p>Taking its title from Tomas Tranströmer, Sarah Yi-Mei Tsiang's Grappling Hook sifts the debris of the twenty-first century for insights into identity, desire, and the everyday struggles inherent to motherhood. In doing so, she presents vivid portraits of the joys and perils of marriage, the evolving fight for social justice in a world divided by inequity, and the uncertain future thats's left for children of the digital age. Grappling Hook is an impressive display of Sarah Yi ?Mei Tsiang's considerable poetic gifts, and a love letter to those who are making meaningful change in unprecedented times.

Chin-na is one of the most convenient of the martial arts to study. It requires no great amount of practice space and no special or protective clothing or devices. It does, however, require a reliable practice partner. Training by oneself produces no true progress, only a false sense of confidence. Two or more practice partners is even more advantageous. The greater the variety of the partners, the more experience the student will gain and the quicker and more completely the techniques will be mastered.

"I was awake. / The hour was wrong," de Meijer writes, and her poems track, in visceral and tender detail, the distraction, exhaustion, exhilaration, and fear of child-rearing through crisis. For de Meijer, the experience was also a crisis of language, and the struggle to find new terms for her state. Addressed, in part, to a child she calls "my grievous spectacle, / my dearest unpossessable," The Outer Wards is everywhere marked by a joy in words--their quick-fire turns, sumptuous sounds, and nursery-rhyme seductions.

This book has taken Gene years to write, and it is his legacy to the world of grappling. It is a massive text on the art of finishing holds. Among the 500-plus pages are chapters on grips and handles; catches and grabs; foot and leg controls; arm bars and shoulderlocks; wristlocks and twists; straight leglocks; ankle bends and twists; chokes; and necklocks and cranks. Many of the techniques shown in the volume are old, never-before-seen pro wrestling techniques. There will never be another grappling text containing so many unique and devastating finishing holds -- unless Gene LeBell pens a sequel.

The Book of Festus is a shattered fable. In these poems, every object has a voice; every thing is awake. Festus wakes inside a myth - on a wharf in Halifax, Nova Scotia - and recalls nothing but a bicycle. As he looks for it, he thinks the city's thoughts. Upon a sidewalk over a buried river, he remembers what the city remembers. He steps past a skateboard park to a Mi'kmaq lagoon. He follows 17th century pioneer cattle to a fast food restaurant. A girl he once knew steps out of the fragments. Festus is an anagogic man, loser-hero of the first city, Ur, Halifax. This collection is a city's lucid dream of itself.

Standup wrestling without a gi! What a concept... This is to say that for various reasons standing grappling seems to be given short shrift in the martial arts world, either due to a lack of space, liability issues, or a general indifference regarding how one ends up on the ground, so long as one can work well from there. So it would seem that aside from those who are looking to be pro fighters, standup training will tend to be cursory, and perhaps with good reason. That said it is a fascinating and nuanced game, and fun to watch as we see it survive, albeit in a theatrical form, in the world of professional wrestling. Armand Cherpillod was a great Swiss wrestler who bested the best catch wrestlers in Europe. Despite is modest size he was a "human battery" whose knowledge of the subtleties of grappling was unparalleled. This manual on Hooks, Trips, Throws, and Takedowns offers a small taste of the great wrestler's vast knowledge.

In these poems, Yvonne Blomer explores birds and their taming through language--the Blackbird as human soul, the Pelican as atonement, the Ostrich as cowardice, and the Raven as trickster, the nearest bird to God. She touches on mythology, biblical texts, and science to ask if poetry comes as close to damaging the wild things of the world as Audubon did in his collecting of birds to create the paintings. Mimesis, Plato argues, damages the soul, but Blomer asks: what does it do to the other creatures of the world?