The Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences.--Seng-t'san

The Hsin Hsin Ming, Verses on the Faith-Mind by Seng-t'san, the third Chinese patriarch of Zen, is considered to be the first Chinese Zen document. Lucidly translated here by Richard B. Clark, it remains one of the most widely-admired and elegant of Zen writings, and is as relevant today as it was when it was written. In a world where stress seems unavoidable, Seng-t'san's words show us how to be fully aware of each moment.

In Underfoot, Holmberg asks what prevents an industrialized nation-state from achieving its desire to extract maximum resources.

His answers are people and their connection with land.
Writing in Northern Sámi, he creates a world of symbols to enact the challenges of maintaining an immediate relationship with land in the midst of ongoing settler colonialism and displacement.

Specifically, Underfoot summons readers to return to their feet because that's where we're constantly in contact with the ground. The book's antagonist, the shoemaker, markets comfort and warmth. The moment that we put on the shoe is when we offer ourselves to capitalism and mechanization. That's when we replace our values of sustainability and communality with egoism and individuality.

The poetry is interwoven with illustrations by Sami artist, Inga-Wiktoria Pave.

Youth, ideals, and life of the sent-down (rusticated) youth during the cultural revolution.

Journal of the Cultural Revolution is a collection of poems depicting the lives of educated youth during the cultural revolution. The author uses poetry to reminisce about many friends and memorable experiences during their time as educated youth, reflecting how the era influenced individual destinies. The language is poetic and with bursts of unexpected insights with strong emotions and rhythms. At once a work of narrative lyricism and an act of personal courage, this memoir in verse documents the human cost of a period of political turmoil in China's recent past.

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution marked a critical passage on China's road to modernity, as momentous for the world as it was for one boy caught up in its throes. In poetry that juxtaposes the political and the personal, the social and the individual, Luo Ying depicts a time when ultra-leftist mass movements and factional struggles penetrated the deepest level of private daily life. In bleak yet vivid portraits he reveals how the period indelibly marred him. I am a red guard just as I always was, he writes.

Giving voice to the inner life of a man haunted by his experiences, Journal of the Cultural Revolution bears witness to a traumatic time when ideology threatened to crush individuality. Luo Ying's poetry stands as eloquent testimony to the power of the individual voice to endure in the face of dire social and historical circumstances.

In Interrogation Room, Jennifer Kwon Dobbs's second collection, poems that restore redacted speech and traverse forbidden borders suture together divided bodies, geographies, and kinships to confront the unending Korean War's legacies of forced distances and militarized silences. Kwon Dobbs powerfully entwines uneasy, tentative reconciliations among South Korea's relatives in the North, her birth family in the South, and the transnational diaspora to which she belongs to resist the war's deprivations of language and imagination.

A ground breaking anthology of contemporary Hungarian poetry containing the diverse work of eight women and eight male poets with a wide range of subject matter and styles full of musicality, rhythm, and colorful images.

Iron Moon is a monumental achievement. It redraws the boundaries of working-class poetry for the new millennium by incorporating at its center issues like migration, globalization, and rank-and-file resistance. We hear in these poems what Zheng Xiaoqiong calls a language of callouses. This isn't a book about the lost industrial past; it's a fervent testimony to the horrific, hidden histories of the 21st century's working-class and a clarion call for a more cooperative and humane future.--Mark Nowak, author of Coal Mountain Elementary

Eleanor Goodman is a writer and translator. Her translation of work by Wang Xiaoni, Something Crosses My Mind, won the Lucien Stryk Translation Prize. Her first poetry collection is Nine Dragon Island.

Pithy phrases handed down through a distinguished line of Chinese and Japanese Zen masters.

This collection is painful, disturbing, and rewarding. Freeman and three other translators transform Storni's razor-sharp poetry into English versions that invite constant rereading. This is a poetry of fatal beauty that leads toward unavoidable death, but not before freeing the poet to leave everything she can behind.--Ray Gonzalez, Bloomsbury Review

Just as Ryokan's life is inseparable from his poetry, the translation's clarity of diction is inseparable from the sensitive brushwork on each page. A book to be gazed into again and again.--Charlotte Mandel, Small Press

What shall remain
as my legacy?
The spring flowers
the cuckoo in summer,
the autumn leaves.

Ryokan (1758-1831) was a poet, master calligrapher, Zen hermit, and is one of the most beloved poets of Japan. Instead of becoming the head of a Zen temple, he preferred the simple and independent life of a hermit. Ryokan's poetry is simple, direct, and colloquial in expression.

The first English translation of one of Japan's most important haiku poets.

