Faraway Blue
Faraway Blue

Author: Max Evans

Publisher: University of New Mexico Press

Published: 2019-10-01

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 0826335861

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First published in 1999, Faraway Blue is based on the real-life exploits of Sergeant Moses Williams, former slave, Civil War veteran, and Buffalo Soldier in the Ninth Cavalry Regiment. Included in Moses's story are four women and two men representing the ethnic groups and economic levels found in the late 1800s American Southwest. At the story's opening, Williams's cavalry unit has one assignment: kill Apaches in the "faraway blue" mountains of southwestern New Mexico Territory, also known as the Black Range. As a fighter in the white man's campaign to obliterate the Indians and take over their lands, Williams finds a nemesis in Nana, an old Warm Springs Apache warrior who is a tactical genius. Nana leads his small band of followers to repeatedly strike area mining camps and settlements. Both men know they must meet before the end of the war and a maddening cat-and-mouse pursuit ensues. ; Williams is sustained by his love for Sheela Jones, a mulatto whom he wants to marry when the army will allow it. But Sheela's love for him guides her to take an immense risk just as Williams and Nana ride out to settle their score. "Evans paints marvelous word pictures of a land and people he knows extremely well." - Booklist "As always with Evans, written with a good sense of the times and place." - Kirkus

Trying Again to Stop Time
Trying Again to Stop Time

Author: Jalal Barzanji

Publisher: University of Alberta

Published: 2015-04-15

Total Pages: 148

ISBN-13: 177212074X

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“It’s a losing battle: my words have no chance against time. Sometimes, unable to catch up with imagination, I leave the battle, candle in hand, in complete darkness.” — from “Trying Again to Stop Time" Jalal Barzanji chronicles the path of exile and estrangement from his beloved native Kurdistan to his chosen home in Canada. His poems speak of the tension that exists between the place of one’s birth and an adoptive land, of that delicate dance that happens in the face of censorship and oppression. In defiance of Saddam Hussein’s call for sycophantic political verse, he turns to the natural world to reference a mournful state of loss, longing, alienation, and melancholy. Barzanji’s poetry is infused with the richness of the Middle East, but underlying it all is a close affinity to Western Modernists. In those moments where language and culture collide and co-operate, Barzanji carves out a strong voice of opposition to political oppression. Readers will return to his work again and again, just as viewers return to a favourite painting. “Like contemporary poets Taslima Nasrin, Adonis, Yehuda Amichai, and Shuntaro Tanikawa, Barzanji’s is a voice in which the native willingly mutates into the global.” — Sabah A. Salih, Translator “The Kurdish question stands tall in our age as yet another emblematic paradigm of the violence enacted on a people in the name of the nation-state. Barzanji’s poetry is lovely, with frequent piercing tender moments and visions of the daily and the ordinary. The translation reads smoothly and naturally, highlighting the spoken quality of the poems, the loving and wounded quality of their speaker.” — Fady Joudah, translator of Ghassan Zaqtan's Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me, and Other Poems, winner of the 2013 International Griffin Poetry Prize