GEOGRAPHIES OF LIGHT is a voice of the Palestinian people, bearing witness to brutal loss, as well as the joy.

In this collection of twelve essays, Susan Tekulve explores the tasks we perform that earn us more than a paycheck. Tekulve's topics include the gathering of secret family stories; surviving a night of haggis and Scottish whisky; mothering a musician son; facing down two teenage gunmen, and caring for a dying mother. The key word in this collection is memory. Whether investigating common occurrences, or making narrative sense out of events for which there are very few words, these essays remind us that memories, and the shaping of them into stories, are the best kind of work.

To be unable to speak, to be shy, to be quiet, to be reticent, is not to be silent, or silenced--not if one listens carefully to the state of reclusion, as carefully as Jennifer S. Cheng does in her beautiful essay, in which she invokes not only the resonance of such a state, but reminds us, too, that the vocation of writing--always--is a call from within. It is a call she has clearly heard. --Mary Ruefle In her concise, precise and beautifully rendered INVOCATION, Cheng's 'utterances' are urgent and even, at times, defiant. She puzzles out existence, investigates silence. The intersection of images and words teases yet insists: you will pay attention, you will comprehend. This voicing of the voiceless is stunningly magical. --Xu Xi

Astraia Holmes, sister of Sherlock, is baffled by a series of bizarre and brutal murders committed by a dragon-like assailant, and desperately wishing to impress her brother and solve the crimes she teams up with a mysterious and brilliant young woman, Madeleine Barquist. Sherlock suspects an ancient malevolence at work and he fears for Astraia's safety. The signs point to a Chinese Dragon God Cult known as the Ya Zi, a warrior society originally formed two thousand years ago to assassinate enemies of the Emperor. Astraia is exultant to finally have a chance to use her own deduction skills, but Miss Barquist is fearful to meet the eye of Sherlock Holmes-for unknown to both Astraia and Sherlock, she is the daughter of Jack the Ripper, and unknown to them all, a dark and powerful evil is preparing to strike at the heart of London.

A Prose Portion of Dragon Ripper

Daintily, almost like a spirit, she glided beyond the frightening calligraphy to stand before the brick wall of Mr. Wu's building. Raising her lantern to the structure, she pointed her magnifying glass toward a section near the door. What do you see here? she asked, holding her glass implement to the wall as aid to my inspection.

I followed her, not half so ethereal. I have always been a clodhopper of a girl. I stared through the lens at the wall.

The brick has been gouged, I said, removing a glove to lightly run a finger along a furrow incised into the masonry.

You see there are three grooves, in fact, each almost a foot in length, separated by approximately three inches at the left end of the gouge and closer to five inches distance from each other at the right end, she said. Do you have any theories about what could have created them?

I have no idea, I said, moving my finger over the lowest furrow, carved perhaps a half-inch deep into the brick. But I don't believe I saw them when I was here last week.

No, I don't expect you did, she said. These gouges are fresh. You can see the brick dust from them on the ground, still unspoilt by the alleyway filth.

I lowered my own lantern to examine the ground, and saw that she was right. What type of instrument was used to make such delineations? I asked. A knife or sword?

Readers will clamor for more.
- Hallie Ephron, NY Times Bestselling Author

A gripping crime drama, game but edgy.
- Kirkus Reviews
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Madeleine Barquist, police veterinarian and daughter of Jack the Ripper, is dragged by her detectivist partner Astraia Holmes into solving the death of popular suffragist leader Lady Deborah Peacham, killed by a hatpin plunged into her heart during an assault on Parliament. While investigating Lady Deborah's mysterious death, the detectivists become aware of a more vicious murderer lurking in the shadows of society, their series of crimes hidden and unnoticed.

Almost immediately, the world-famous leaders of London's temperance and suffrage communities realize they have secrets to hide and reputations to protect. They grow nervous, threatened by the direction of Maddie's and Astraia's investigation, and soon learn that a hatpin is not the only weapon available to desperate and lethal Victorians.

