The Other Language, a book of poems by Mark Brazaitis, is, appropriately, about language. It's about English and Spanish, as in the title poem; it's about what we say and what we don't, or won't or can't, say; it's about what we can easily find words for and what we cannot. The Other Language is about Guatemala, a country ravaged by a thirty-six-year-long civil war. It's about Brazaitis' encounters in Guatemala, with North Americans as well as Guatemalans, and about what these encounters inspired him to think, feel, and remember. The Other Language is about love and passion. In the Guatemalan poems, the lovers can be equated with the country itself, which, for Brazaitis, is haunting and beautiful and painful to think of leaving. In the latter part of the book, the love poems-written to Brazaitis' wife and daughters-are both lighthearted and exuberant. The Other Language is about loss. It's about the devastating losses war brings. It's about the loss of a country-something Elizabeth Bishop, who also loved Latin America, understood. It's about the death of Brazaitis' father and the loss, or the potential loss, of so much because of global warming. The Other Language is about the redemptive power of words, of poetry, of beautiful language, to captivate people and bring relief. It's about the laughter and playfulness words can engender, whether it's in a monologue by a Prince Charming who has a surprising political and domestic agenda or in a whimsical reflection on what it means to turn forty. It's about the relationship between language and music, and how sound, whether from word or instrument, is sometimes enough to unite us-or at least bring us closer.

The Other Language

Literature & Fiction

Brazaitis, Mark

Poetry

ABZ Press

Ordinary Mourning by Carrie Shipers was chosen by Mark Halliday as the 2009 winner of the ABZ First Book Poetry Prize. The poems explore in clear and precise language the meaning of grief, the possibilities of ghostly experience, and the jarring consequences of loss.

Ordinary Mourning

Carrie Shipers

Jaimee Kuperman's book of poems You Look Nice Strange Man was chosen by Angela Ball as the winner of the 2010 ABZ First Book Poetry Prize. In poems of great clarity and force Jaimee Kuperman presents compelling information about many different subjects: cities in America, Jewish History, Deaf culture, family relarions, romance and marriage.

You Look Nice Strange Man

Kuperman, Jaimee

The poems of George Eklund are celebrations and examinations of our philosophical, social, psychological and spiritual emergencies. This collection is filled with voices at once strange and familiar, poems that unite human interiors and exteriors. They present an aesthetic which honors language as the essence of our beings; an aesthetic in which words are freed from the yokes of colonial duties. These poems synthesize influences drawn from a diverse and wide world. They celebrate discursive, linear composition as it comes into contact with the elliptical and associative orientations in language. We encounter a voice that alternates as narrative or lyrical as well as associative and highly abstracted. To create new blendings and ratios these poems move freely between the rational and the arcane, between the linear and the elliptical. The Island Blade offers us a destination to expand and honor human experience.

The Island Blade

Eklund, George

A book of poems chosen by Charles Simic for ABZ Press's First Book Award..  From the foreward,  "If the hope of any poem is to render experience in a fresh, unsettling way, she has that gift.  She likes to disorient us, pull the rug from under our expectations, and do so quickly and decisively, so we catch our breath in astonishment and delight...How beautiful, I kept saying to myself again and again reading her poems.  Tuckey may call the chapel in the title of her poems "tenuous" but there's nothing flimsy and insubstantial about all the fine poems she has collected here."  Charles Simic

Tenuous Chapel

Tuckey, Melissa

Traceries is a prize-winning book chosen by C.D.Wright. It consists of poems published in numerous influential American poetry periodicals. It presents in new and memorable ways the enduring themes of family, growth, loss, and mortality

Traceries

Kingsley, Jean A.

Lunette is an innovative and compelling book of poems by the California Writer Pamela Davis. The poems have been published widely in national magazines. It was chosen by Gregory Orr as the winner of the 2014 ABZ Press First Book Poetry Award.

Lunette

Davis, Pamela M.

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the ABZ Press publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by ABZ Press