Rodney Gómez's Arsenal With Praise Song somehow manages to yoke together lament and celebration, reproach and veneration across the borders of eras and nations. Set in the stark desert landscape of the México-U.S. border all too familiar to so many refugees and migrants, these poems scrutinize human bodies and the body of the earth as the sites of great injustices and violences-political, social, and spiritual-and as the vehicles that carry our collective legacy generation to generation.
“To write a series of poems out of extreme illness is a bracing accomplishment indeed. In Deluge... Leila Chatti, born of a Catholic mother and a Muslim father, brilliantly explores the trauma." —Naomi Shihab Nye, The New York Times In her early twenties, Leila Chatti started bleeding and did not stop. Physicians referred to this bleeding as flooding. In the Qur’an, as in the Bible, the Flood was sent as punishment. The idea of disease as punishment drives this collection’s themes of shame, illness, grief, and gender, transmuting religious narratives through the lens of a young Arab-American woman suffering a taboo female affliction. Deluge investigates the childhood roots of faith and desire alongside their present day enactments. Chatti’s remarkably direct voice makes use of innovative poetic form to gaze unflinchingly at what she was taught to keep hidden. This powerful piece of life-writing depicts Chatti’s journey from diagnosis to surgery and remission in meticulous chronology that binds body to spirit and advocates for the salvation of both. Chatti blends personal narrative, religious imagery, and medical terminology in a chronicle of illness, womanhood, and faith.
Poems of Devotion is a collection of the finest recent poems in the devotional mode, which the editor examines in detail in the introductory essay. The seventy-seven poets collected here demonstrate the ongoing vitality of poetry as a spiritual practice, in the long tradition of poets, psalmists, and mystics from the East and West. This is an anthology that will prove deeply rewarding in the classroom, at home, or in the library of your religious institution.
This new collection of linked short stories from award-winning author Jeff Fearnside explores the lives of ordinary people in Kazakhstan as they face the challenges of post-Soviet transition in the early 21st century. These stories illuminate the soul of a people tested by their circumstances: a man struggling between tradition and his conscience, a woman remembering her coming of age during perestroika, a woman who through memory comes to identify with the other, a husband and wife who seek reconciliation through the words they've used to hurt, and a grandfather who lost his loved ones and now must face his past.
Poetry. Latinx Studies. Set along the U.S.-Mexican border, CEREMONY OF SAND is an examination of hiddenness, of those things the borderlands want kept secret, of the banal violence that is both internally created and forced upon it. The collection exposes the futility of naming the borderlands as one particular type of place and tackles the complexity of its inhabitants, their contradictions, their language, and their failures. In poems both fatalistic and deeply hopeful, CEREMONY OF SAND serves as witness as it also addresses the complexity of developing a language of unique personhood while living inside a culture that expects recapitulation of its own aesthetics and beliefs.
A compelling story of characters enduring various hardships in rural New Mexico. This debut novel tells the story of nine-year-old Raymond, nicknamed "Ray Moon" by Molly, his adoptive caretaker, a waitress, and the former partner of his recently deceased uncle. These two outcasts rely on one another for survival, and their bond forms the heart of this book. Living in a trailer atop a mesa in the high desert of New Mexico in 1968, Raymond ages quickly amid hostile circumstances. With the help of a keen imagination that Molly inspires, he navigates various forms of loss and exploitation amid enduring hardship. Kevin Honold's deft and trance-like prose is interspersed with sharp insights and brings attention to the displacement of Native Americans, the hardships of capitalism, the ills of misogyny, and the raw hurt of living a displaced or marginalized life. This is a story of endurance, memory, and unceasing change. Molly was selected by Dan Chaon as the winner of the 2020 Autumn House Fiction Prize.
In a fifth collection of poetry, sonnets explore the lives of people coping with a plague as they reflect on the influenza pandemic of 1918-1919, which killed some twenty-five million people around the globe. Reprint.
#1 INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • A timeless, structure-bending classic that explores how actions of individual lives impact the past, present and future—from a postmodern visionary and one of the leading voices in fiction Featuring a new afterword by David Mitchell and a new introduction by Gabrielle Zevin, author of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century • Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize Cloud Atlas begins in 1850 with Adam Ewing, an American notary voyaging from the Chatham Isles to his home in California. Ewing is befriended by a physician, Dr. Goose, who begins to treat him for a rare species of brain parasite. The novel careens, with dazzling virtuosity, to Belgium in 1931, to the West Coast in the 1970s, to an inglorious present-day England, to a Korean superstate of the near future where neocapitalism has run amok, and, finally, to a postapocalyptic Iron Age Hawaii in the last days of history. But the story doesn’t end even there. The novel boomerangs back through centuries and space, returning by the same route, in reverse, to its starting point. Along the way, David Mitchell reveals how his disparate characters connect, how their fates intertwine, and how their souls drift across time like clouds across the sky. As wild as a video game, as mysterious as a Zen koan, Cloud Atlas is an unforgettable tour de force that, like its incomparable author, has transcended its cult classic status to become a worldwide phenomenon.
In Weak Devotions, his first poetry collection, Luke Hankins engages with great honesty the difficulties and uncertainties inherent in the spiritual life. Far from seeking mere "self-expression," Hankins has honed these explorations into tightly knit meditations and monologues that will resonate with the deepest questions and longings of readers of all backgrounds.
A collection of short fiction by the award-winning writer Alina Stefanescu in which the author brings an immigrant's sharp eye to the American way of life. In prose that reminds us of the best of Grace Paley, Every Mask I Tried On is by turns smart, funny, and profound.
