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"In A Fire in the Hills, Afaa focuses on one of the central threads in his body of work. His ongoing project of an articulation of self in relation to the external landscape of the community and the world and the writing of spirit through those revelations of sublimation of self gives way here to a material focus. The racial references are explicit as are the complexities of life lived as a Black man born in America in the mid-twentieth century. These are poems emanating from an attempt to follow Daoist philosophy for most of his life. Knowledge of other is in relation to knowledge of self, and self is an illusory continuum, a perspective wherein the poet embodies the transcendent arc of Malcolm X's life as credo"--

apocrifa is a nongendered love story told in verse, the journey of a lover and their beloved finding each other, falling apart, and then creating their own way to love together.

H Warren’s (they/them) debut collection, Binded, explores the nonbinary body and the courage it takes to heal and exist in the world today.

In richly lyrical prose, this coming-of-age novel tells the story of aspiring artist Sonya Hudson, who yearns to break free from psychological distress and celebrate her place in the world.

In The Nightlife, Elise Paschen explores the nocturnal world and what happens in that interval between "dorveille" and daybreak. She reveals, through dream lyrics and fractured narratives, the inevitability of unrecognized desire and the drama between the life lived and the life imagined.

A poet hailed as "stunning" reveals a fierce and sensual intelligence in a meditation about farming, reproducing, and what it means to try to forge a relationship with the earth.

2014 OMAHA READS SELECTION2016 ONE BOOK, ONE NEBRASKA WINNERStuart, Nebraska is a long way from the battlefields of Western Europe, but it is not immune to the horrors of the first Great War for Peace. Like all communities, it has lost sons and daughters to the fighting, with many more giving themselves over to the hatred only war can engender.Set in 1918 in the farm country at the heart of America, The Meaning of Names is the story of an ordinary woman trying to raise a family during extraordinary times. Estranged from her parents because she married against their will, confronted with violence and prejudice against her people, and caught up in the midst of the worst plague the world has ever seen, Gerda Vogel, an American of German descent, must find the strength to keep her family safe from the effects of a war that threatens to consume the whole world.

Poet Emily Wall began collecting birth stories after the birth of her third child, Lucy. She realized that women were always quietly sharing their storiesin living rooms with a mug of tea, or whispered at the preschool playground. She saw the intensity with which women listened to each other's stories. They were shared, remembered, retold, but not collected, not treated as the art form they are. Wall began asking for, and collecting birth stories: women sent her emails, handed her their journals, and recorded their own voices. She collected stories from a lesbian couple, a story from an indigenous father who is fighting for his language, and a story from a grandmother. Some of the stories are about difficult and painful births: a woman who had a miscarriage, a woman unable to get pregnant. And some of the stories are beautiful: a birth in water that happened exactly as the mother dreamed it would. Wall has taken these stories and shaped them into poems, and then into this collection, offering the reader a look into the story that women, for centuries, have been quietly sharing with each other.

This anthology brings together one hundred contemporary Indian poets and fiction writers working in English as well as translating from other Indian languages. Located anywhere from Michigan to Mumbai, the sources of their creativity range from the ancient epics to twentieth-century world literature, with themes suggesting a modernist individuality and sense of displacement as well as an ironic, postmodern embracing of multiple disjunctions. The editors present a historical background to the various Englishes apparent in this collection, while also identifying the shared traditions and contexts that hold together their uniquely diverse selection. In aiming at coherence rather than unity, Hasan and Chattarji reveal that the idea of Indianness is as much a means of exploring difference as finding common ground.

Jane is a Los Angeles nurse who grew up in a Christian cult that puts celebrities on trial for their sins. Daniel is a has-been actor whose career ended when the cult family members nearly killed him for flirting with her. Eight years after a romantic meet-cute in Battery Park, both search for someone to fill the gap they imagine the other could've filled if given the chance. Jane compulsively goes on dates with every self-professed expert in art, music, and food hoping they will teach her the nuances of the culture she couldn't access in her youth. Daniel looks for a girlfriend who will accept the disabilities left from the cult attack. A loving woman will prove to Daniel's blockbuster star brother, Steve, that he's capable of a supporting role in Steve's upcoming movie and relaunching Daniel's career. When a chance encounter unexpectedly reunites them, Jane and Daniel not only see another chance at the love they lost, but an opportunity to create the lives they've always wanted. The only question is whether their families will let them.

American Bastard is a lyrical inquiry into the experience of being a bastard in America. This memoir travels across literal continentsand continents of desire as Beatty finds her birthfather, a Canadian hockey player who's won three Stanley Cupsand her birthmother, a working-class woman from Pittsburgh. This is not the whitewashed story, but the real story, where Beatty writes through complete erasure: loss of name and history, and a culture based on the currency of gratitude as expected payment from the adoptee. American Bastard sandblasts the exaltation of adoption in Western culture and the myth of the ';chosen baby.' This journey into the relationship of place and body compels and unhinges, with the link between identity and blood history as its driving force. Beatty rescripts the order of things: the horizontal world of the birth table where babies are switched, the complex yard of the body where names and blood shift and revolt, and the actual story into the relationship of place and the insurrection of the body erased. Issues of class and struggle run throughout this book, this narrative river between blood and continents, between work and desire.

