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Growing up in Alabama, the author was a devoted reader, an explorer of riverbeds and red-dirt roads, and a fiercely loved daughter. Here, in brief essays, she offers an unusual, captivating portrait of her family and her childhood—and of the...
As a small boy in remote Alberta, the author was immersed in his Cree family’s history, passed down in the stories of his mother, Bertha. But after a series of tragic losses, Bertha turned wild and unstable, and their home life became chaotic....
This winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize is an elegant debut that searches widely to ask what it means to exist in a state of loss. These are poems of frequent swerves and transformations, in dialogue with science, geography, art, and aesthetics...
From celebrated Belgian author Geneviève Damas, a modern fable about friendship, self-determination, and the power of education.
Illiterate, isolated, and held at arm’s length by a bitter father, François Sorrente has spent his seventeen...
Selected by Victoria Chang, this winner of the Jake Adam York Prize is a deeply personal examination of violent masculinity, driven by a yearning for more compassionate ways of being. With arresting lyricism and humility, these poems attend to...
Ndiya Grayson returns to her childhood home of Chicago as a young professional, but even her high-end job in a law office can’t protect her from half-repressed memories of childhood trauma. One evening, vulnerable and emotionally disarrayed, she...
In March 2011, a tsunami caused by an earthquake collided with nearby power plant Fukushima Daiichi, causing the only nuclear disaster in history to rival Chernobyl in scope. These poems take a piercing, witty, and ferocious look into the heart...
Ants drunk on cherry-red hummingbird nectar. An ambulance rushing into the distance. And rain, endless rain: turning pulpy with sunlight, seemingly on the verge of a flood. These are the moments of an ordinary day—rendered, throughout these poems...
This is a collection about time—about memory, and remembrance, and how the past makes itself manifest in the world. A desk, a mailbox, a house delivering its own autobiography: in these poems, objects hold history, even if they’ve grown...
When her mother is diagnosed with a rare form of cancer, the author—a cook, collector of thrifted vintage cast iron, and fiercely devoted daughter, sister, and aunt—can’t help but wonder: Feed a fever, starve a cold, but what do we do for...
The K’iche’ creation myth of The Popol Vuh is thousands of years old, one of the only epics indigenous to the Americas. By turns poetic and lucid, sinuous and accessible, this verse translation—the first of its kind—breathes new life...
A companion volume to The Stuntman, this collection fuses the stories of two fabled couples: the mythical Narcissus and Echo, and Bob Dylan and Echo Star Helstrom. But where The Stuntman focused on Narcissus, these poems take...
A final collection fully inscribed with the daring of the author’s acrobatic mind and the force of his unrelenting spirit. These poems brush up against the pain, fear, and isolation that accompany a long illness, but with all the creative force...
In 2012, Sarah Ruhl was a distinguished author and playwright, twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Max Ritvo was an exuberant, opinionated, and highly gifted poet in remission from pediatric cancer. Studded with poems and songs, their...
Vulnerable, tender, acute, these are serious poems, brave poems, exploring with honesty the ambiguous moment between the rapture of youth and the grace of acceptance. This collection shows us the persistence of hunger, love, and joy, the dizzying...
The Boundary Waters is a national treasure—so when the authors learned of a danger facing the region, they decided to speak on behalf of the wilderness. This is the story of their year bearing witness to wild places and a passionate argument for...
The winner of the inaugural Max Ritvo Poetry Prize is an assured debut collection about grace—the places we search for it, and the disjunction between what we seek and where we arrive. In these poems, hinterlands demand our close attention;...
Alone in the world and placed in a horrific boarding school, Saul Indian Horse is surrounded by violence and cruelty. At the urging of a priest, he finds a tentative salvation in hockey. Yet as Saul’s victories mount, so do the racism and the...
Love poems to the lovely and unlovely, the loved and unloved, finding tenderness for the other, the dead, and the disappeared. This is a collection that translates between the heart and the mind, the flesh and the more-than-flesh, the word ...
This collection deftly spans not only the physical space of global cities, but more intangible and intimate distances: between birth and death, father and son, past and present, metaphor and reality. From experiences defined by an urban landscape...