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Sweden has long been home to a rich and luminous poetic tradition, notable for refreshing openness, striking honesty, and a rare transcendence that often springs from a keen attention to the natural world. This breathtaking anthology brings together…

The winner of the 2013 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry probes the depths of the human psyche. These are poems spoken through and for the melancholic, the hysteric, the body dysmorphic—from Mary Glover to Lavinia Dickinson to Freud’s famed patient…

Simultaneously occupying past, present, and future, this collection suffuses image with memory and darkness with abundant light. In these masterful translations—printed alongside the original Vietnamese—the poems sing out with the wisdom that comes…

When Eugenie de La Roque and her family flee the French Revolution for the wilderness of Pennsylvania, Hannah Kimbrell is chosen to help prepare for their arrival—leading to an unlikely friendship between the aristocrat and the Quaker. This novel is…

Growing up in the 1920s, Garnet Richardson watches the birds outside her window, admiring their freedom and beauty. When Garnet is sent away to a lakeside resort town for the summer, she discovers a chance to finally spread her wings, and her…

Often the most recognized, even brutal, events in American history are segregated by a politicized, racially divided “Color Line.” But where—asks this intense and ambitious National Poetry Series winner—is the Color Line in the mind, in the body…

In 1984, the eleventh year of his life, the author experienced his first love, the loss of his grandmother, and his sister’s departure for college—seemingly ordinary events that eroded his innocence in a way that was never to be fully repaired. At…

Full of youth, wonder, and imagination, this collection crosses distances and generations to celebrate the lives of women, and the bonds that bring them together. In these poems, the female body rises from a foundation of stars; songbirds are cut…

When Tom Serafino’s twin sister, Teagan, suffers a debilitating brain injury, a police investigation implicates his playmate’s uncle, Shoe. Innocent of the crime but burdened by his own childhood tragedy, Shoe takes the blame—inviting the question of…

These are poems rooted in the flatlands and lowlands: the Midwestern lawns, fields, lakes, and creeks of the author’s childhood, and the farms, canals, and seascapes near her family home’s in Holland. And from these seemingly empty spaces—and the…

In the fall of 1944, the Red Army encircled Budapest, and the ensuing months witnessed one of the most brutal sieges of World War II. Richly grounded in this historical trauma and its extended aftermath, the stories in this collection illuminate the…

Navigating both depression and the search for inspiration, this collection sits at the threshold between faith and doubt, the visible and the invisible, the physical and the metaphysical. These poems find us at our most vulnerable, the moment when we…

A grim prognosis, brain cancer, leaves the speaker in this collection fighting for her life. The winner of the 2012 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry creates from loss a dreamlike reality: Odessa, “roof of the underworld,” a refuge at once real and…

Originally published as the state marked its sesquicentennial in 2008, this anthology suggests what residents of the state have known for some time: Minnesota has changed enormously since 1858. Rich, compelling, and often surprising, these pieces…

Wild, austere, and magnificently beautiful, the territories of northern Pakistan are a forbidding place. When a young bride from Lahore arrives in these mountains, the ancient customs of unquestioning obedience and backbreaking work make accepting…

This collection shows the self as a crucible of force—that which compels us to exert ourselves upon the world, and meanwhile renders us vulnerable to it. From Robert Smithson’s colossal Spiral Jetty to a train hurdling along the west-reaching…

A stunning, intricate collection of forty lyric essays juxtaposing natural history, ancient texts, folk heroes, and found objects. Moving from cemeteries to parks—and always cast in the light of the author’s Southern upbringing—this is a collection…

Growing up in Pakistan in the 1970s, Feroza Ginwalla is precocious, impetuous, and increasingly affected by the rising tide of religious fundamentalism there. When her family decides to send her to America for a change of scenery and influence, a…

On the surface, Alice Marie Krayenbraak has it all: she’s beautiful and witty, a star student and a gifted athlete. But nothing is as it seems: the family farm is failing, Alice’s mother awaits the apocalypse, her parents are planning to send her…

In these poems, presented in both Portuguese and English, butcher shops, sex, and machine guns sit in spirited dialogue with language, absence, and time. The resulting collection is varied as well as unified, brilliantly textured and layered.

After the Deepwater Horizon well was capped in 2010, most reporters and government officials turned away from the unfolding narrative: the story was over. But for one writer the unimaginable amount of oil spilled into the ocean was only the beginning…

Matthew Garth’s story begins in the fall of 1962, with the shooting of a young woman on Thanksgiving Day. Fueled over the following weeks by his longing for this mysterious woman, Matthew finds himself drawn into a series of confrontations he never…

Taking their inspiration from the alphabet, and employing such innovative forms as the ancient ghazal, these poems are both humble and exotic. Highly ambitious and astonishingly beautiful, this collection deciphers the seemingly indecipherable in…

A family curse, a genetic trick resulting from centuries of hardship, causes the Hervé children to be born either giants or runts. In assured and mystically powerful prose, this novel follows generations of the family across North America and through…

These haunting and crystalline poems examine the moment when solitude slips into separation, when a person realizes he can barely see the place he set out from, and must make his way back to the present. In this journey, Thoreau’s “border life”…

Touching on the works of Emerson, Thoreau, Proust, and Plato, among others, this collection of nonfiction and fables provides a walking tour of the creative mind. This is a rich investigation of what it means to think, read, write, and learn…

Frigid, lethal, and wildly beautiful, Lake Superior is as alluring as it is dangerous. Featuring three women living on its shores in three different centuries, this novel—haunting, rich in historical detail, and universal in its exploration of the…

This haunted and haunting collection swings between moments of delicate connection and striking brutality. Shifting between lyric and narrative, these poems explore how our interior and exterior lives are entangled, the past living on inside us as we…

This groundbreaking anthology presents a revelatory portrait of contemporary Vietnamese poetry. What emerges from this conversation of outsiders and insiders, Vietnamese and American voices, is a worldly sensibility descended from the geographical…

At the farthest extent of Australia’s Blue Mountains, on the threshold of the country’s arid interior, the blue plateau reveals the vagaries of a hanging climate: the droughts last longer, the seasons change less, and the wildfires burn hotter and…

Cosmos and Niner dream of going to the sea, where it’s always summer. And to do that they need to raise money. Cosmos knows a woman who might be able to help them. When she asks them to exchange something precious for the money, Niner and Cosmos…

Can the love reserved for family and friends be extended to a place? These essays—set on a small island in the Pacific Northwest—beautifully explore the island as a metaphor for the paradoxical connections that bind us despite our apparent isolation…

When a small unit of soldiers is separated from their command and left to fend for themselves in a hostile city, their only option is to keep moving. As they wander, the line between friend and enemy is blurred beyond recognition, and with it the…

When Libby winds up raising her younger sister’s daughter, she sets out to give baby Amber the childhood she never had. But then Libby—who is only twenty-two—loses her job, and Amber’s father shows up with a custody claim. With spirit and a kind of…

On Hell’s Bottom Ranch, a section of land below the Front Range, there are women like Renny, who prefer a “little Hell swirled with their Heaven,” and men like Ben, her husband, who’s “gotten used to smoothing over Renny’s excesses.” This work of…