I.
Epistle
The Gift
Persimmons
The Weight Of Sweetness
From Blossoms
Dreaming Of Hair
Early In The Morning
Water
Falling: The Code
Nocturne
My Indigo
Irises
Eating Alone

II.
Always A Rose

III.
Eating Together
I Ask My Mother To Sing
Ash, Snow, Or Moonlight
The Life
The Weepers
Braiding
Rain Diary
My Sleeping Loved Ones
Mnemonic
Between Seasons
Visions And Interpretations

Joseph Fasano's The Last Song of the World delves into the chaos of the modern world, and searches for resilience in the face of environmental and societal devastation. Dripping with images of ancient ruins and mythological figures, these poems serve as vignettes of fatherhood, love, and desire against the backdrop of apocalyptic events.

Through the documentation of ongoing violence and natural phenomena, Fasano depicts the ever-present anxieties of parenting with concision and compassion. The Last Song of the World is a love letter to the world that could be--a world as tender as it is bold, as loving as it is brutal, as beautiful as it is horrendous.

This long-awaited and much-needed volume shines new light on one of America's most beloved, and profound, poets--Lucille Clifton.

Black Buffalo Woman is a deep, comprehensive dive into Clifton's work through the eyes of celebrated poet and scholar, Kazim Ali.

Collecting chapters of Clifton's early manuscripts, late drafts, and integrating her books of children's literature, Ali's meticulously researched volume provides a brilliant and fresh perspective on Clifton's life and work.

Various chapters examine Clifton's treatment of the body as a site of both joy and danger, spirituality, and an interrogation of American history, politics, and popular culture. The result of Ali's scholarship and care highlights a dazzling array of Clifton's poetic techniques and forms that will continue to inspire poets, readers, and Lucille Clifton fans--past, present and future--for decades to come.

LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY

WINNER OF THE THOM GUNN AWARD FOR GAY POETRY

WINNER OF THE GLCA NEW WRITERS AWARD

WINNER OF THE A. POULIN, JR. POETRY PRIZE

A LIBRARY JOURNAL BEST BOOK OF 2017 SELECTION: POETRY & LITERATURE

ON NPR BOOKS'S LIST OF POETRY TO PAY ATTENTION TO: 2017'S BEST VERSE

In this ferocious and tender debut, Chen Chen investigates inherited forms of love and family--the strained relationship between a mother and son, the cost of necessary goodbyes--all from Asian American, immigrant, and queer perspectives. Holding all accountable, this collection fully embraces the loss, grief, and abundant joy that come with charting one's own path in identity, life, and love.

In the Hospital

My mother was in the hospital & everyone wanted to be my friend.
But I was busy making a list: good dog, bad citizen, short
skeleton, tall mocha. Typical Tuesday.
My mother was in the hospital & no one wanted to be her friend.
Everyone wanted to be soft cooing sympathies. Very reasonable
pigeons. No one had the time & our solution to it
was to buy shinier watches. We were enamored with
what our wrists could declare. My mother was in the hospital
& I didn't want to be her friend. Typical son. Tall latte, short tale,
bad plot, great wifi in the atypical café. My mother was in the hospital
& she didn't want to be her friend. She wanted to be the family
grocery list. Low-fat yogurt, firm tofu. She didn't trust my father
to be it. You always forget something, she said, even when
I do the list for you. Even then.

Chen Chen was born in Xiamen, China, and grew up in Massachusetts. His work has appeared in two chapbooks and in such publications as Poetry, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, Best of the Net, and The Best American Poetry. The recipient of the 2016 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize, he has been awarded fellowships from Kundiman, the Saltonstall Foundation, Lambda Literary, and in 2015, he was a finalist for the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowships. He earned his BA at Hampshire College and his MFA at Syracuse University. Currently, he is pursuing a PhD in English and Creative Writing at Texas Tech University. Chen lives in Lubbock, Texas, with his partner, Jeff Gilbert, and their pug dog, Rupert Giles.

Balancing heart-intelligent intimacy and surprising humor, the poems in Ellen Bass's Mules of Love illuminate the essential dynamics of our lives: family, community, sexual love, joy, loss, religion and death. The poems also explore the darker aspects of humanity--personal, cultural, historical and environmental violence--all of which are handled with compassion and grace. Bass's poetic gift is her ability to commiserate with others afflicted by similar hungers and grief. Her poem Insomnia concludes: may something/ comfort you--a mockingbird, a breeze, rain/ on the roof, Chopin's Nocturnes, the thought/ of your child's birth, a kiss, / or even me--in my chilly kitchen/ with my coat on--thinking of you.

Marketing Plans:
- National advertising
- National media campaign
- Advance reader copies
- Course adoption mailing

Author Tour:
- Berkeley
- Boston
- Minneapolis
- San Francisco
- Santa Cruz

Ellen Bass is co-author (with Laura Davis) of the best-selling The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse (HarperCollins 1988, 1994), which has sold more than one million copies and has been translated into nine languages. She has also published several volumes of poetry, and her poems have appeared in hundreds of journals and anthologies, including The Atlantic Monthly, Ms., Double Take, and Field. In 1980, Ms. Bass was awarded the Elliston Book Award for Poetry from the University of Cincinnati. Last year, she won Nimrod/Hardman's Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, judged by Thomas Lux. She was nominated for a 2001 Pushcart Prize. She lives in Santa Cruz, where she has taught creative writing for 25 years. She has also taught writing workshops at many conferences nationally and in Mallorca, Spain.

