In Traci Brimhall and Brynn Saito's Bright Power, Dark Peace, readers are guided through the ruins of a city, and perhaps a society. The old grandeur of its bones is evoked in bright lariats of image. It is a city where hyacinths unfold themselves from the corpses of the old world into a blinding and beautiful white. Where the old windows are filled with "bolts of chenille and empty bobbins" and where you can still hear the voices singing from the empty theater. In this exquisite collaboration, from the ruins are the possibilities. From the unsalvageable, what will save. The magic of Saito and Brimhall's lyricism returns what was thought to be lost into what is, for certain, miraculous. --Oliver de la Paz Traci Brimhall is the author of Our Lady of the Ruins (W.W. Norton, 2012), winner the Barnard Women Poets Prize, and Rookery (SIU Press, 2010), winner of the Crab Orchard Series First Book Award. Her poems have appeared in Kenyon Review, Slate, Ploughshares, and Best American Poetry. She’s received fellowships from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the King/Chávez/Parks Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Brynn Saito is the author of the poetry collection The Palace of Contemplating Departure, winner of the Benjamin Saltman Award from Red Hen Press (March, 2013). Her poetry has been anthologized by Helen Vendler and Ishmael Reed; it has also appeared or is forthcoming in Virginia Quarterly Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Ninth Letter, and Pleiades. She is the recipient of a Kundiman Asian American Poetry Fellowship and the Key West Literary Seminar’s Scotti Merrill Memorial Award. Brynn was born and raised in the Central Valley of California and currently lives and teaches in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Bright Power, Dark Peace

Traci Brimhall

Brynn Saito

Diode Editions

"Philip Metres has created a miracle-a tender book so transporting it carries us deeply into the soul of Palestine as well as the love of a family-mysteries and blessings of language and haunted details-each tiny turn as huge as history and the next precious page of days." 
 
 --Naomi Shihab Nye 
 
 "A Concordance of Leaves is an epic poem of the indomitable yet fragile human spirit. Philip Metres brings Palestine and Palestinians into English with rare luminosity. One feels echoes of Oppen's succinct tenderness in the depiction of the numerous characters of this work. Without other, there is no self. And that other is the stranger who must be loved. Concordance is, after all, a wedding poem-leaves and pages in search of a certain passage toward harmony." 
 
 --Fady Joudah 
 
 Philip Metres has written a number of books, most recently the chapbook, abu ghraib arias (Flying Guillotine, 2011), winner of the 2012 Arab American Book Award, and To See the Earth (Cleveland State, 2008). His work has appeared in Best American Poetry and many other journals and anthologies. He is the recipient of two NEA fellowships, a Watson Fellowship, four Ohio Arts Council Grants, the Anne Halley Prize, the Arab American Book Award, and the Cleveland Arts Prize. He teaches literature and creative writing at John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio.

A Concordance of Leaves

Philip Metres

Vandana Khanna was born in New Delhi, India and attended the University of Virginia and Indiana University, where she earned her MFA. Her first collection, Train to Agra, won the Crab Orchard Review First Book Prize and her second collection, Afternoon Masala, was the co-winner of the 2014 Miller Williams Arkansas Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in the New England Review, The Missouri Review, 32 Poems and Prairie Schooner as well as the anthologies Raising Lilly Ledbetter: Women Poets Occupy the Workspace, Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation and Indivisible: An Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry. 
 Vandana Khanna's work reminds me why we read poetry. These poems in the voices of Hindu goddesses speak with authority and clarity to what it means to be human, to our desires and our disappointments, to the multiple deaths and rebirths we experience in a lifetime. 
 Blas Falconer
 The imaginative language and elegant lines found in the poems of The Goddess Monologues propel the reader to carefully and fully examine their own thumping hearts. Behind these beautiful and tightly controlled personas, Khanna deftly steers us through a rich landscape where the voiceless can finally be heard "...raw and rustling like sugar cane," and where the night fills "with the tight snap of bow, the hollow whistle of arrows on fire." 
 Aimee Nezhukumatathil

