The earliest and most extensive literary engagement with wilderness in human history, Mountain Home is vital poetry that feels utterly contemporary. China's tradition of rivers-and-mountains poetry stretches across millennia. This is a plain-spoken poetry of immediate day-to-day experience, and yet seems most akin to China's grand landscape paintings. Although its wisdom is ancient, rooted in Taoist and Zen thought, the work feels utterly contemporary, especially as rendered here in Hinton's rich and accessible translations. Mountain Home collects poems from 5th- through 13th-century China and includes the poets Li Po, Po Chu-i and Tu Fu. The rivers-and-mountains tradition covers a remarkable range of topics: comic domestic scenes, social protest, travel, sage recluses, and mountain landscapes shaped into forms of enlightenment. And within this range, the poems articulate the experience of living as an organic part of the natural world and its processes. In an age of global ecological disruption and mass extinction, this tradition grows more urgently important every day. Mountain Home offers poems that will charm and inform not just readers of poetry, but also the large community of readers who are interested in environmental awareness.

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR POETRY

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2024 LUCIEN STRYK ASIAN TRANSLATION PRIZE

An iconic figure in the emergence of feminist poetry in South Korea and now internationally renowned, Kim Hyesoon pushes the poetic envelope into the farthest reaches of the lyric universe. In her new collection, Kim depicts the memory of war trauma and the collective grief of parting through what she calls an I-do-bird-sequence, where Bird-human is the 'I.' Her remarkable essay Bird Rider explains: I came to write Phantom Pain Wings after Daddy passed away. I called out for birds endlessly. I wanted to become a translator of bird language. Bird language that flies to places I've never been. What unfolds is an epic sequence of bird ventriloquy exploring the relentless physical and existential struggles against power and gendered violence in the eternal void of grief (Victoria Chang, The New York Times Magazine). Through intensely rhythmic lines marked by visual puns and words that crash together and then fly away as one, Kim mixes traditional folklore and mythology with contemporary psychodramatic realities as she taps into a cremation ceremony, the legacies of Rimbaud and Yi Sang, a film by Agnes Varda, Francis Bacon's portrait of Pope Innocent X, cyclones, a princess trapped in a hospital, and more. A simultaneity of voices and identities rises and falls, existing and exiting on their delayed wings of pain.

The long-awaited sophomore poetry collection by award-winning writer Cathy Linh Che, on familial estrangement, the Vietnam War, and Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now.

The follow-up to her acclaimed poetry debut Split, Becoming Ghost documents Cathy Linh Che's parents' experiences as refugees who escaped the Vietnam War and then were cast as extras in Francis Ford Coppola's film Apocalypse Now, placing them at the margins of their own story. The poetry collection uses persona, speculation, and the golden shovel form as a means of moving Vietnamese voices from the periphery to the center. The speaker's disownment raises questions about the challenges of using parents as poetic subjects, telling familial stories to a broader public, and the meaning of forgiveness.

An explosive, devastating debut book of poetry from the acclaimed author of The Boat

In his first international release since the award-winning, best-selling The Boat, Nam Le delivers a shot across the bow with a book-length poem that honors every convention of diasporic literature--in a virtuosic array of forms and registers--before shattering the form itself.

In line with the works of Claudia Rankine, Cathy Park Hong, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, this book is an urgent, unsettling reckoning with identity--and the violence of identity. For Le, a Vietnamese refugee in the West, this means the assumed violence of racism, oppression, and historical trauma.

But it also means the violence of that assumption. Of being always assumed to be outside one's home, country, culture, or language. And the complex violence--for the diasporic writer who wants to address any of this--of language itself.

Making use of multiple tones, moods, masks, and camouflages, Le's poetic debut moves with unpredictable and destabilizing energy between the personal and the political. As self-indicting as it is scathing, hilarious as it is desperately moving, this is a singular, breakthrough book.

An elegant translation of the beloved epic tale of Prince Rama

Few works of literature have inspired so vast an audience across so many radically different languages and cultures as the Ramayana, written in Sanskrit over 2,000 years ago by a poet known to us as Valmiki. William Buck has retold the story of Prince Rama--with all its nobility of spirit, courtly intrigue, heroic renunciation, fierce battles, and triumph of good over evil--in a length and with a style that make the great epic accessible without compromising the spirit and lyricism of the original.

This collection of poems by Kashmiri-American Agha Shahid Ali finds that contemporary history has forced him to return to his homeland, not with the ease of a tourist, but as a witness to the savagery visited upon Kashmir since the 1990 uprisings. These poems evoke the tragedy of his birthplace.

