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.

How two British World War I-era planes came to be found many decades later in India and returned to their former glory. In 2000, upon hearing rumors of aircraft parts being found in a maharaja’s palace in India, Guy Black took a trip that would lead to the most unexpected discovery of his life. Hidden away in a former elephant stable of the maharaja’s palace in Bikaner, Rajasthan, were the hulks of at least two DH9 bombers. This was no example of this WWI aircraft in existance in Britain. Recognizing their importance to the UK’s aviation heritage, and excited by the challenge of restoration, Guy set about negotiating their purchase and returning them back to England. In DH9: From Ruin to Restoration, Guy Black details the intriguing history of how these two rare aircraft (D-5649 and E-8894) came to be in India under the Imperial Gift Scheme. He also reveals the extraordinary efforts in recovering these two planes and the extensive restoration project undertaken to bring them to their former glory. With D-5649 restored as a static and proudly on display at IWM Duxford, he then set about getting E-8894 back to airworthy status. The book then moves on to the highly anticipated flight of E-8894 and the years of frustration that followed until its maiden flight with “Dodge” Bailey at the controls on May 13, 2019—making it the only WWI bomber flying anywhere in the world. Told in meticulous detail, this fully illustrated book includes a foreword by Andy Saunders and is a must-have of all WWI and aircraft enthusiasts.

Provides instructions for creating twenty-five paper airplanes using single sheets of paper.

Captain Bunn founded SOAR to develop effective methods for dealing with flight anxiety. Therapists who have found this phobia difficult to treat will find everything they need to give their clients success. Anxious flyers who have “tried everything” to no avail can look forward to joining the nearly 10,000 graduates of the SOAR program who now have the whole world open to them as they fly anxiety free wherever they want. This approach begins by explaining how anxiety, claustrophobia, and panic are caused when noises, motions—or even the thought of flying—trigger excessive stress hormones. Then, to stop this problem, Captain Bunn takes the reader step-by-step through exercises that permanently and automatically control these feelings. He also explains how flying works, why it is safe, and teaches flyers how to strategically plan their flight, choose the right airlines, meet the captain, and so on. Through this program, Captain Bunn has helped thousands overcome their fear of flying. Now his book arms readers with the information they need to control their anxiety and fly comfortably.

Long ago, in the faraway land of Mythia, atop the Cloudtouch Peaks, dragons rule the skies. Icy is a student at the dragon academy. She is young and kind, but she has a secret. She can't fly. Now, she must show off her skills in the sky to the class, and with the hotheaded Flame working against her, how will Icy ever learn in time? Even with the help of her friends, will Icy be ever able to take flight?