Experimental and visual poems diving into the history and culture of the poet's homeland, Guam. This book is the fifth collection in Craig Santos Perez's ongoing from unincorporated territory series about the history of his homeland, the western Pacific island of Guåhan (Guam), and the culture of his indigenous Chamoru people. "Åmot" is the Chamoru word for "medicine," commonly referring to medicinal plants. Traditional Chamoru healers were known as yo'åmte; they gathered åmot in the jungle and recited chants and invocations of taotao'mona, or ancestral spirits, in the healing process. Through experimental and visual poetry, Perez explores how storytelling can become a symbolic form of åmot, offering healing from the traumas of colonialism, militarism, migration, environmental injustice, and the death of elders.

"Native Pacific Islander writer Craig Santos Perez has crafted a timely collection of eco-poetry comprised of free verse, prose, haiku, sonnets, satire, and a form he calls "recycling." Habitat Threshold begins with the birth and growth of the author's daughter and captures her childlike awe at the wondrous planet. As the book progresses, however, Perez confronts the impacts of environmental injustice, global capitalism, toxic waste, animal extinctions, water struggles, human violence, mass migration, and climate change. Throughout, Perez mourns lost habitats and species and faces his fears about the world his daughter will inherit. Yet this work does not end at the threshold of elegy; instead, the poet envisions a sustainable future in which our ethics are shaped by the indigenous belief that the earth is sacred and all beings are interconnected--a future in which we cultivate love and "carry each other towards the horizon of care.""--

This book revisits and updates the concept of linguistic ecology, outlining applications to a variety of contact situations worldwide.

November 22, 2013 marks the 50th anniversary of the tragedy that has haunted America ever since. For the first time, this concise and compelling book pierces the veil of secrecy to fully document the small, tightly–held conspiracy that killed President John F. Kennedy. It explains why he was murdered, and how it was done in a way that forced many records to remain secret for almost fifty years. The Hidden History of JFK's Assassination draws on exclusive interviews with more than two dozen associates of John and Robert Kennedy, in addition to former FBI, Secret Service, military intelligence, and Congressional personnel, who provided critical first–hand information. The book also uses government files—including the detailed FBI confession of notorious Mafia godfather Carlos Marcello—to simply and clearly reveal exactly who killed JFK. Using information never published before, the book uses Marcello's own words to his closest associates to describe the plot. His confession is also backed up by a wealth of independent documentation. This book builds on the work of the last Congressional committee to investigate JFK's murder, which concluded that JFK ‘was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy," and that godfathers ["Santo] Trafficante [and Carlos] Marcello had the motive, means, and opportunity to assassinate President Kennedy." However, it also draws on exclusive files and information not available to Congress, that have only emerged in recent years, to fully explain for the first time how Marcello and Trafficante committed—and got away with—the crime of the 20th century. Some of the book's revelations will be dramatized in the upcoming Warner Brothers film Legacy of Secrecy, produced by and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, which also stars Robert De Niro as Carlos Marcello. The Hidden History of JFK's Assassination is the definitive account of the crime and the secrecy which has surrounded it.

Poems about art by a masterful practitioner of ekphrastic poetry.

Joseph Stanton's Things Seen is one of the great books of poetry this year that probably will not get the attention it deserves, though I hope my sheer delight might conspire otherwise. His is a major voice and these poems artifacts of an exquisite musical craftsman possessed of a generosity of vision and a special quality of attention that transforms art into being. As the poem about Paul Gauguin's "Vision After the Sermon" offers us, "a roseate window" in which the story "gleams for all to see; / my struggle to know, my difficult wrestling / with that indefatigable god--/ my deft, ungraspable self." Things Seen is divided into five discrete sections--ekphrasis that gives fresh insight into that timeless practice; reinventions of fairy tales that remake the Prince Frog, The Fir Apple, Godfather Death and leave us the Shepherd Boy to calculate the universe; Noh variations that demonstrate why that word is derived from the Japanese word for "skill"; a series on Edward Hopper that intertwines his art and life; and deft poems about paintings about baseball--and yet by the end the sections feel as triumphantly cohesive as the movements in a symphony. "Things Seen" offers us the poet at the height of perception and the skills of conjuration.--Ravi Shankar, founding editor of Drunken Boat and author of What Else Could It Be