WINNER OF THE AMERICAN BOOK AWARD In her stunning debut poetry collection, What have you done to our ears to make us hear echoes?, Arlene Kim confronts the ways in which language mythologizes memory and thus exiles us from our own true histories. Juxtaposing formal choices and dreamlike details, Kim explores the entangled myths that accompany the experience of immigration--the abandoned country known only through stories, the new country into which the immigrant family must wander ever deeper, and the forked paths where these narratives meet and diverge. Sharing ground with Randall Jarrell's later poems, and drawing on a dizzying array of sources--including Grimm's Fairy Tales, Korean folklore, Turkish proverbs, Paul Celan, Anna Akhmatova, Antonin Dvorak's letters, and the numerous fictions we script across the inscrutabilities of the natural world--Kim reveals how a homesickness for the self is universal. It is this persistent and incurable longing that drives us as we make our way through the dark woods of our lives, following what might or might not be a trail of breadcrumbs, discovering, finally, that "we are the only path."

An easy-to-follow guidebook. This is the ultimate collection of fun and thought provoking writing inspirations, exercises, reflections, and prompts for story writers and poets alike. This book includes prompts, examples, and helpful nuggets of creative power to set you on your way to writing the best work of your life.Your mind is like your attic -- it's already filled with everything you need to write your story or poem -- a lifetime's worth of material. We're here to help you take your memories along with the wealth of words that are already part of your life and assemble them into stories, poems, and essays. Organized around items you might find in an attic, the prompts in this book will help you find inspiration in everyday objects and experiences.

The Village on Horseback features mesmerizing new work from the author of Samedi the Deafness and The Way Through Doors, one of the New Yorker's Best Books of 2009. This collection of new pieces by experimental writer Jesse Ball is a philosophical recasting of myth and legend. Unearthing parables from the compost heap of oral tradition, folklore, literature, and popular culture, The Village on Horseback can be read as a sort of fabulist's compendium by an author who has been called charming, lyrical, fanciful, and "disturbingly original."

“[A] wide-ranging, fascinating series of poems that [has] the city as character at its center, the city as a collective soul, the city as idea.” —Sycamore Review A William Carlos Williams Award Finalist A Kansas City Star Top Book of the Year A Library Journal Top Winter Poetry Pick A series of semi-mythologized, symbolic narratives interspersed with dramatic monologues, the poems collected in The City, Our City showcase the voice of a young poet striking out, dramatically, emphatically, to stake his claim on “the City.” It is an unnamed, crowded place where the human questions and observations found in almost any city—past, present, and future—ring out with urgency. These poems—in turn elegiac, celebratory, haunting, grave, and joyful—give hum to our modern experience, to those caught up in the City’s immensity, and announce the arrival of a major new contemporary poet.

FINALIST FOR THE RILKE PRIZE Christopher Howell’s haunted and haunting Gaze is a collection of counterpoints, swinging between moments of delicate connection and striking brutality. Howell explores how our interior and exterior lives are entangled, the past living on inside us as we live in the physical world around us, and he reminds us how loss releases us into the present—how in the process of living, “everybody pays.” Gaze is divided into three sections, focusing successively on the objective world, the world of the inner life, and finally on the “other world” of the imagination and alternate reality. The author speaks through his own voice as well as the voices of other characters, ghosts, and creatures, coming together to question and explore our perception of the world. Shifting between lyric and narrative, these poems proceed incrementally and with humility, offering a bewitching and deeply felt wisdom.

In her accomplished second collection of poems, Katrina Vandenberg writes from the intersection of power and forgiveness. With poems named for letters of the Phoenician alphabet, and employing such innovative forms as the ancient ghazal, Vandenberg deciphers the seemingly indecipherable in this extraordinary becoming of self through language. Moving between the physical and the abstract, the individual and the collective, "Alphabet Not Unlike the World" unearths meaning--with astonishing beauty--from the pain of loss and separation.