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Marco Polo Mother & Son is a delicately woven confessional novel that turns memory into a character. It follows a deceased mother and her grieving son as they unsuccessfully pursue each other with words through a universe of memory and fantasy, truth-making and truth telling. Over the course of the book, the mother / son connection is repeatedly tested-and found to be gossamer thin, yet unexpectedly strong. Marco Polo Mother & Son delves into the depths of human emotion as it explores the intricate interplay of existence and perception. This is a book for those who appreciate a narrative that navigates the spaces between reality and imagination, truth, and fiction. It is a is a testament to the power of storytelling in understanding and accepting the complexities of human relationships and the inexorable march of time.

Full of brilliant rhythmic immediacy and syntactical arcs, as Ann Lauterbach puts it, these poems are as strikingly clear as they are surprising in their movements. Grounded in a close reading of the mundane and the memorable, they present an easy-going wisdom that sneaks up on you like a wave or a recollection or an unexpected insight. Play Lucretius is, in Charles North's words, an imaginative, inspiring book.

The third book of poetry by Reno, Nevada, based poet, Michelle Murphy. Pulitzer Prize winner Diane Seuss sings the praises of Murphy's new book: "The poems in Michelle Murphy's Disheveled Histories both echo the dishevelment and bring order to family history, personal history, the natural history of the body, and the land on which it resides, where "[t]hese rapids spit out / trailer hitch, tangled lures, / dime-size locket, crumbled jacket," and where "even a butterfly / can anger God." Murphy uncovers a sort of defiant eternity in her poems, though not the easy kind. Regarding a brother, who takes his own life by leaping from the Golden Gate bridge, she writes: "Even your father, his / history, moth-holed / almost laughs when / your urn refuses / to sink under the waves. / Nothing ends." Michelle Murphy has written a beautiful, gutsy, and restorative collection."

Scrolls of a Temple Sweeper is a novel of war, lost children, dream masters, a traveling circus, a theater troupe, a shaman, and a ghostwoman, told by a temple sweeper who has not spoken in twenty-five years. This book is for anyone who has felt the pain of separation, the fear of the future, the loss of a country or a language or a loved one. It's the quantum love story of a one-eyed boy and mute girl moving through time to an island monastery of refuge-where stones have become dreams, dreams have become bones, bones have become prayers and prayers have become us.The Scrolls are replete with phantasmagorical elements in which even ghosts have flesh and blood, and being is time, where crows speak, elephants and dragons wander in and out of the telling, and the Old Story, the scrolls themselves, unfold before us. The novel welds post-modernist narrative techniques to traditional discourse-the seamless integration of rhythmical prose, lyrical poetry, and proverbial utterance is dazzling. Pathos presides, not bathos: terrible beauty is born and reborn.This astonishing and dizzyingly extensive work smashes all barriers of time and space, so that when you are done with its dark & light pages full, incidentally, of multicolored ens¿ (Zen circle) art works, you don't know who you are or where you have been, though its vividly realized scenes are stunningly clear. Scrolls of a Temple Sweeper is itself an extended Zen koan that plays on the flute of traditional Zen literary tropes like a virtuoso.

Maureen Alsop, like other goddesses of myth, likes to work at the crossroads, the place where words give shape to image, where images speak back, and our sense of language expands beyond the frontier. The reader is invited to wander among the signs and signifiers. A visual narrative may appear then disappear, a voice might be heard, then quieted. Colors have their say, words have their way. Adjoining images engage in dialogue, or argue loudly. Faces watch us, we watch them; their world is glimpsed and lost. This is work that listens at that angle where the ghosts can be heard, a place where our sense of language is distilled across time and form. These images are a record of that exchange; an alchemy that takes place at the horizons of perception.

"People have long told stories like our story but most never quite as long." And so begins Earl S. Braggs complex jazz memoir of growing up black and poor in rural North Carolina. What is long about Braggs'' story is not its length but how deeply the roots of race and history reach through the narrative in every unexpected direction. From the haphazard pleasures of a childhood in a rural shack in segregated "fishtown" to the civil unrest of Wilmington NC in the Civil Rights Era to the poet''s coming of age as a writer in San Francisco. In the midst of familiar injustices, Braggs blows open our conceptions about good and bad, revealing violence where we expect safety and friendships where we expect derision. A white man presses a revolver into the boy''s head, the bookmobile lady stops so he can get on. While the borders of Hampstead were segregated black and white, the design of this narrative never is.

Wilson Wiley Variations is an extraordinary work of imagination that brings the losses of everyday life and death into a field of perception that opens the underlying tenets of oft hidden languages of love. It's a brilliant manifestation of a poetry we need-uncovering the layers of invisible perception which can distort; yet in the hands of a master ultimately reveal an awesome beauty of a redemptive freeing of what it means to be alive, and finally home. Thoreau Lovell's Wilson Wiley Variations creates a naming that itself becomes light.--John High author of Vanishing Acts (Tailsman House)

Saraswati’s Lament conjures the Hindu goddess of poetry, in forms both sacred and profane; exploring how she speaks of every woman who questions what it means to love and create. Written over the course of a year spent alone in Bali, the poems here are part travelogue, part folktale, and part personal inquiry into the nature of marriage and exile. Weaving together images from traditional Balinese literature with contemporary scenes of the island’s exploitation by the tourist industry, Saraswati’s Lament questions what we lose and what we gain, when we leave our history behind.

Michelle Murphy knows how to 'unzip the stringed heart and strum it naked,' harmonizing the noise of the blood with the news of memory. Murphy's deep song awakens a fabulist dreamscape where broken pieces of lived experience unexpectedly fit together. The homecoming that happens in Murphy's poetry is the wild coincidence of word and world.Andrew Joron author of The Absolute Letter (Flood Editions)

Ousted by his girlfriend, Nick takes himself–and his bicycle–to New Orleans, where he sulks and cycles, prey to vivid dreams and anxieties. Along with an antiquated interest in letter-writing, he shows an unexpected knack for collage. But undercurrents of racial and sexual disharmony alarm him on his wobbly journeys around town, and even the dogs seem critical.Anthony Schlagel is a subtle, engaging, artistic writer: risky, frisky, and very funny. My Dog, Me is a striking tale of being a loose cannon at a loose end. It presents a wholly new, and honest, take on what it is to be American–and every American should know about it.--Lucy Ellmann, author of Mimi (Bloomsbury)