Readers will bend over backward for the debut of the first yoga mystery series. Ever since her husband ditched her-for another man-A.J. hasn't exactly been on the road to inner peace. Then her yoga-guru aunt is found dead, and A.J.'s named the sole heir to her lucrative yoga studio-making her a multimillionaire, a prime suspect, and the killer's next target.

At the end of each yoga class, the students lie in Shavasana, the Corpse Pose. Practice being dead, the teacher says. But what if they actually ARE dead? Is it the all too powerful Power Yoga that kills the students of this eccentric little Yoga Studio in San Francisco one by one? After her yoga teacher gets arrested, Lily, a not completely assimilated Swiss immigrant, investigates. Not only the mystery of the deadly Corpse Pose, but also her own history, brought to her in an urn by a man she hardly knows - her father.

"The Corpse Pose by Erik Campbell is a collection of poems that chronicles one man's sometimes messy, simultaneously candid and sardonic (and consequentially human) meanderings from the jungles of Papua, Indonesia to the deserts of Phoenix, Arizona, from a 15-year marriage to infidelity and divorce, from answers to errors in a quasi-narrative that is both redemptive and destructive. In poems that adroitly juxtapose contemporary Western society with historical and literary figures, the evanescent American culture with that of the East, and through scrutinizing personal relationships against the implicit backdrop of modernity, perceived "progress," and commotion. The poems in The Corpse Pose are a refreshing (and increasingly necessary) break from what Tony Hoagland calls, "the skittery poem of the moment," which so often are merely exercises in mere cleverness as a value. Instead, in language that is accessible, allusive, and forthright without being didactic or reductive, Campbell's poetry does not require that the reader don a decoder ring to apprehend it. Even in his most ostensibly self-referential poems Campbell renders his felt experience in ways that are permeable and consequential to the reader. Readers of Claudia Emerson and Stephen Dunn will find a comfort in these poems that don't shy away from "meaning," written in a voice that is trying to speak to the reader crucially"--

“Whatever his subject―favorites include porn, punctuation and the poetry of Frank O’Hara―the goal is always to jigger logic and language free of its moorings . . . His great and singular appeal is this fealty to his own desire and imagination . . . Figuring it out, after all, is a life sentence." ––Parul Sehgal, The New York Times “Toward what goal do I aspire, ever, but collision? Always accident, concussion, bodies butting together . . . By collision I also mean metaphor and metonymy: operations of slide and slip and transfuse.” Through a collection of intimate reflections (on art, punctuation, eyeglasses, color, dreams, celebrity, corpses, porn, and translation) and “assignments” that encourage pleasure, attentiveness, and acts of playful making, poet, artist, critic, novelist, and performer Wayne Koestenbaum enacts twenty-six ecstatic collisions between his mind and the world. A subway passenger’s leather bracelet prompts musings on the German word for “stranger”; Montaigne leads to the memory of a fourth-grade friend’s stinky feet. Wayne dreams about a handjob from John Ashbery, swims next to Nicole Kidman, reclaims Robert Rauschenberg’s squeegee, and apotheosizes Marguerite Duras as a destroyer of sentences. He directly proposes assignments to readers: “Buy a one-dollar cactus, and start anthropomorphizing it. Call it Sabrina.” “Describe an ungenerous or unkind act you have committed.” “Find in every orgasm an encyclopedic richness . . . Reimagine doing the laundry as having an orgasm, and reinterpret orgasm as not a tiny experience, temporally limited, occurring in a single human body, but as an experience that somehow touches on all of human history.” Figure It Out is both a guidebook for, and the embodiment of, the practices of pleasure, attentiveness, art, and play from “one of the most original and relentlessly obsessed cultural spies writing today” (John Waters).

A spellbinding novel about transience and mortality, by one of the most original voices in American literature The Silk Road begins on a mat in yoga class, deep within a labyrinth on a settlement somewhere in the icy north, under the canny guidance of Jee Moon. When someone fails to arise from corpse pose, the Astronomer, the Archivist, the Botanist, the Keeper, the Topologist, the Geographer, the Iceman, and the Cook remember the paths that brought them there—paths on which they still seem to be traveling. The Silk Road also begins in rivalrous skirmishing for favor, in the protected Eden of childhood, and it ends in the harrowing democracy of mortality, in sickness and loss and death. Kathryn Davis’s sleight of hand brings the past, present, and future forward into brilliant coexistence; in an endlessly shifting landscape, her characters make their way through ruptures, grief, and apocalypse, from existence to nonexistence, from embodiment to pure spirit. Since the beginning of her extraordinary career, Davis has been fascinated by journeys. Her books have been shaped around road trips, walking tours, hegiras, exiles: and now, in this triumphant novel, a pilgrimage. The Silk Road is her most explicitly allegorical novel and also her most profound vehicle; supple and mesmerizing, the journey here is not undertaken by a single protagonist but by a community of separate souls—a family, a yoga class, a generation. Its revelations are ravishing and desolating.