Selected by Jos Charles as the winner of the 2021 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry, Return Flight is a lush reckoning: with inheritance, with body, with trauma, with desire—and with the many tendons in between. When Return Flight asks “what name / do you crown yourself,” Huang answers with many. Textured with mountains—a folkloric goddess-prison, Yushan, mother, men, self—and peppered with shapeshifting creatures, spirits, and gods, the landscape of Jennifer Huang’s poems is at once mystical and fleshy, a “myth a mess of myself.” Sensuously, Huang depicts each of these not as things to claim but as topographies to behold and hold. Here, too, is another kind of mythology. Set to the music of “beating hearts / through objects passed down,” the poems travel through generations—among Taiwan, China, and America—cataloging familial wounds and beloved stories. A grandfather’s smile shining through rain, baby bok choy in a child’s bowl, a slap felt decades later—the result is a map of a present-day life, reflected through the past. Return Flight is a thrumming debut that teaches us how history harrows and heals, often with the same hand; how touch can mean “purple” and “blue” as much as it means intimacy; and how one might find a path toward joy not by leaving the past in the past, but by “[keeping a] hand on these memories, / to feel them to their ends.”

In Afro-Atlantic Flight Michelle D. Commander traces how post-civil rights Black American artists, intellectuals, and travelers envision literal and figurative flight back to Africa as a means by which to heal the dispossession caused by the slave trade. Through ethnographic, historical, literary, and filmic analyses, Commander shows the ways that cultural producers such as Octavia Butler, Thomas Allen Harris, and Saidiya Hartman engage with speculative thought about slavery, the spiritual realm, and Africa, thereby structuring the imaginary that propels future return flights. She goes on to examine Black Americans’ cultural heritage tourism in and migration to Ghana; Bahia, Brazil; and various sites of slavery in the US South to interrogate the ways that a cadre of actors produces “Africa” and contests master narratives. Compellingly, these material flights do not always satisfy Black Americans’ individualistic desires for homecoming and liberation, leading Commander to focus on the revolutionary possibilities inherent in psychic speculative returns and to argue for the development of a Pan-Africanist stance that works to more effectively address the contemporary resonances of slavery that exist across the Afro-Atlantic.

"Beautiful, funny, uplifting...a story of miraculous recovery..." - Martha Beck, author of Expecting Adam "Into the Blue is an inspiring true story of love, courage and triumph. As Edsall brilliantly relates, life's toughest battles don't take place on a battlefield." - Stephen Coonts, New York Times bestselling author of Liberty and Liars and Thieves "A thrilling book in a thrilling voice-which is a rare and wonderful combination." - Phyllis Theroux, author of Giovanni's Light and The Book of Eulogies "A moving account of the stubborn heroism of the everyday, and an honest, absorbing chronicle of the tough, often hilarious process necessary to get a family airborne." - Tim Brookes, author of Signs of Life and NPR commentator "Into the Blue invites us into the community of family and friends who shoulder a fallen man's burden of dignity and independence and return it to him whole. A tribute to courage and determination and an example of what can happen when we refuse to settle for less." - Judy Blunt, author of Breaking Clean

All of aviation's dangerous, exciting, and most courageous moments are featured within this stunning compendium on flight. Packed with stories of heroic and innovative pioneers, fascinating profiles of remarkable planes from Spitfires to space shuttles, and how-to instructions for making everything from origami helicopters to bottle rockets—all accompanied by sensational photographs, illustrations, and diagrams—Cleared for Takeoff promises to astonish, entertain, and fire the imaginations of everyone with their head in the clouds.