An unflinching shapeshifter, Beast at Every Threshold dances between familial hauntings and cultural histories, intimate hungers and broader griefs. Memories become malleable, pop culture provides a backdrop to glittery queer love, and folklore speaks back as a radical tool of survival. With unapologetic precision, Natalie Wee unravels constructs of “otherness” and names language our most familiar weapon, illuminating the intersections of queerness, diaspora, and loss with obsessive, inexhaustible ferocity—and in resurrecting the self rendered a site of violence, makes visible the “Beast at Every Threshold.” Beguiling and deeply imagined, Wee’s poems explore thresholds of marginality, queerness, immigration, nationhood, and reinvention of the self through myth.
Natalie Wee'sOur Bodies & Other Fine Machinesis a roadmap. Of words, yes. Of well crafted images ("your name tucked under my tongue, an unraveling string that pulls & pulls.") But more than just that, this book thrills and pulls you in, showing you a history, a lineage, an invitation into Wee's room, both in its cleanest and messiest moments. This is a stunning work by a powerful writer. The work in this book grabs on to all of the right emotions, and never lets go. - Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib, Author of The Crown Ain't Worth Much Natalie Wee's writing is indicative of a wordsmith-master utilizing all her tools with precision. Wee says the words we think, and then reshapes them, out loud, into beautiful origami-like gifts that hit you like "stray bullets splinter technicolour lovers." The intricacies of her images walk a fine line that hover closely over genius, and the supernatural. From her well thought-out use of white space, enjambments, and form, Our Bodies and Other Fine Machines tells tales of hurt, pain, lust, love and all that lurks between leaving the "unsayable hung in our mouths." - Chelene Knight, Managing Editor of Room Magazine This debut is breathtaking. Wee's writing drops you into her world and you do not want to leave. Her portrait of girlhood from an outsider still feels as intimate and relentlessly soft as any old Polaroid plucked from your mother's scrapbook. The poetry here is raw and refined, bloody and delicate, a whole body of work that turns our elusive moments into fine tuned pieces of machinery... Wee's perspective is genuine, honest, and highly crafted. Our Bodies & Other Fine Machines is a bouquet arranged with every blossom and thorn for us to witness. - Alex Dang , Author of Are You Proud of Me? In Our Bodies & Other Fine Machines, Natalie Wee asks, "What is it like to be made a person / instead of a stranger's dim shadow?" and reveals, "my bones are heavy with the weight of never having been seen at all." It is with just such rigor and grace that Wee demands sight throughout this collection. Illuminating myriad ways queer women of color are silenced, dismissed, and unseen, these pages are alive with determination to be understood. There is an urgency here one cannot escape, expressed entirely in Wee's own careful and knowing language. More than remarkable, this book is necessary. - Jeanann Verlee, Author of Racing Hummingbirds & Said the Manic to the Muse "
When her most closely guarded secrets are laid bare, how will Kira survive the inevitable fall out—and will anybody be standing beside her in the end? Traveling to the planet of Jettie in the hopes of finding safe harbor for her niece, Kira arrives only to find their destination host to the quorum—a series of dangerous contests that hold the power to decide the fate of empires. With little choice but to participate, it doesn’t take long for Kira to find herself knee deep in enemies. Surrounded on all sides, Kira will have to face her worst fear. Trusting others with the truth. Because it’s becoming clear the tsavitee are no longer content to exist in the shadows. War is coming—and everything Kira thought she once knew is about to change.
In 1856, Paul Du Chaillu ventured into the African jungle in search of a mythic beast, the gorilla. After wild encounters with vicious cannibals, deadly snakes, and tribal kings, Du Chaillu emerged with 20 preserved gorilla skins—two of which were stuffed and brought on tour—and walked smack dab into the biggest scientific debate of the time: Darwin's theory of evolution. Quickly, Du Chaillu's trophies went from objects of wonder to key pieces in an all-out intellectual war. With a wide range of characters, including Abraham Lincoln, Arthur Conan Doyle, P.T Barnum, Thackeray, and of course, Charles Darwin, this is a one of a kind book about a singular moment in history.
