seattle Times).