Neruda paints a portrait of his beloved home at Isla Negra in this English-only edition of a White Pine Press best-seller.

Erotic passion, rebellion, spiritual thirst, and a strong hint of early feminism, --these are what make Mirabai's songs irrepressible five centuries after she sang them.

Mirabai (16^th century India) is one of the world's celebrated and renowned poets. Her life embedded in legend, her poems go straight to the heart. She was devoted to a god she called Shyam, the Dark One, and in lyric after lyric pursues her love with fervor. Every singer of note in India knows her songs and sings them; in the West her reputation is second only to Kabir among India's poets. What makes Mirabai remarkable is the way she weds religious devotion with India's old tradition of love song. These versions have been anthologized in India and the USA, worked into performances by singers and theater groups in the USA and Europe, and present Mirabai without embellishment. An introduction sets the historical context; a bibliography points towards further reading.

Celebrating the prose poetry sequence in twentieth century literature.

Sequences, some narrative and some fragmentary emerged as a form early in the twentieth century with the work of Ernest Hemingway, Amy Lowell, T.S. Eliot, Thornton Wilder, H.D., and others. Braids & Sequins traces the form to contemporary writers including Donald Hall, Holly Iglesias, Robert Bly, Michael Benedict, Kay Boyle, David Young, Robert Duncan, N. Scott Momaday, Jim Hazard, Nin Andrews and many others.

What is real and what is not, how to preserve history and self in a changing landscape, and how to build roots where the ground does not accept them.

Easy Victims to the Charitable Deceptions of Nostalgia grapples with the tensions associated with being exiled to home, with the environment and gentrification when there is a lack of land, and what that does to family, history, and family history. It is about the personal islands we all inhabit. Nostalgia is deceptive and seductive. We live in a time of tumult, a time therefore where the past may be, perhaps too easily, romanticized. There is a tendency to fall for these deceptions. Not just our own, but those of the generation before us, as well as the nostalgia of the generations that came before them, that they fell for. On the small island where this manuscript is largely set, there is such transience and such dependency on the narrative born of tourism that the truth and fiction of a place's history become skewed. As the water rises and the cost of living becomes such that working people and families rooted on the island for years cannot afford to live here, cannot risk staying, the distance to mainland seems lengthened. This is the perspective from which this book wrestles with the tough pull of nostalgia and the questions of what is real and what is not, how to preserve history and self in a changing landscape, and how to build roots where the ground does not accept them.

Building the Barricade, harrowing and demanding, here takes its place in English among the twentieth century's master works of war-witness.--Jane Hirshfield

Building the Barricade, is poetry of witness, and a lyric account of the sixty-three day Warsaw uprising.

Caught between German occupation and the advancing Soviets, the Polish Resistance Home Army barricaded central Warsaw in hopes of liberating the city and gaining Polish sovereignty. Building the Barricade is Anna Świrszczyńska's first-person account of the atrocities that destroyed over 60% of the Polish capital and left over 100,000 civilians and 16,000 Polish resistance fighters dead.

Świrszczyńska had joined the resistance as a military nurse and later wrote: Day and night German bombers raged over the capital, burying the living beneath the rubble.

A iterary testament to friendship and the ways in which a vibrant collaboration can inspire poets to plumb the depths of their experiences.

The concluding volumes of a ten-year-long conversation in prose poetry between the award-winning poets Marvin Bell and Christopher Merrill. They write from different generations and places around the world on a range of themes from memory to politics, aging and mortality, the vagaries of desire and the imagination.

Bell and Merrill wanted to create a wide-ranging dialogue to explore the meaning not only of their separate experiences but of the very ways in which a collaboration fosters a deeper engagement with each other--and the world. In his penultimate message to Merrill, written just hours before he suffered a heart attack from which he never recovered, Bell said that what he loved about their collaboration was that each new prose poem defined his immediate future--which was what After the Fact provided both of them for ten glorious years.

Adamantine explores the strength of stone and spirit and the power of the human spirit to transform itself.

Traveler, there is no road; you make your path as you walk.

An anthology of nearly 100 Chinese lyrics (san-ch'u) by 23 poets, three of them anonymous, all from the Yuan period (1271-1368). Seaton's colloquial English renderings are a sheer pleasure to read, so much so that the reader is apt to forget he is enjoying translations...--Choice

Forty poems and one essay by the left-wing schizophrenic Hungarian poet who committed suicide by throwing himself under a train.

I have long thought of Attila Jozsef as one of the great poets of the century--a tragic realist whose work beautifully redeemed the unbearable conditions of the life to which history condemned him. These new translations will be welcomed.--Donald Justice