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Since her father remarried, Nissa feels like a stranger in her own home. Hoping to restore the life she knew, Nissa accepts an invitation from her mother and moves to Chicago—but life in the big city is overwhelming. How can Nissa fit in when...
California wildfires, the 2008 election, plastic surgery, Larry Craig, wildfires, Wal-Mart, and rampant commercialism—these poems take on American media culture, the obscene foil for personal legacies of violence and violation. This collection...
At once ancient and contemporary, personal and political, grounded and yet uniquely dazzling, this extraordinary collection blends Asian and Western sensibilities in a pioneering way. With wit and energy, these poems define the author’s existence...
Musician. Curmudgeon. Trailblazer. Prairie populist. Teacher. World traveler. Cultural critic. Humanitarian. Scholar. Skeptic. Insightful humorist. Charismatic speaker. Firebrand. Seer. This collection of new and selected poems paints a portrait...
Manz is sure of one thing: he lives on the wrong side of the tracks in dusty Rockhill, Texas. Life is tough for everyone, but especially for Manz, the mixed-race son of migrant apple pickers. When the summer heat sets in, Manz takes a job outside...
Charting one cycle of seasons, this book reveals countless cycles of thought: the innumerable sounds of winter snow; the fecundity of spring; the tenacity of prairie roots in a summer drought; and the mortality of fall. The result is equal parts...
Brothers C and Sam left home after their father’s violent death. But upon their return to the Easter house—looming over the residents of Ontarion, Iowa—they create a lucrative business: The Associate, a group of men who perform services for a fee...
Lusty and literate, these tales feature characters flirting with disaster. An alienated young man discovers the meaning of love in the pages of a biology textbook. A mother and son witness a father’s backyard fling with a disturbed neighbor. And...
This fascinating account of life on North America’s last frontier chronicles the transformation of the Arctic as the mainstream moves relentlessly north. Essays and photographs offer an ode to respect—that oft-forsaken, unromantic quality—for the...
As a small child, a storm at sea claimed Kyna’s family, and nearly took her own life. Now, when her adoptive parents announce that they’ve rented a summer house on “magical” Lake Champlain, Kyna begs to be left home for the summer. No such luck....
A tightrope walker who travels on telephone wires; angels, scarecrows, friends, and lovers—the speakers in these poems often desire to hold time still, even as they acknowledge that to do so would actually mean the death of love, of experience....
Drawing inspiration from Novalis, a poet who believed in the correspondence between inner and outer worlds, this collection divines the palpable and ineffable ways in which inherited traditions—indigenous culture, mythology, romanticism,...
Mattie, Ariel, and Nicki are fast friends facing the uncertainty of being thirteen. After finding a book of spells, the three girls perform a ritual that will grant each the object of her desire—but the girls’ longed-for wishes carry unintended,...
Taking its inspiration—and, for that matter, its form—from Ishmael’s abandoned “Cetological Dictionary” in Moby-Dick, this extraordinary, highly original work brings meditations on myth, representation, language, nature, consciousness,...
At midlife, the author writes, we are called to an “archaeology of memory”—turning over a potsherd here, a fragment there—to assemble something whole out of the messiness of experience. She encourages all of us to contemplate our own deep story,...
Exploring the paranoia and bravura of the modern American male, these powerful novellas depict a realm marked by faltering blunders, misguided intentions, and the fear of failure. “I Am Death, or Bartleby the Mobster” charts the slumped career of...
Eleven-year-old Nissa’s life has never been perfect. Living with her free-spirited mama in the small town of Harper, Louisiana, has led to lots of gossipy small talk and mean rumors. But now Mama is gone, leaving Nissa with her gentle father, and...
From the revulsion on a child’s face as the speaker’s recovering body struggles to walk after a stroke, to the gift of a night nurse revealing her tattoo, these poems defy consolation in their consideration of mortality. This collection engages...
Rapturous and electric, these poems take us through a glittering underworld of illness and recovery, on a confrontational, explosive trip that is at once euphoric and brutal. Without relying on familiar narratives of despair and pity, this...
In April 2003, the author and his wife set out with the Porcupine caribou herd as they journeyed from the Yukon Territory to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. On the caribou’s trail, two people learn what is possible when they immerse...
In the high Altai Mountains of northern Mongolia, the nomadic Tuvan people’s ancient way of life is colliding with the pervasive influence of modernity. And for Dshurukawaa, a young shepherd boy, this means loss—of his siblings, of his...