The U.S. debut of internationally acclaimed poet and performance artist Shailja Patel, Migritude is a tour-de-force hybrid text that confounds categories and conventions. Part poetic memoir, part political history, Migritude weaves together family history, reportage and monologues to create an achingly beautiful portrait of women's lives and migrant journeys undertaken under the boot print of Empire. Patel, who was born in Kenya and educated in England and the U.S., honed her poetic skills in performances of this work that have received standing ovations throughout Europe, Africa and North America. She has been described by the Gulf Times as the poetic equivalent of Arundhati Roy and by CNN as the face of globalization as a people-centered phenomenon of migration and exchange. Migritude includes interviews with the author, as well as performance notes and essays.

Winner of the Big Other Award in Translation
Winner of MLA's 17th Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for a Translation of a Literary Work

Formally audacious and remarkably compelling, Yi Sang's works were uniquely situated amid the literary experiments of world literature in the early twentieth century and the political upheaval of 1930s Japanese occupied Korea. While his life ended prematurely at the age of twenty-seven, Yi Sang's work endures as one of the great revolutionary legacies of modern Korean literature. Presenting the work of the influential Korean modernist master, this carefully curated selection assembles poems, essays, and stories that ricochet off convention in a visionary and daring response to personal and national trauma, reminding us that to write from the avant-garde is a form of civil disobedience.

Small Wars Manual is a masterpiece, one of those books I read and know at once I'll be coming back to the rest of my life.--Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr!

From award-winning poet Chris Santiago, a far-reaching collection of erasures and original poems examining the long shadow of American militarism and imperialism.

Stemming in part from a disturbingly mundane military document of the same name, Small Wars Manual is a how-to for imperialism that critically dismantles itself with each passing line, a pidgin // containing elements // of animus and // insubordination. In its wake, the very boundaries of oppression and resistance, art and justice, and power and truth are exploded.

Highly conceptual yet gut-wrenching, this meticulous and visionary masterpiece of erasure poetry and other forms sinks into the cold mechanics of American warfare in the Philippines and Vietnam to reveal a brutal rhetoric. In more autobiographical sections, Chris Santiago's own Filipino immigrant background reveals hard-lived experiences, where stars can guide // either bayonets // or refugees and even small wars waged // on the living room floor cause trepidation and harm.

This righteous collection redeems the vulnerable from the aggressors--empire, army, their systems and tools--and transforms everything in the process. In the hands of Santiago, the deconstructive becomes the eviscerating, condemning all wars that upend countries and mark generations. Here are shining poems that make shelter of chaos, by one of the most skillful and intrepid poets writing today.

The title of this debut collection, Nothing Follows, is reappropriated from a government document
establishing the beginning of a refugee family's time in the United States. At
every coordinate of their lives, the refugee family provides affidavits,
letters, and reams of paperwork as they work to beseech those in power to grant
them family reunification visas for those they had to leave behind in 1975
after the fall of Saigon.

Nothing Follows
draws from the genres of memoir and poetry. Written from a young girl's
perspective, the center of this world is a military father, an absent mother,
sisters who come and go, broken brothers, and friends she meets in San José.

With each place the book travels through--from Butler,
Pennsylvania, to San José, California--we see that racism, objectification, and
sexual violence permeate the realities of the narrator and those close to her.
In marking the journey, Lan Duong recreates the portraits of the girl's friends
and family and maps out refugee girlhoods.

Spiked with violence, pleasure, and longing,
these refuges are questionable sanctuaries for those refugee girls who have
grown up during the 1980s in the aftermath of war.

An illuminating collection of inspirational poems by a Nobel Laureate While traveling through one of the poorest regions in India, W. B. Yeats was amazed to discover the women in the tea fields singing the songs and poems of Rabindranath Tagore. This striking scene led the great Irish poet to appreciate the depth of India's far-reaching tradition of poetry and the fame of this one Indian poet. Tagore's work is without equal and plays an eminent role in twentieth century Indian literature. The publication of the English edition of Gitanjali in 1911 earned Rabindranath Tagore the Nobel Prize in literature. A collection of over one hundred inspirational poems, Gitanjali covers the breadth of life's experiences, from the quiet pleasure of observing children at play to a man's struggle with his god. These are poems that transcend time and place.

The graceful, evocative haiku featured here were composed by the renowned Japanese haiku masters of the past four hundred years, including Matsuo Bash, Taniguchi Buson, and Kobayashi Issa. The deceptively simple poemsrendered in English with Japanese calligraphies and transliterationsare paired with exquisite eighteenth- or nineteenth-century paintings and ukiyo-e prints and twentieth-century shin hanga woodcuts from the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, Canada. Haiku: Japanese Art and Poetry presents thirty-five pairs of poems and images, organized seasonally. The Introduction details the origin and development of haiku, the lives of the most famous poets, and the obstacles faced when translating the concise yet complex lines.

Awarded the Noble Prize for Literature in 1913, Rabindranath Tagore (1861-- 1941) is considered the most important poet of modern-day India. He was also a distinguished author, educator, social reformer, and philosopher. Today, Tagore along with Mahatma Gandhi is prized as the foremost intellectual and spiritual advocates of India's liberation from imperial rule.

