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The author of this essay collection has called many places home: Kansas, where her Filipina mother was a doctor; Arizona, where she hiked with her Indian father; and the chillier climes of western New York and Ohio. But no matter where she’s been...
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...
Ojibwe tradition calls for fathers to walk their children through the world, sharing the ancient understanding “that we are all, animate and inanimate alike, living on the one pure breath with which the Creator gave life to the Universe.” In this...
Troubled and meditative, Blood Moon is an examination of racism, whiteness, and language within one woman’s life. In these poems, words are deeply powerful, even if—with the onset of physical infirmity—they sometimes become unfixed and...
To Make Room for the Sea delights as much as it mourns. It looks forward as much as it reflects. Deft and hopeful, the poems in this collection gently encourage us to take another look at a world “only some strange god might have thought...
Kathryn Cowles’s Maps and Transcripts of the Ordinary World is a collection that lingers in memory and place, in the unsettled distance between reality and its transcriptions. Arresting on both visual and textual levels, this collection...
Nau’s greatest joy is to visit the sea, where whales gather every morning to gaily spout rainbows. Then, one day, she finds a man in the mist where a whale should be: Reu, who has taken human form out of his Great Love for her. This...
What to do when a world is split—terribly, wholly—by grief? What else but to interrogate the very fundamental principles themselves: light, religion, physical matter, time? This winner of the Jake Adam York Prize creates an unforgettable portrait...
These poems are engaged in the work of recovery, making visible what is often intentionally erased: the movement of domestic workers on a weekday morning in Brooklyn; a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, fondly sharing photos of his dog; the...
What is the deep web? A locked door. A tool for oppression and for revolution. “An emptying drain, driven by gravity.” And in Patrick Johnson’s Gatekeeper—selected by Khaled Mattawa as the winner of the 2019 Ballard Spahr Prize for...
Taking its name from the Roman goddess of wisdom and her companion bird, Owl of Minerva turns astonishingly precise attention to the physical world, scouring it for evidence of the spiritual as the poet travels through such places as...
From cartographer Tim Robinson comes the second title in the Seedbank series, a breathtakingly intimate exploration of one beloved place’s geography, ecology, and history. Footstep by footstep, moment...
One winter’s night, Ruby Drake’s beloved parents perish in an accident—and suddenly, Ruby finds herself penniless and nearly alone in the world. Her new path eventually takes her to Harvester, to romance, and to a journey of selfhood on the...
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...
This National Poetry Series winner is an unflinching portrait of the actual west—full of beauty as well as brutality, where boys tentatively learn to become, and to love, men. Its landscapes are ravaged but also startlingly lush, and even its...
When Gregory Orr was twelve years old, he shot and killed his brother in a hunting accident. Guilt weighed on him throughout a childhood split between the rural Hudson Valley and jungles of Haiti. But eventually his experiences led him to...
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...
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2020 PEN TRANSLATION PRIZE
From celebrated Belgian author Geneviève Damas, a modern fable about friendship, self-determination, and the power of education.
Illiterate, isolated, and held at arm’...
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...