Winner of the 2013 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry

The love readers feel for Lucille Clifton--both the woman and her poetry--is constant and deeply felt. The lines that surface most frequently in praise of her work and her person are moving declarations of racial pride, courage, steadfastness.--Toni Morrison, from the Foreword

If you only read one poetry book in 2012, The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton ought to be it.--NPR

The 'Collected Clifton' is a gift, not just for her fans...but for all of us.--The Washington Post

The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010 combines all eleven of Lucille Clifton's published collections with more than fifty previously unpublished poems. The unpublished poems feature early poems from 1965-1969, a collection-in-progress titled the book of days (2008), and a poignant selection of final poems. An insightful foreword by Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison and comprehensive afterword by noted poet Kevin Young frames Clifton's lifetime body of work, providing the definitive statement about this major America poet's career.

On February 13, 2010, the poetry world lost one of its most distinguished members with the passing of Lucille Clifton. In the last year of her life, she was named the first African American woman to receive the $100,000 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize honoring a US poet whose lifetime accomplishments warrant extraordinary recognition, and was posthumously awarded the Robert Frost Medal for lifetime achievement from the Poetry Society of America.

mother-tongue: to man-kind (from the unpublished the book of days):

all that I am asking is
that you see me as something
more than a common occurrence,
more than a woman in her ordinary skin.

Winner of the 2019 GLCA New Writers Award
An NPR Best Book of 2018

In this highly lyrical, imagistic debut, Marcelo Hernandez Castillo creates a nuanced narrative of life before, during, and after crossing the US/Mexico border. These poems explore the emotional fallout of immigration, the illusion of the American dream via the fallacy of the nuclear family, the latent anxieties of living in a queer brown undocumented body within a heteronormative marriage, and the ongoing search for belonging. Finding solace in the resignation to sheer possibility, these poems challenge us to question the potential ways in which two people can interact, love, give birth, and mourn--sometimes all at once.

The daring and deeply
sexy poems in Lonely Women Make Good Lovers are bold with the
embodied, earthy, and startlingly sensual.

These
unforgettable love poems--queer, complicated, and almost always
compromised--engage a poetics of humility, leaning into the painful tendernesses
of unbridgeable distance. As Kuipers writes, love is a question defined not by
what we / cannot know of the world but what we cannot know of ourselves. These
poems write into that intricate webbing between us, holding space for an I
that is permeable, that can be touched and changed by those we make our lives
with.

In
this book, astonishingly intimate poems of marriage collide with the
fetishization of freedom and the terror of desire. At times valiant and at
others self-excoriating, they are flush with the hard-won knowledge of the
difficulties and joys of living in relation.

As a Filipino-American conscious of his multiple identities and the trove of experiences and external forces that shaped him, Gray uses the unfettered landscape of poetry to release himself and others from the limitations that aggrieve undocumented immigrants. --New City Lit

Rooted in the experience of living in America as a queer undocumented Filipino, Documents maps the byzantine journey toward citizenship through legal records and fragmented recollections. In poems that repurpose the forms and procedures central to an immigrant's experiences--birth certificates, identification cards, letters, and interviews--Jan-Henry Gray reveals the narrative limits of legal documentation while simultaneously embracing the intersections of identity, desire, heritage, love, and a new imagining of freedom.

In the current literary scene, one of the most heartening influences is the work of Naomi Shihab Nye. Her poems combine transcendent liveliness and sparkle along with warmth and human insight. She is a champion of the literature of encouragement and heart. Reading her work enhances life.-- William Stafford

Dusk

where is the name no one answered to

gone off to live by itself

beneath the pine trees separating the houses

without a friend or a bed

without a father to tell it stories

how hard was the path it walked on

all those years belonging to none

of our struggles drifting under

the calendar page elusive as

residue when someone said

how have you been it was

strangely that name that tried

to answer

Naomi Shihab Nye has spent thirty-five years traveling the world to lead writing workshops and inspire students of all ages. In her newest collection Transfer she draws on her Palestinian American heritage, the cultural diversity of her home in Texas, and her extensive travel experiences to create a poetry collection that attests to our shared humanity.

Among her awards, Naomi Shihab Nye has been a Lannan Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Witter Bynner Fellow. She has received a Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, the Paterson Poetry Prize, and four Pushcart prizes. In January 2010, she was elected to the board of chancellors of the Academy of American Poets.

Winner of the 2024 LAMBDA Literary Award for Outstanding Bisexual Poetry

Divided into four sections and shaped by female-identified embodiment, Desire Museum touches on lost love and friendship, climate crisis, lesbian relationships, and the imprisonment of children at the U.S.-Mexico border. These poems trace the pleasures and pitfalls of sex, the anxieties of motherhood, and the ramifications of interpersonal, sociopolitical, and environmental trauma in women's lives.

In these pages, Deulen holds up a candle to desire itself, questioning what it means to recognize and embrace one's desires, or what it might mean to let them go.

In conversation with Hopkins, Keats, Crane, and Lorca, Deulen seamlessly weaves memories into dreamscapes and blurs the human and natural worlds. With love, wonder, grief, and awe, Desire Museum shows us that to live alongside desire is to refuse to be contained: I refuse meaning [ ] the first sunrise reiterates the last.