Bøker utgitt av Western Michigan University, New Issues Press

"These poems love. Prophesize. Return us to our beginnings. To days that we want to remember. Or forget. But don't. Thus in our sister's memory, we survive in the luxury of dying. The courage of loving. The re-imagining of our souls for another generation. Thank you, my dear sister for your words saluting our living, our lives." --Sonia Sanchez, winner of the 2018 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Academy of American Poets "In exquisitely crafted poems of heart-accelerating candor and clarity, Lauren K. Alleyne says to all the black bodies slain by hatred and militarized fear, 'Nothing I say will save you, but how can I say nothing?' Honeyfish is an elegy for all the countless lost, and a praise song for the many black lives that persist in their wish to give and receive love." -- Tracy K. Smith, Poet Laureate of the United States of America "Even in the places we think of as most beautiful, the endless gong of the body being broken and defiled will find us. How can we see the sun and the ocean and the clear blue sky as anything other than a kind of cruel joke in the face of so much suffering? The extraordinary gift of Lauren K Alleyne's, Honeyfish is that she shows the world in all its brutality and loss and somehow lets us mourn within the poems, which in turn allows us to begin some kind of healing. These are poems whose elegy is ongoing, whose elegy need never happened but for hatred. The waves go in and out and so many people keep being killed. And here is this extraordinary poet, making a heaven that is freedom, that is the dream of being welcomed and loved and tended to. This is a book for our times and for the day when these times are over and we can rejoice." -- Gabrielle Calvacoressi, author of Rocket Fantastic

Just as radio favorites like Marvin Gaye, Donny Hathaway, and Pink Floyd characterize loss, loneliness, addiction, and denial with their voices, these poems' chorus of speakers transform moments of intimacy and humor into spontaneous music.

"The poems in 2nd Chance are written in the voice of a doctor; the speaker often imagines he is talking to students, residents, patients, families--anyone who is ill or has witnessed illness and suffering. The poet, Daniel M. Becker, has been a physician for over thirty years, working in general medicine, geriatric clinics, and addiction clinics, supervising medical students and residents, and more. With poems such as "Goals of Care," "Before Flu Season," and "Advance Directives," 2nd Chance covers the full spectrum of medical care--birth, death, and all the surprising moments in between. Written with warmth and empathy for the human condition, these poems attempt to understand, share, and honor what both patients and medical professionals experience. Serious matters are approached with intelligence, humility, and humor, making this collection an affecting entry into the growing field of medical poetry.'--

This collection is named for a "swale," a shallow channel used to direct the flow of rainwater. Similarly, Swale looks outward to the natural world and directs its focus inward to the landscape of the mind. The past presses in like a thick mist: plundering colonial ships and the cracking edges of empire coincide with contemporary scenes and personal erosions and failures. Alongside humans are animals both living and extinct: manatees, sea turtles, and whales; roaming bears, horses, and lambs; and the flightless dodo and Steller's sea cow, gone for centuries. What happens when the mind eclipses what the body sees, and neither can be trusted--when demarcations between land and water blur, and one's sense of self begins to recede? Swale interrogates the violence of colonialism and its reverberations over time, as well as the extinction and the rapid decline of animal species. By turns tidal and cloistered, Swale speaks of science, reliquaries, and lapis lazuli, traversing forests, seascapes, and meadows. Here, the ocean becomes a field, a medieval tapestry transforms into a space that can be entered, and the body is fleshless, struck through with light. The speaker of these poems is ultimately unfixed--and with that comes both imaginative possibility and a personal unmooring. In poems that cast and recast the interior self in different guises--from the perpetually off-kilter Alice to the divergent voices of the shorn lamb and predatory foxhound--an unsettling anxiety grows starker, along with the wish for repair.

"Eryn Green's new collection of poetry BEIT is a lyric examination of the idea of home, and how it intersects with the essential human experiences of love, attachment, and loss. Filtered through a Hebrew sense of the letter Bet-the second letter of the Aleph-Bet, and the root of the Hebrew word for home-BEIT explores the connection between the internal and external worlds of poetic expression and spiritual inhabitation. The collection includes poems addressing the vast constellation of concerns inherently built into a home-family, romance, protection, loss, tenderness, the fear of violence, and one's place within the natural world-while asking probing questions of how attentive, poetic care might help us to see our shared spaces more clearly. How does the microcosm of the home relate to the broader macrocosmic physical world? Where does language factor into the relation between the self, the spirit, the other, and the planet? And what can poetry do to assuage our grief at the loss of the people and spaces we love in a universe of unavoidable change? BEIT wants to know just how big the walls of the home might prove to be, how unexpectedly porous and mercurial, and what tessellated universes can be discovered under their aegis. An ecocritical text, the collection looks with wonder and worry at the landscapes which extend and encroach upon the myriad realms of the self and the world, especially the desert. BEIT is always looking at the world with both feet firmly planted in the dirt, and eyes thrown to the heavens"--

""Insofar" is a collection of poems dedicated to analogical reasoning, seeking to remember basic terms of relation and proportion. Archival in mood, it works with and against the idea of an A-Z filing system. This alphabet is akin to a damaged rosary or abacus-an accounting system that carries on in the midst of physical or spiritual impairment. While the poems proceed alphabetically, there are gaps in representation, and redundancies. The poems get stuck in certain alphabetic registers and elide over others. Four of the poems share the same title, "Insofar," as if transfixed by the relational reasoning set up by that adverbial phrase. The collection as a whole is cast in an adverbial mood, exploring disposition as a vital qualifier to thought and action. Its theology, insofar as it finds one, is earth-based, pluralistic, and cyclical. Its fondest prayer is that we come to our senses"--

In Flyshoals, Georgia, karma is writ small enough to witness. When Doreen Swilley discovers that her boss and lover of thirty years intends to fire her to placate his dying wife, she devises a plan to steal his business from him. Her plan just might work too, if she is not thwarted by a small town's enmeshed histories and her family's own dark secrets. Set during the 2009 recession, The Nature of Remains rests at the intersection of class, gender, education and place. Through extended geological metaphor, readers witness the orogeny, crystallization, and weathering of the human soul. Doreen's journey reveals the ways even a woman's most precious connections--her children, her grandchildren, her lover--operate within larger social structures capable of challenging her sovereignty.

Poems that confront the violence of war that is inflicted on the female body and the landscape.

A poetic imagining of a conversation between the narrator and Sally Hemings.

This striking new collection explores identity, race, and history with a lively and intelligent music

A work of rupture and repair, what occurs after healing, and the irreparable--on individual and planetary levels

Century Worm wrestles with the threshold between witness and participation living amid ethnic and political violence in West Africa's Ivory Coast

This haunting and haunted triptych explores life at the very periphery of what is visible to the human eye and tangible to the human heart

Billy Donachio, a coach for the Chicago Cubs, steals notes and letters from the lockers of his players and-by chance-comes away with an education

Tadek Gradinski grows up witnessing the multiple invasions and crimes of World War II sweep over his village; he is arrested, tortured, and swept away into the Gulag with a twenty-five year sentence