Winner of the 2009 New Michigan Press/DIAGRAM chapbook contest, Ben Mirov's I IS TO VORTICISM is an auspicious debut from a poet to watch. A recurring character in the poetry of Ben Mirov is Ben Mirov, part charming host, part self-inflicted lab experiment in a debut dedicated to demonstrating our daily, perilous transformations. These poems are sudden, agile, heart-strong, and as wonderfully unsolvable as their analogical title. Welcome to the surgical theater. You're finally going to learn how to sleep with your eyes open. --Dobby Gibson These poems and parables celebrate the idea of no self, even as they sing a host of eccentric alter-egos and delightfully strange secret-identities into being. Using 'interstellar ventriloquism, ' Ben Mirov is able to inhabit several worlds at once. He deftly mixes the mythic with the mundane, the literary with the cartoonish, sincerity and simulacra. The result is an impressive, often hilarious, book that truly works on many levels. --Elaine Equi

Reading Trey Moody's poems feels a little like standing among flags slapping in a bright wind in a field of flags, except that it's the middle of the night and each flag moves according to its own force. This new, serious, vivid, original voice reports from necessity. These beautiful poems are layered, foreboding, magnetic, preternaturally wise. --Kathleen Peirce When I was a boy, I choked on a piece of candy outside the kitchen window for a few minutes while watching my parents making dinner. I thought I was going to die, but I didn't want to scare them. Our existence was so separate, a dying and a doing well, an outside and an inside. Trey Moody's poems hover in that cold, wet, refrigerator-lit place between the dying and the doing well, the outside and the inside. His poems are the thoughts of the person you love who is always standing behind you, slowly and silently suffocating. But they're not afraid to say hello, and please, and I'm scared. --Zachary Schomburg Artful without being pretentious, well-made without being staid, Trey Moody's investigations of our weird and ordinary world are a little off, by which I mean that they're onto something. Read 'em and be crept into. --Graham Foust

Resurrected and restored through the bodies of multitudes, a young woman who becomes an organ donor after a car accident radiates unmitigated love as she comes to know the recipients of her heart and kidneys--lungs, bowel, vertebrae, corneas . . . Twenty-seven years after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, black storks glide over the Zone of Alienation. Apple trees bloom; lilacs flower--radioactive wolves thrive; bees make glowing honey . . . A prisoner in California, a man who killed a woman a hundred times, who stabbed face and throat, heart and belly, now washes another man in the shower, shaves his face, changes his diapers, protects and serves a murderer like himself, riddled by dementia . . .

Prayers, love songs, laments, confessions--these three provocative immersions through and beyond the body explore the revelatory expansiveness of consciousness and compassion; the persistence of love; the trauma of intimate violence and environmental devastation; unexpected grace; and the remarkable resilience of the marvelously diverse more-than-human world.

THE MOST LYRICAL POEMS (mostly in prose) that I have read in years. A silver-tongued I with little concern for itself, so wakeful and watchful is it embodied, and so attuned to its bounty of fabulous perceptions. A first collection brought to a nearly translucent state of shine. --C.D. WRIGHT TORCH LAKE & OTHER POEMS is the most original and exciting collection given American poetry since Larry Levis' Elegy. There's more juice, scope, imagination and sheer vitality in this work than in twenty run-of-the-mill collections. --GRAY JACOBIK

The nine short stories collected here, selected by our judge and panel of readers from a pool of over five hundred stories, admirably showcase the range, vitality, and distinction of the contemporary literary short story. Kimberly Willardson's winning story, Winter Memories of the Summer Bear, was chosen from the 2008 contest's nine ?nalists by our judge, Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Olen Butler.

Splintered relationships, paternal fears, infidelity, the historical weight of oppression and violence, hauntings, madness and familial corrosion-Henry Israeli's poetry in Praying to The Black Cat knows no bounds.

Dark and beautiful and strange, NIGHT-SEA is the second chapbook by Rachel Moritz (author of THE WINCHESTER MONOLOGUES, also by New Michigan Press), and further extends her interests in the curlicues of language and history, past the world of the senses. She writes, in the poem of that title (Past the World of the Senses), Light snow on the capital / steps = quotidian / information, the kind we love / to exchange. RACHEL MORITZ is the author of THE WINCHESTER MONOLOGUES (New Michigan Press, 2005). Her poetry has appeared in many journals including Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, HOW2, Hayden's Ferry Review, Indiana Review, and 26. She lives in Minneapolis, where she publishes chaplets and broadsides for WinteRed Press. She also edits poetry for Konundrum Literary Review.

