Winner of the 2019 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize
Inside the dodo bird is a forest, Inside the forestThis layering of bird, woman, place, technology, and ceremony, which begins this first full-length collection by Zaina Alsous, mirrors the layering of insights that marks the collection as a whole. The poems in A Theory of Birds draw on inherited memory, historical record, critical theory, alternative geographies, and sharp observation. In them, birds--particularly extinct species--become metaphor for the violences perpetrated on othered bodies under the colonial gaze.
Putting ecological preservation in conversation with Arab racial formation, state vernacular with the chatter of birds, Alsous explores how categorization can be a tool for detachment, domination, and erasure. Stretching their wings toward de-erasure, these poems--their subjects and their logics--refuse to stay put within a single category. This is poetry in support of a decolonized mind.
Finalist, 2025 Miller Williams Poetry Prize
In her debut collection True Mistakes, the poet Lena Moses-Schmitt unleashes her powers of scrutiny on herself and on works of art to interrogate the essential nature of consciousness, identity, and time.As the poet goes about daily life--taking long walks, painting at her desk, going to work, grappling with the deaths of friends, struggling with anxiety and depression--she ruminates on the boundaries between art and reality, grief and joy, living and imagining. For Moses-Schmitt, thought, like painting, is relentlessly high-stakes: I often think about things so hard / I kill them. And: Is it possible to paint myself so precisely / I disappear? Can I remember myself / so completely I'm erased? In the context of such ruminations, the poet's reflections on David Hockney's seminal pool paintings shimmer with sublimity and insight.
Working to turn mistakes--misperceptions, errors in life and in art--into sites of possibility and imagination instead of failure or confusion, Moses-Schmitt offers a truth for every reader, writes series editor Patricia Smith.
Winner of the 2010 Lois Roth Persian Translation Prize
In Wolpé's fresh and vital translation, a musical and compelling English version that draws the reader along and captures a sense of the exquisitely balanced pacing of Farrokhzad's language, and the immediacy and authenticity of her voice, the members of the Lois Roth jury found themselves experiencing Forugh's Persian poems with new eyes.
--Excerpt from the Lois Roth judges' award statement
Sin includes the entirety of Farrokhzad's last book, numerous selections from her fourth and most enduring book, Reborn, and selections from her earlier work, and creates a collection that is true to the meaning, the intention, and the music of the original poems.
Conceived during the 2020 COVID-19 lockdown and the accompanying rise in anti-Asian bigotry, Word of Mouth: Asian American Artists Sharing Recipes is an artists' cookbook featuring stories and artwork from twenty-three Asian American and Asian diaspora artists from across the United States, with contributions that range from Los Angeles-based performance artist Kristina Wong's Recipe for Political Action to New Orleans-based painter Francis Wong's family recipe for stir-fried Szechuan alligator.
Word of Mouth was first published as an online exhibition through the Virtual Asian American Art Museum. This print version features a new introduction by art historian Michelle Yee, expanded essays, and brand-new recipes. Each contribution is accompanied by an original illustration and enriched by the artist's reflections on how their cuisine has been impacted by histories of war, migration, relocation, labor, or mixing.
A pandemic project turned illustrated cookbook, this unique collection disrupts genre expectations to celebrate how artists use food to nurture and sustain their diverse communities and artistic practices as well as to build connection during times of isolation, grief, and loss.
Finalist, 2025 Miller Williams Poetry Prize
Julia Kolchinsky's Parallax offers a lyrical narrative of parenting a neurodiverse child under the shadow of the ongoing war in Ukraine, the poet's birthplace. As her child expresses a fascination with death and violence, Kolchinsky struggles to process the war unfolding far away, on the same soil where so many of her ancestors perished during the Holocaust.
Anchored by a series of poems that look to the moon, this collection explores displaced perspectives and turns to the celestial to offer meditations on how elements formed in distant stars account for so much of our human DNA. In these poems, writes series editor Patricia Smith, Kolchinsky clutches at a feeling of home that is both unfamiliar and deeply treasured, longs for all that was left behind, struggles to come to terms with the rampant violence devastating a landscape that still, in so many encouraging and heartbreaking ways, belongs to her.
Finalist, 2025 Miller Williams Poetry Prize
John Allen Taylor's debut poetry collection To Let the Sun opens with an invitation both generous and resolute: take a walk with me . . . I hope you'll come / though I am going anyway. These poems peel back the layers of recovery as an adult from childhood sexual abuse, the myriad ways a body can change to protect itself from memory, and the difficulty of looking at abuse head-on. Taylor uses a poetics of reclamation to write the child-self from a perspective beyond trauma, to document the messiness of survival, the child's flight from himself, and the uncertain path home--to a life filled with small and perfect things. Through hermit crabs and golden pothos, fungal gnats and beet seed, the speaker reclaims himself: I am not lost . . . I know memory / is not healed by time, but / by the oddities / with which we adorn our lives, / the fragilities we need to know / we're needed by.
Arkansas Made is the culmination of Historic Arkansas Museum's exhaustive investigations into the history of the state's material culture. Decades of meticulous research have resulted in this exciting two-volume survey of cabinetmakers, silversmiths, potters, fine artists, quilters, and other artisans working in communities all over the state.
The work of the artisans documented here has been the driving force of Historic Arkansas Museum's mission to collect and preserve Arkansas's creative legacy and rich artistic traditions. Artisans from across Arkansas's rich cultural landscape come to life among the colorful quilts, playful temperance jugs, and inventive effigies included in Volume I. Readers will delight not only in the striking full-color images but also in the stories that weave them together across time and region to create a lively picture of art and artisanship in a state too little celebrated for its creative output.
Volume 1Between 1972, when he published his first book, The Signing Knives, and 1978, when he died at the age of twenty-nine, Frank Stanford published seven volumes of poetry. Within a year of his death, two posthumous collections were published. At the time of this death, as Leon Stokesbury asserts in his introduction, Stanford was the best poet in America under the age of thirty-five.
The Light the Dead See collects the best work from those nine volumes and six previously unpublished poems. In the earlier poems, Stanford creates a world where he could keep childhood alive, deny time and mutability, and place a version of himself at the center of great myth and drama.
Later, the denial of time and mutability gives way to an obsessive and familiar confrontation with death. Although Stanford paid an enormous price for his growing familiarity with Death as a presence, the direct address to that presence is a source of much of the striking originality and stunning power in the poetry.
Fulbright was erudite and eloquent in all the books he wrote, but this one is his masterpiece. Within its pages lie his now historic remonstrations against a great nation's overreach, his powerful argument for dissent, and his thoughtful propositions for a new way forward . . . lessons and cautions that resonate just as strongly today.
--From the foreword by Bill Clinton
Fulbright drew on his extensive experience in international relations to write The Arrogance of Power, a sweeping critique of American foreign policy, in particular the justification for the Vietnam War, Congress's failure to set limits on it, and the impulses that gave rise to it. This book--with its solid underpinning the idea that the most valuable public servant, like the true patriot, is one who gives a higher loyalty to his country's ideals than to its current policy,--was published in 1966 and sold four hundred thousand copies. The book remains an invaluable antidote to the official rhetoric of government, as the New York Times called it, fifty years after its first publication.