"This collection includes four chapbooks, “chapter books,” books under 100 pages. “Journey of a Martyr ” is a poetic allegory that explores the dynamic of “a calling.” “Fatherhood and Sonship ” pulls from life experience as a celebration of bonding between three generations: father, son, grandson. It was written while the author‚s father approached death and while his own son approached manhood.“The World on Stilts ” is a fictionalized prose account portraying a man redefining the geometry that composes his life.“Seasons with an Unearthed Soul,” through metaphor and personification, captures two critical concepts?what matters most and what constitutes forevermore?and the influences they have on how one sees, feels, dreams, thinks, believes, and hopes.

Bellamy's debut novel revives the central female character from Bram Stoker's Dracula and imagines her as an independent woman living in San Francisco during the 1980s. Hypocrisy's not the problem, I think, it's allegory the breeding ground of paranoia. The act of reading into--how does one know when to stop? KK says that Dodie has the advantage because she's physical and I'm "only psychic." ... The truth is: everyone is adopted. My true mother wore a turtleneck and a long braid down her back, drove a Karmann Ghia, drank Chianti in dark corners, fucked Gregroy Corso ... --Dodie Bellamy, The Letters of Mina Harker First published in 1998, Dodie Bellamy's debut novel The Letters of Mina Harker sought to resuscitate the central female character from Bram Stoker's Dracula and reimagine her as an independent woman living in San Francisco during the 1980s--a woman not unlike Dodie Bellamy. Harker confesses the most intimate details of her relationships with four different men in a series of letters. Vampirizing Mina Harker, Bellamy turns the novel into a laboratory: a series of attempted transmutations between the two women in which the real story occurs in the gaps and the slippages. Lampooning the intellectual theory-speak of that era, Bellamy's narrator fights to inhabit her own sexuality despite feelings of vulnerability and destruction. Stylish but ruthlessly unpretentious, The Letters of Mina Harker was Bellamy's first major claim to the literary space she would come to inhabit.

An ethereal new collection that is “visceral with intellection” (David Lau) Winner of the Bollingen Prize Finalist for the National Book Award Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry Finalist for the PEN Open Book Award Finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Prize A Treatise on Stars extends Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s intensely phenomenological poetics to the fiery bodies in a “field of heaven…outside spacetime.” Long, lyrical lines map a geography of interconnected, interdimensional intelligence that exists in all places and sentient beings. These are poems of deep listening and patient waiting, open to the cosmic loom, the channeling of daily experience and conversation, gestalt and angels, dolphins and a star-visitor beneath a tree. Family, too, becomes a type of constellation, a thought “a form of organized light.” All of our sense are activated by Berssenbrugge’s radiant lines, giving us a poetry of keen perception grounded in the physical world, where “days fill with splendor, and earth offers its pristine beauty to an expanding present.”

From the prize-winning poet: “A stunning volume . . . A master of the understatement, Matthews is wryly philosophical and self-deprecating.” —Booklist When William Matthews died, the day after his fifty-fifth birthday, America lost one of its most important poets, one whose humor and wit were balanced by deep emotion, whose off-the-cuff inventiveness belied the acuity of his verse. Drawing from his eleven collections and including twenty-three previously unpublished poems, Search Party is the essential compilation of this beloved poet's work. Edited by his son, Sebastian Matthews, and William Matthews's friend and fellow poet Stanley Plumly (who also introduces the book), Search Party is an excellent introduction to the poet and his glistening riffs on twentieth-century topics from basketball to food to jazz.