Marc McKee's WHAT APOCALYPSE is a tumultuous, exciting, hilarious, bizarre, beautiful, and terrifying high wire act. Winner of the DIAGRAM/New Michigan Press 2008 Chapbook Contest, this book is singular in its vision and love for / embrace of / terror for all the muchness this world has to offer us. As he writes in At the Edge of a Deep, Dark Wood, Re-purposed Dolphin Speaks So we move in the air of this world / which will cover the dent we made when we leave. Marc McKee earned his MFA from the University of Houston, and is currently pursuing a PhD at the University of Missouri in Columbia, where he lives with his wife, Camellia Cosgray. His poems appear in Boston Review, Conduit, Crazyhorse, DIAGRAM, LIt, Pleiades, Salt Hill, and several other places.

Two teenage sisters--Bernadette, the explorer and skeptic; and Jane, the Christian optimist--engage in an unorthodox battle for the truth of their attack in the Australian bush. As they grow up, each seeks refuge in their own world: Bernadette in the maps and writings of the 19th century explorer Charles Stuart, Jane in her faith and teaching. Their parents, Audrey and Robert, unaware of what's happened, deal with their own break in the security of their marriage. Audrey copes by creating a button quilt, its patterns an intricate topography hinting at the family's secrets and betrayals, while, as a form of penance, their father inventories the buttons sent from all over the country by friends, strangers, and schoolchildren. As the quilt grows to epic proportions, and the years pass with the growing burden of what's unsaid, and denied, and hidden, each character bends the boundaries of time and memory to negotiate with the trauma that has separated them from themselves and each other.

These elegant lines cut deep, not into bodies but into thoughts, thoughts about bodies, about the pain, shame, and delight of incarnation. For Eric Weinstein, poetry may be vivisection, but vivisection is, for him, metaphysical, an art of awe and understanding, where it is not so much poetry as our own contradictions that rend us, that appear to us, in these pages, with such an arresting tension, between galaxy and microbe, flesh and metal, living and dead. These poems peer into the dark. --Joseph Donahue Weinstein's VIVISECTION exposes the beating heart of its subjects with no loss of life: these remarkable poems are pensive yet urgent, allusive yet never needlessly elusive, grounded yet never sentimental. If this is surgical poetry, its implements--graceful precision, incisive thought, a meticulous accounting of the self's sacred and fungible parts--are wielded by a poet of significant subtlety and skill. 'I have a heart & so I know / how to make one, ' writes Weinstein--and the reader who fully registers the tensile structure and pulsing warmth of these poems is inclined to agree. --Seth Abramson What is this quintessence of dust to me? Hamlet asks a flummoxed, completely overmatched duo pressed into the service of politicians, not more than a breath or two after he's exclaimed man to be a piece of work. As if in answer, Eric Weinstein launches VIVISECTION, this volley of vaulting philosophies. Here, the vehicles of body that give humankind its various and temporary residences are real, fragile, desirous, terrible pieces of work. In one poem after another, the hearts and the brains tough out another moment or month in their nearly involuntary quest to endure. But in the face of inexorable finitude, Weinstein's poems know and sing what we need to remember, what poems themselves remind us: that the brevity and transience that we might otherwise rue charges our existence with meaning. Detail by luminous detail, VIVISECTION insists on the value and significance of the vast co-op that is life, sentient and non-. In doing so, he implicates us in a sad and gorgeous summons to a world that we might otherwise only fear. --Marc McKee

NOTHING BETWEEN US is a collection of stunning poems about Berkeley in the 60s that examines the politics of race, nuances of the feminist movement, as well as the complexities of infidelity.

A microscopic parasite has crippled humanity with night terrors and paralyzing anxiety. In this world of increasing dystopia, hope yet remains in Karma City. But when mercenary drifter, Jameson Shoals, learns that a famous scientist has created a stronger parasite to kill the original, it isn't until the bodies litter the streets that he realizes the horrifying truth: the new parasite is a killer with a mind of its own, and upon dominating Patient Zero, this killer acquires legs, hands, and eyes. It falls upon Shoals and his partner, a deadly female mercenary, to stop PZ and his mob before they can overcome and supplant humankind.