This inspiring collection of Tagore's poetry represents his simple prayers of common life. Each of the seventy-seven prayers is an eloquent affirmation of the divine in the face of both joy and sorrow. Like the Psalms of David, they transcend time and speak directly to the human heart.

The spirit of this collection may be best symbolized by a single sentence by Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, the renowned philosopher and statesman who served as president of India: Rabindranath Tagore was one of the few representatives of the universal person to whom the future of the world belongs.

T'ao Ch'ien, (365 - 427, C.E.), one of the most revered poets in classical Chinese literature, is presented in a lucid translation with an introduction. David Hinton is one of the most impressive of the younger translators of classical Chinese poetry.... His renderings are varied and imaginative while remaining faithful to the spirit of the original.--Burton Watson

Poetry collection by Sokunthary Svay, Khmer writer and musician from the Bronx, New York. She and her family were refugees from Cambodia who survived the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime.

Sokunthary Svay's Apsara in New York is truly like no other poetry collection I've read. Transnational and pan-ethnic in scope, the book begins in a refugee camp in Thailand, settles in the Bronx and, driven by memory and desire, returns to the Cambodian cities of Phnom Penh, Battambang, and Takeo. The poet is both fierce and tender, street-smart and thoughtful, maternal and filial, political and haunted. With No Others, Svay emerges as a powerful new voice in Cambodian-American poetry.

Bunkong Tuon, author of Gruel and associate professor of English, Union College

Schizophrene traces the intersections of migration and mental illness as they unfold in post-Partition diasporic communities. Bhanu Kapil brings forward the question of a healing narrative and explores trauma and place through a somatic, poetic and cross-cultural psychiatric enquiry. Who was here? Who will never be here? Who has not yet arrived and never will? Towards an arrival without being, this notebook-book returns a body to a site, the shards re-forming in mid-air: for an instant.

Kenji Miyazawa (1896-1933) is now widely viewed as Japan's greatest poet of the 20th century. Little known in his lifetime, he died at 37 from tuberculosis, but has since become a much loved children's author whose magical tales have been translated into many languages, adapted for the stage and turned into films and animations. Recognition for his poetry came much later. Strong in the Rain - the title-poem of this selection - is now arguably the most memorised and quoted modern poem in Japan. Both intensely lyrical and permeated with a sophisticated scientific understanding of the universe, Kenji Miyazawa's poems testify to his deep love of humanity and nature. From a young age, he was fascinated by plants, insects, and especially minerals, which he collected. At school, his interest in nature deepened, and he began poring through books on philosophy and Buddhism, which were to strongly influence his later writing. Miyazawa drew on nature in a way that no modern Japanese author had before him. Where other writers tended to use it as a springboard for their own meditations, he saw himself not just as nature's faithful chronicler and recorder but as its medium: light, wind and rain are processed through him before being recreated on the page. His mode of active engagement with nature set him apart from virtually all other Japanese poets, and led to his work being largely ignored by the Bundan (the literary establishment) and misunderstood for half a century. But in the 1990s, he received unprecedented attention in the Japanese media. The compassion, empathy and closeness to nature expressed in Kenji Miyazawa's poems and tales appealed strongly to a new generation of readers.

Yosano Akiko (1878-1942) is one of the most famous Japanese writers of the twentieth century. She is the author of more than seventy-five books, including twenty volumes of original poetry and the definitive translation into modern Japanese of the Tale of the Genji. Although probably best known for her exquisite erotic poetry, Akiko's work also championed the causes of feminism, pacifism, and social reform. Akiko's poetry is profoundly direct, often passionate, exposing the complexity of everyday emotions in poetic language stripped of artifice and presenting the full breadth of her poetic vision. Included are ninety-one of Akiko's tanka (a traditional five-line form of verse) and a dozen of her longer poems written in the modern style.

Selected by Aracelis Girmay, A Tinderbox in Three Acts is at once elegy and exegesis, fact and invention.

In her fourth poetry collection, Cynthia Dewi Oka performs a lyric accounting of the anti-Communist genocide of 1965, which, led by the Indonesian military and with American assistance, erased and devastated millions of lives in Indonesia. Under the New Order dictatorship that ruled by terror for over three decades in the aftermath, perpetrators of the killings were celebrated as national heroes while survivors were systemically silenced. Drawing on US state documents that were only declassified in recent years, Oka gives form and voice to the ghosts that continue to haunt subsequent generations despite decades of state-produced amnesia and disinformation.

In service of recovering what must not be remembered, A Tinderbox in Three Acts repurposes the sanitized lexicon of official discourse, imagines an emotional syntax for the unthinkable, and employs synesthetic modes of perception to convey that which exceeds language. Here, the boundary between singular and collective consciousness is blurred. Here, history as an artifact of the powerful is trumped by the halting memory of the people whom power sought to destroy. Where memory fails, here is poetry to honor the dishonored, the betrayed, the lost and still-awaited.