Striking and big-hearted, Glass Jaw depicts the grit and glamor of women's boxing based on the poet's time training as a fighter in New York City. Beginning on the ropes, fighting back against the limitations of gender, Raisa Tolchinsky situates us within the dynamic context of the boxing gym, through both a chorus of named women boxers and a single fighter battling for her selfhood. In a Dantean reimagining, we follow the boxer as she descends into the hellish rings of an abusive relationship with her coach. In a count-down from 34 to 1, sputtering at times, the fighter gets closer and closer to the heart of her brutal, solitary metamorphosis. Winner of the 2023 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize in Poetry, Glass Jaw explores a quest as spiritual as it is physical through poems that are muscular, musical, ecstatic.
Published in 1993, America Street was the very first collection of stories about young people growing up in our diverse society. It has informed and inspired hundreds of thousands of readers. Now this influential and much-loved anthology is expanded and updated for a new generation. Twenty stories, twelve new and eight returning favorites, focus on life issues, from the personal to the political.
Authors included are: Duane Big Eagle, Marina Budhos, Norma Elia Cant , Sandra Cisneros, Lan Samantha Chang, Tope Folarin, Rivka Galchen, Joseph Geha, Veera Hiranandani, Langston Hughes, Gish Jen, Edward P. Jones, Francisco Jim nez, Mary K. Mazotti, Toshio Mori, Naomi Shihab Nye, Susan Power, Gary Soto, Justin Torres, and Michele Wallace.
This collection of prose poems chronicles a woman's childhood onset and adult journey through obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), which manifests in fearful obsessions and counting compulsions that impact her relationship to motherhood, religion, and the larger world. Cynthia Marie Hoffman's unsettling, image-rich poems chart the interior landscape of the obsessive mind. Along with an angel who haunts the poems' speaker throughout her life, she navigates her fear of guns and accidents, fears for the safety of her child, and reckons with her own mortality, ultimately finding a path toward peace.
Like nothing before it, in Rocket Fantastic explores the landscape and language of the body in interconnected poems that entwine a fabular past with an iridescent future by blurring, with disarming vulnerability, the real and the imaginary. Sorcerous, jazz-tinged, erotic, and wide-eyed, this is a pioneering work by a space-age balladeer.
A dance of self-discovery, subverting our assumptions of gender and the body. . . Both innovative and sensual, Rocket Fantastic is a vital book for our time.--Diana Whitney, San Francisco Chronicle
This compassionate, constructive volume by renowned author Joy Ladin collects eleven essays written between 2008, on the cusp of what Time called America's transgender tipping point, and 2021, as anti-trans laws began metastasizing around America. Dr. Ladin, the first openly transgender employee of an Orthodox Jewish institution (Yeshiva University), a nationally known speaker on transgender identities and issues, and founding figure in trans poetry and trans theology, has lived through and contributed to gender's bitterly debated and still unfolding transformation. Drawing on her experiences as a trans parent, spouse, teacher, and author, she writes honestly and insightfully about gender, exploring its intersections with feminisms, psychotherapy, divinity, ontology, and even the poems of Emily Dickinson. Written for any curious reader, these essays teach us about who we are, who we can be, and what it means to be human.