"Aunt Carmen is impatient with cerebral notions of faith, but she knows her saints - their stories, their sorrows, and their joys. Through her they emerge: El Santo Nino, the mischievous Holy Child; the doting father, San Jose; and the bold Santa Maria Magdalena, whom Carmen imagines walking into church "in heels and short skirts." And in Carmen's prayers to them, she finds the words to tell her own story."--BOOK JACKET. "We know that Aunt Carmen,...

Vanity corrupts the empires on the grand tour from ancient Rome to revolutionary Iran, from Europe in the Age of Reason to America in the Age of Television. William Logan's poems find Ovid in a London gentlemen's club, Romeo and Juliet in Florida, and the varnished splendors of religion and politics surviving at the seedy edge of culture. VAIN EMPIRES is breathtakingly intense in language and disturbing in its moral intelligence.

Divided into "Home Recordings" and "Field Recordings," Brown speaks to the way personal experience is shaped by culture, while culture is forever affected by the personal, recalling a black, Kansas boyhood to comment on our times. From "History"--A song of Kansas high-school fixture Mr. W., who gave his students "the Sixties / minus Malcolm X, or Watts, / barely a march on Washington"--to "Money Road," a sobering pilgrimage to the site of Emmett Till's...

"The reissue of Nickole Brown's debut-published ten years after it first appeared-holds just as much relevance and power today as it did a decade ago, and in this special revised edition are all of the poems that first came to light in 2007 along with some supplementary materials, including a discussion with the author and a craft guide geared towards survivors writing through their own trauma." (cover).

Bitsui's poetry returns things to their basic elements and voice in a flowing language rife with illuminating images. A great reading experience for those who like serious and innovative poetry." --Library Journal Drawing upon Navajo history and enduring tradition, Sherwin Bitsui leads us on a treacherous, otherworldly passage through the American Southwest. Fluidly shape-shifting and captured by language that functions like a moving camera, Dissolve...