Poems translated from the original Bulgarian.

Beginning with a harrowing account of her childhood in a Belgian convent, where she was placed at the age of four, Laure-Anne Bosselaar shows us how early emotional and physical deprivation can be overcome by intelligence, humor, curiosity, and determination. Although many of her poems are overtly autobiographical, they are never merely personal. Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Stephen Dunn wrote of A New Hunger: "There's a time in the life of a poet as a maker of poems, if she or he is going to become more than just good, when the voice of one's second self fully emerges, distilling and orchestrating the poet's concerns, while simultaneously infusing them with an inner melody--a music that reaches and satisfies both ear and mind. This is to say that Laure-Anne Bosselaar, with her wonderful third book, A New Hunger, has become more than just good. It's an occasion to mark and to celebrate." The acclaimed author of two previous collections (The Hour Between Dog and Wolf and Small Gods of Grief, which won the 2001 Isabella Stewart Gardner Prize), Laure-Anne Bosselaar grew up in Belgium, where she worked as a talk show host, commentator, and voiceover for Belgian radio and television. Fluent in four languages, she moved to the United States in 1987.

Scouring the world’s most remote fields and valleys, a dedicated Soviet scientist has spent his life collecting rare plants for his country’s premiere botanical institute in Leningrad. From Northern Africa to Afghanistan, from South America to Abyssinia, he has sought and saved seeds that could be traced back to the most ancient civilizations. And the adventure has set deep in him. Even at home with the wife he loves, the memories of his travels return him to the beautiful women and strange foods he has known in exotic regions. When German troops surround Leningrad in the fall of 1941, he becomes a captive in the siege. As food supplies dwindle, residents eat the bark of trees, barter all they own for flour, and trade sex for food. In the darkest winter hours of the siege, the institute’s scientists make a pact to leave untouched the precious storehouse of seeds that they believe is the country’s future. But such a promise becomes difficult to keep when hunger is grows undeniable. Based on true events from World War II, Hunger is a private story about a man wrestling with his own morality. This beautiful debut novel ask us what is the meaning of integrity

Award-winning Lulu and the Hunger Monster is also available as a bilingual book in Spanish and English. When Lulu's mother's van breaks down, money for food becomes tight and the Hunger Monster comes into their lives. Only visible to Lulu, Hunger Monster is a troublemaker who makes it hard for her to concentrate in school. How will Lulu help her mom and defeat the Monster when Lulu has promised never to speak the monster's name to anyone? This realistic and hopeful book in Spanish and English builds awareness of the issue of childhood hunger, increases empathy for people who are food insecure, and demonstrates how anyone can help end hunger. Lulu and the Hunger Monster /Lulú y el Monstruo del Hambre empowers children to destigmatize the issue of hunger before the feeling turns into shame. The author combines years of experience fighting hunger as a food bank CEO with an MFA in writing for young children to craft an honest story of how poverty and food insecurity can affect adults and their children. Lulu's story addresses the effects of hunger on learning and can be used in group settings to address social justice issues in an accessible and encouraging way. Food Justice Books for Kids series This series takes complex food justice issues—food insecurity, how food is marketed and sold, and food systems—and makes them kid-friendly and fun to read. In three separate but connected stories, Lulu, Jesse, and Frankie confront the Hunger Monster, Snack Food Genie, and Food Phantom. As they do, readers follow along and learn more about how each of us can take small steps toward greater food justice for everyone. A section at the back of each book offers children ways to further explore the story and make a difference in their own communities.

An epic novel of genius and obsession — apocalyptic, lyrical and erotically charged. Spanning three centuries and two cultures, Hunger’s Brides brings to vivid life the greatest Spanish poet of her time, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, and plumbs a mystery that has intrigued writers as diverse as Robert Graves, Diane Ackerman, Eduardo Galeano and Nobel laureate Octavio Paz. Why did a writer of such gifts silence herself? At the time of her death in 1695, Juana Inés de la Cruz was arguably the greatest writer working in any European tongue, yet she had never set foot in Europe. Instead she was born among the descendants of the Aztec empire, in the shadow of the mountain pass Cortés and his troops descended on their advance to Montezuma’s capital. A child prodigy from a barbarous wilderness, her beauty and wit provoked a sensation at the viceregal court in Mexico City. But at the age of nineteen, still a favourite of the court, Juana entered a convent, and from that point her life unfolded between the mystery of her sudden flight from palace to cloister, and the enigma of her final vow of silence, signed in blood. After a quarter-century of graceful, often sensuous poetry, plays and theological argument, Sor Juana chose silence, which she maintained until she died of plague at the age of forty-five. Drawing on chronicles of the conquest and histories of the Inquisition, myth cycles and archeological studies, ancient poetry and early Spanish accounts of blood sacrifice, Hunger’s Brides is a mammoth work of inspired historical fiction framed in a contemporary mystery. In the dead of a Calgary winter night, a man escapes from an apartment in which a young woman lies bleeding — in his arms he clutches a box he has found on her table addressed to him. He is Donald Gregory, a once-respected, now-disgraced, academic. She is Beulah Limosneros, one of his students, and for a brief time his lover. Brilliant, erratic, voracious, she had disappeared two years earlier in Mexico, following the thread of her growing obsession with Sor Juana. Over the ensuing days and weeks, as a police investigation closes in around him, Gregory pieces together the contents of the box she has left him: a poetic journal of her travel in Mexico, diaries, research notes, unposted letters, and a strange manuscript — part biography, part novel — on Sor Juana. Hunger’s Brides is a dramatic unveiling of three intimate journeys: a man’s forced march to self-knowledge, a great poet’s withdrawal from the world, and a profane mystic’s pilgrimage into modern Mexico, in which the bones of the past constantly poke through a present built on the ruins of the vanquished. Excerpt from Hunger’s Brides “From the moment I was first illuminated by the light of reason, my inclination toward letters has been so vehement that not even the admonitions of others . . . nor my own meditations have been sufficient to cause me to forswear this natural impulse that God placed in me . . . that inclination exploded in me like gunpowder. . . .” —Sor Juana, in a letter of self-defence written to a bishop in 1691, just before she took a vow of silence