Taking the reader across our country through the varied landscapes of Colorado, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Arizona, Refugee discusses the nature of seeking shelter. We are all refugees looking for a haven from whatever oppresses our lives. What constitutes a refugee is at the heart of the collection. Poems confront and explore xenophobia, sexism, gun violence, domestic violence, corporate greed, and their ties to environmental destruction and political and economic tyranny. An ovarian cancer survivor, the author also writes about her own courageous confrontation with death. These inspiring poems ultimately call for the reader to recognize the refugee condition as a human condition. They call for a change in consciousness in the forms of action and compassion. They call for the reader to thrive. Ranging from short lyric poems to narrative poems, this collection steeped in rich, sensual imagery draws inspiration and healing from the natural world. Truth lies in recognition of the interdependence of all life. Refugee is an odyssey to find grace and unity in a besieged and divided contemporary American society.

Danielle Vogel's newest collection creates a latticework for repairthe repairing of past trauma, the calling-into-presence of a dissociated selfbut does so while keeping the material of this net of thinking in a fragmented, diaphanous state, glowing in the space between the poem and essay. Across three sections of ';displacements,' ';miniatures,' and ';volume,' Vogel initiates readers into the seance of the book; she asks the reader to hold vigil for the most crucial phase of its composition, which can only happen when the reader and she meet at the site of the page, within a ';new, interrupted unity.' In The Way a Line Hallucinates its Own Linearity, accordwriting with, reading withis always a verb, always kinetic, alchemical, and alive. ';It only takes one letter on the page,' Vogel writes, ';and we are already inside one another's lungs.' To consent to walk through these spaces is to give up that part of you that wishes to remain anonymous and un-entrained. You will be grateful that you did.

GONE TO EARTH brings to light, late in the long, distinguished career of poet Eleanor Wilner, her early uncollected poemsan unveiling of the first stages of a vital, imaginative process, in whose evocative, imagistic landscapes is enacted a drama of emergence from entrapment. In the often-painful drama of new birth, from the deadly strictures and oppressions of the older social forms, come the living forces undermining themnew life seeded out of a decaying order: ';a wet nose / breaks the earth, and sniffs the river air.' Written during the poet's immersion in the civil rights movement and the protests against the Vietnam War, an inner liberating struggle is tuned to a collective channel where communal memory and vision are undergoing transformation.

The Skin of Meaning is award-winning poet Keith Flynn's sixth and most wide-ranging collection, seeking to find the tangible analogs and visceral meanings hidden behind the daily bombardment of digital information and hoping to restore the mystery in our involvement with language. From the etymologies of pop culture, history, astronomy, and rock and roll, these poems fan out into a bold multiplicity of voices and techniques. Flynn's work illustrates the meaning that is also created through tense collisions and is populated with figures in resistance to the status quo, a gathering as varied as Caravaggio, Nina Simone, Gaud, Villon, Wonder Woman, and Manolete. The final section examines America's fascination with violence and death, revealing that ';a human being in love with mystery is never finished.' This collection constantly challenges our assumptions about the world we think we see and is teeming with evidence of another invisible world bristling like an underground river beneath our feet.

The five sections in Kim Stafford's Singer Come from Afar hold poems that summon war and peace, pandemic struggles, Earth imperatives, a seeker's spirit, and forge kinship. The former poet laureate of Oregon, Stafford has shared poems from this book in libraries, prisons, on reservations, with veterans, immigrants, homeless families, legislators, and students in schools. He writes for hidden heroes, resonant places, and for our chance to converge in spite of differences. Poems like ';Practicing the Complex Yes' and ';The Fact of Forgiveness' engineer tools for connection with the self, the community, and the Earth: ';It is a given you have failed . . . [but] the world can't keep its treasures from you.' For the early months of the pandemic, Stafford wrote and posted a poem for challenge and comfort each day on Instagram and published a series of chapbooks that traveled hand to hand to far placesto Norway, Egypt, and India. He views the writing and sharing of poetry as an essential act of testimony to sustain tikkun olam, the healing of the world. May this book be the hidden spring you seek.

Kim Dower's poetry has been described by the Los Angeles Times as ';sensual and evocative . . . seamlessly combining humor and heartache,' and by O Magazine as ';unexpected and sublime.' Acclaimed for combining the accessible and profound, her poems about motherhood are some of her most moving and disarmingly candid. I Wore This Dress Today for You, Mom is an anthology of her poems on being a motherchildbirth to empty nestas well as being a daughter with all the teenaged messiness, drama and conflict, to finally caring for one's mother suffering from dementia. Culled from her four collections as well as a selection of new work, these poems, heartbreaking, funny, surprising, and touching, explore the quirky, unexpected observations, and bittersweet moments mothers and daughters share. These evocative poems do not glorify mothers, but rather look under the hood of motherhood and explore the deep crevices and emotions of these impenetrable relationships: the love, despair, joy, humor and gratitude that fills our lives.