"Rajiv Mohabir's Cutlish uses history to interrogate the word "home" and all that it might mean to those who thrive in spite of homophobia, stereotype, and xenophobia. These poems are grounded in definite time and space in a voice that refuses to be silenced, "They are vexed you survive; that you/rise up from the pavement..." But what I love most is read a poet as disciplined and committed as Mohabir as he transforms and reinvents himself in tone, in subject, and in line: "Let's get one thing queer-I'm no Sabu-like sidekick,/I'm the main drag. Ram Ram in a sari; salaam//on the street. I don't speak Hindu, Paki, or Indian,/can't control minds, have no psychic powers." Jericho Brown Cutlish, Rajiv Mohabir's stunning new collection, asks urgent questions about queer identities, diaspora and silence. Deeply grounded in 1838, the year the first ships brought indentured servants from India to Guyana, Cutlish reckons with the relationship between language and violence. These poems challenge the colonizer's English through Creole, Sanskrit, Hindi, Hindustani and Chutney songs, dazzling us at every turn: "May each face who ever said, Speak English / find their own tongue fettered and split, / my mixed blood blackening their faces." The book's title evokes the violence of a cutlass, and everywhere here we see language as knife and blade but also as solace. Cutlish is a luminous, beautiful book. Rajiv Mohabir is one of the most important poets writing today. --Nicole Cooley"--
An NPR Best Book of the Year A 2020 International Latino Book Award Finalist An Entertainment Weekly, The Millions, and LitHub Most Anticipated Book of the Year This unforgettable memoir from a prize-winning poet about growing up undocumented in the United States recounts the sorrows and joys of a family torn apart by draconian policies and chronicles one young man’s attempt to build a future in a nation that denies his existence. “You were not a ghost even though an entire country was scared of you. No one in this story was a ghost. This was not a story.” When Marcelo Hernandez Castillo was five years old and his family was preparing to cross the border between Mexico and the United States, he suffered temporary, stress-induced blindness. Castillo regained his vision, but quickly understood that he had to move into a threshold of invisibility before settling in California with his parents and siblings. Thus began a new life of hiding in plain sight and of paying extraordinarily careful attention at all times for fear of being truly seen. Before Castillo was one of the most celebrated poets of a generation, he was a boy who perfected his English in the hopes that he might never seem extraordinary. With beauty, grace, and honesty, Castillo recounts his and his family’s encounters with a system that treats them as criminals for seeking safe, ordinary lives. He writes of the Sunday afternoon when he opened the door to an ICE officer who had one hand on his holster, of the hours he spent making a fake social security card so that he could work to support his family, of his father’s deportation and the decade that he spent waiting to return to his wife and children only to be denied reentry, and of his mother’s heartbreaking decision to leave her children and grandchildren so that she could be reunited with her estranged husband and retire from a life of hard labor. Children of the Land distills the trauma of displacement, illuminates the human lives behind the headlines and serves as a stunning meditation on what it means to be a man and a citizen.
SOMETHING EVIL THIS WAY COMES 7 VENGEFUL SISTERS 7 FAIRYTALE KINGDOMS 7 DAUGHTERS OF EVILLE Everyone dreams of marrying a prince--except for me. I am nothing more than a pawn in my adoptive mother's diabolical plot against the seven kingdoms. I was the chosen tool, her sharpened blade that would cut the deepest into the heart of the Kingdom of Baist. But like all deadly weapons, my wedding is a two-edged sword that could cost me my soul. For I am Rosalie, one of the adopted daughters of Lady Eville, and it is my duty to enter into a loveless and hate-filled marriage with the narcissistic Crown Prince of Baist. My choices and heart are not my own to give. Yet even in the thick of dire situations, beastly vengeance can give way to beautiful attraction. THIS BOOK CAN BE READ AS A STANDALONE.
An entertaining companion to the Harry Potter books, written by J.K. Rowling. Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is an extensive introduction to magical beasts familiar from the Harry Potter books and others we haven't yet met. Includes information about beasts which can be found in Australia and New Zealand and what they eat.
A formidable collection of poems that deconstructs the notion of "otherness" through folklore and myth. An unflinching shapeshifter, Beast at Every Threshold dances between familial hauntings and cultural histories, intimate hungers and broader griefs. Memories become malleable, pop culture provides a backdrop to glittery queer love, and folklore speaks back as a radical tool of survival. With unapologetic precision, Natalie Wee unravels constructs of "otherness" and names language our most familiar weapon, illuminating the intersections of queerness, diaspora, and loss with obsessive, inexhaustible ferocity - and in resurrecting the self rendered a site of violence, makes visible the "Beast at Every Threshold." Beguiling and deeply imagined, Wee's poems explore thresholds of marginality, queerness, immigration, nationhood, and reinvention of the self through myth.
Poetry. Top Debut Collection of 2015, Poets and Writers. "This is a book of great beauty and of terrible suspicion regarding that beauty. This is a poet of intensifying linguistic gift and of terrible suspicion regarding that gift. Is there, yet, an Auto-Voyeuristic school of poetry? If not, then Jay Deshpande's troubling and gorgeous LOVE THE STRANGER 'watch yourself grow muscle in your failures / and hate it' could be the founding document." Josh Bell "Deshpande tracks those moments when we become strange to ourselves, when indecision and failure wrench us open. He writes with a kind of glowing, dreamlike clarity about desire, distraction, regret the ways we rush past ourselves, the ways we hurt each other. This book is full of searching and light." Joanna Klink "Elegant, dreamy, and hauntingly charismatic, Deshpande's poems captivate the way the recordings of their patron saint Chet Baker do, insisting time after time that exceptional artistry can spin even radical loneliness and excruciating sensitivity into music that radiates and affirms. Provoking 'a hunger become so animal' then tranquilizing it with 'orchestrated moonlight, ' LOVE THE STRANGER is a book, a shady neighborhood, and a mood that readers will return to again and again." Timothy Donnelly"