What a strange and intense book this is! David Blair has a wild, restless imagination and he uses language like saw, a hammer, a velvet whip. He can write incredibly tender (and original) love poems and enfilading satirical poems, as well as many of the many other kinds of poems between those poles, and they all seem entirely at home, indeed, need to be in this book together. His music, his diction, his refusal to use (ever!) cliches, his syntax all drive his poems and their hearts forward. That is where his poems go: forward. He will be in the company of the best poets of his generation. --Thomas Lux Nothing can remain horizontal or vertical for long might as well be David Blair's mini ars poetica. A commitment to the pleasures and terrors of change, you might say. I have been reading Blair's poems for about ten years now--struck always by his unique pitch and tone, the tensile muscularity of his syntax and vibrational accents. His diction is totally unboxed. He reminds me a bit of August Kleinzahler or John Yau in this--a karaoke of urban hullabaloo sung slightly off the beat, all for the sake of swing....David Blair's acceptance of the world is signaled by his stylishness, provoked by the people and things he encounters. His brain knows that it's living in an animal body. And it moves among all these other minds and bodies in motion. Changed by the smallest of changes. Unbalanced but at ease. This poet's energy reminds me of Edwin Denby's comments about De Kooning's paintings from the 1930s: He wanted everything in the picture out of equilibrium except spontaneously all of it...a miraculous force and weight of presence moving from all over the canvas at once. These poems want that, too. --David Rivard, /Boston Review/ David Blair's work is both public and discreet, somewhere between black box theatre and a blind date with an utterly beguiling stranger. His poems are dinner parties, intimate and sumptuous, arranged with great care and yet full of unforeseen turns: the pope gives way to 'the first red coils of the peonies' and a the hair of a lost aviator becomes 'brown, fibrous light.' How refreshingly unlike contemporary poetry this book is; a pleasure. --D. A. Powell

These ten short stories--Valerie Hurley's winning story, Jasmine, washing the Hair of Pearsa, and nine finalists--show the range possible in the contemporary literary short story and offer a snapshot of some of the most compelling writing by established and emerging literary talents. From a pool of over five hundred stories, some published in very well-known journals and magazines, and many unpublished, our panel of readers selected these finalists, the best of the best, in 2007. Valerie Hurley's winning story, Jasmine, washing the Hair of Pearsa, was chosen from these finalists by our judge, Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Olen Butler. Here you'll find stories by: Jacob M. Appel, Stephenie Brown, Lauren Cobb, Greg Hrbek, LaTanya McQueen, Benjamin Noam Pearlberg, Matthew Pitt, Scott Winokur, and Mark Wisniewski.

Genine Lentine's new chapbook, a finalist in the NMP/DIAGRAM 2009 chapbook contest, is a great debut. Reading Genine Lentine's poems--so ardent and playful, risky and affecting--I kept thinking that it's not true, what René Char once said, that 'no bird has the heart to sing in a thicket of questions.' These poems plunge headlong into uncertainties of both language and life and, in doing so, they are so original that I often felt while reading them that I was in the grip of a brand new and still unnamed emotion. --Richard McCann These clear, refreshing acts of attention seem to wake us to another way of seeing, and to the problems and pleasures of saying what we see. Have we taken the act of speech for granted all along? In her short, formally inventive pieces--and especially in her dazzling long poem about language's power and limits that anchors this collection--Lentine sounds like no one else. Her wry, astonished, aching voice is a fresh presence in American poetry. --Mark Doty Beautiful experiments from the spiraling ladder of someone who has spread out her root hairs and patiently attends the right words to assign; one who is there to honor the instant something shimmers before it disappears, be 'it' the meaning of 'all this' or the lack thereof, not unlike Mr. Worthington photographing a droplet's splash he so ingeniously rigged to measure. And what doesn't Genine Lentine's aqueous breath expel--a disquisition on Softsoap, a sideways look at the motivational expression of Grenville Kleiser, the speed of sperm, along with a little consideration of the comma, the prefix un-, the contour of a vowel. Ms. Lentine's experiments begin and end with the parent body as it breaks away, that 'which asks nothing of us, only that we're here for it.' She is here. --C.D. Wright These thrilling poems--restless, calm, reckless, wise--interrogate themselves by hovering over moments of aching beauty, as well as utter bewilderment, until they become the world itself. --Nick Flynn