Using epistolary letters and fragments, Abracadabra, Sunshine collects multiple personal, cultural, and historical narratives that embrace the tragedy, magic, and beauty that is the human experience.

A woman who is suffering from a tragic loss is placed on a jury with her estranged ex-husband.

When an elderly woman goes missing, the women of her neighborhood dig into the secrets and lies of her husband’s past to save her.

Like Mark Doty’s Heaven’s Coast, The Book of Timothy: The Devil, My Brother, and Me weaves a lyric voice into a difficult subject matter; in this case, a sister’s attempt to extract a confession from the Catholic priest who abused her brother. When the legal system fails, is restorative justice still possible?

Bad New Age mother seeks miracle cure in Germany but encounters her past with an aloe plant instead.

Former best friends Scott and Errol meet unexpectedly at Oso Lake, a remote Canadian fly-fishing paradise where, five years before, fresh out of college, they had the time of their lives. Their situations, though, have changed, their high hopes quashed by workaday realities and, in Errols case, marriage to Claire, who has come with him trying to stave off divorce. But Oso Lake has changed. The fall before, a womans severed head was left in a campfire pit beside the lake. The shadow cast by her murder is darkened further by a fire-scarred white truck driver who claims to be a long-dead Native shaman and has plans to eradicate not only Scott, Errol, and Claire, but all of Western civilization. The beauty of the wilderness becomes, every day, more threatening and perverse. But the worst danger the vacationers face may be themselves.

Diane Thiel's eagerly anticipated collection of poems, Questions from Outer Space, explores fresh and often humorous perspectives that capture the surreal quality of our swiftly changing lives on this planet. The poems travel through questions on many fronts, challenging assumptions and locating unique angles of perception. This thought-provoking book reflects a deep engagement with the natural world, a questioning of our built systems, the expansive wilderness of parenting, and the complexities of navigating outer and inner space.

When William Fox, a TV writer on location in Florida, is dragged by his shows toxic producers to a gentleman's club thats just appeared outside town, he meets Nicole, a mysterious dancer who claims to be an anthropologist searching for signs of rational life on Earth.Enchanted by her both playful and serious ideas exploring love, limerence, power, monkey behavior, paintball combat, creativity, and the dilemma of a rational mind compelled to serve an animals body by feeding it fantasies, Will falls in loveand his ever more troubled love-struck behavior and the acidly destructive battles among his producers and network executives during the production of his show soon begin to illustrate Nicoles theories.Nicole is charmingly romantic on a cruise up the Space Coast, but nothing about her seems authentic. After she warns shell soon leave and his producers are humbled by an uncanny encounter with the police, Will begins to wonder, is Nicole staging real world events with him and the producers as her experimental subjects? And if so, can he discover her true identity, learn the lessons shes trying to teach, and earn her love before he loses her forever?

This harvest of poems is inspired by the plant medicine latent in Gossypium Herbeceum, or Cotton Root Bark, which was used by enslaved Black women to induce labor, cure reproductive ailments and end unwanted pregnancies. Through an arrangement of stories, secrets and memories experienced, read, heard, reimagined and remixed, gossypiin reckons with a peculiar yet commonplace inheritance of violation, survival and self-possession. In this way, Ra Malika Imhotep invites us to lean in and listen good as the text interrupts the narrative silence around sexual harm, sickness, and the marks they make on black femme subjectivity. Within these pages, the poet is joined by a ';sticky trickster-self' named Lil Cotton Flower who tells of their own origins and endings in the Black vernacular traditions of the griot and the gossip. Interspersed throughout the collection, Black feminist wisdoms and warnings meld with the poets own yearnings and Lil Cotton Flower's tall tales.Gossypiin is an offering towards the holding and healing of Black beings that exceed the confines of their own bodies.

John Weir, author of The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket, a defining novel of 1980s New York in its response to the global AIDS crisis, has written a story collection that chronicles the long aftermath of epidemic death, as recorded in the tragicomic voice of a gay man who survived high school in the 1970s, the AIDS death of his best friend in the 1990s, and his complicated relationship with his mother, a movie star without a movie to star in, whose life is winding to a close in a retirement community where she lives alone with her last dog.

Saul doesn't get why he's misunderstood. At his high-tech day job, he hides in the bathroom writing a novel about his dead grandfather and wonders why his boss wants to fire him. He tells his almost ex-wife about a blind date and wonders why she slams the door in his face. He aches with worry for his seven-year-old son, who seems happier living with his mom and her new man.When the blind date becomes a complicated relationship, and Sauls blunders at work threaten the survival of the company, Saul has to wake up and confront his fears.I Only Cry with Emoticons is a quirky comedy that reveals the cost of being disconnectedeven when we're using a dozen apps on our devices to communicateand an awkward man's search for real connections, on and offline.