The Goddess Monologues

Vandana Khanna

Kai Carlson-Wee has rollerbladed professionally, surfed north of the Arctic Circle, and traveled across the country by freight train. He has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, and his work has appeared in Narrative Magazine, Best New Poets, TriQuarterly, Crazyhorse, and The Missouri Review, which selected his poems for the 2013 Editor's Prize. His photography has been featured in Narrative Magazine and his co-directed poetry film, "Riding the Highline," won the special jury prize for Innovation in Documentary Short Film at the 2015 Napa Valley Film Festival. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow, he lives in San Francisco &amp; is a Jones Lecturer at Stanford University. Anders Carlson-Wee is a 2015 NEA Creative Writing Fellow and the author of Dynamite, winner of the 2015 Frost Place Chapbook Competition. His work has appeared in Narrative, New England Review, The Southern Review, AGNI, Best New Poets, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading series. In collaboration with his brother Kai, he co-directed the poetry film, "Riding the Highline," which won the special jury prize for Innovation in Documentary Short Film at the Napa Valley Film Festival. Winner of Ninth Letter's Poetry Award and New Delta Review's Editors' Choice Prize, he's received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, the Camargo Foundation, Ucross, &amp; Vanderbilt University.

Mercy Songs

Kai Carlson-Wee

Anders Carlson-Wee

Remica Bingham-Risher, a Cave Canem fellow and Affrilachian Poet, is the author of Conversion (Lotus, 2006) winner of the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award and What We Ask of Flesh (Etruscan, 2013). She is currently the Director of Writing and Faculty Development at Old Dominion University. She resides in Norfolk, VA with her husband and children. Advance praise for Starlight &amp; Error: There's starlight and sunlight - and no error I could find - in this elegant book where the soul shines through every line. Only when we see how richly the poems matter to the poet can they come so close to us - entering with inescapable feeling and authenticity. We believe, and live, what each poem says, because the heart knows truthful detail. Central to our humanistic beliefs are the love of daughter, wife, stepmother, lover. Here, we learn this all over again, and how complex problems like memory become strengths. Only perfect craft can make it all happen, with experience leading the way. Remica Bingham-Risher has written a world-class book of poems. It's the best of the best in American poetry. This is no imitation. This is the real thing. Grace Cavalieri ￼Producer/Host: ￼"The Poet and the Poem from the Library of Congress" ￼ In Starlight &amp; Error, Remica Bingham-Risher redefines the beat of the heart not only in the adult situations of romantic love but also in the adult decisions within the love of family. The scope of her vision helps us see into our own lives with a sharper focus. At a time in America when we need hope the most, this book offers us an open path; we no longer "wonder what other secrets/ we've been keeping/ on this side of the world." Here- in her songs of forgetfulness and of memory, songs of the closed fist and the open palm, songs of regrets and of gratitude-we clearly see a world worth fighting for. A. Van Jordan

Starlight & Error

Remica Bingham-Risher

More Challenges for the Delusional, edited by Ona Gritz and Daniel Simpson, is a craft book based on prompts and exercises for generating writing developed by Peter Murphy in his role as a writing teacher. This long-anticipated follow-up to Challenges for the Delusional brings us a wealth of Peter Murphy's writing prompts, and an anthology of creative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry. In this edition, you will encounter a diverse range of emerging and accomplished writers including Kim Addonizio, Tony Hoagland, Dorianne Laux, Mimi Schwartz, and Pulitzer Prize winner Stephen Dunn. The prompts will ignite your creativity, daring you to take risks and produce work that is sometimes strange but always thought-provoking. This book will offer something new each time you return to it.

More Challenges for the Delusional Paperback

Reference

PETER MURPHY

Writing, Research & Publishing Guides

Alison Pelegrin is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Waterlines with LSU Press. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Louisiana Division of the Arts, recent work of hers appears in The Southern Review, The Cincinnati Review, and Image. She teaches at Southeastern Louisiana University. This collection vibrates with candor and concern-forging a kinetic blaze into an emotional and physical terrain newly devastated by hurricane. But oh, what gorgeous life and sass teems in these poems! Whether she writes of the exquisite delight of eating "a foam of jeweled fruits" or the horrors of "...unzipped bodies, emptied and stacked by size," Pelegrin's writing is simply incandescent. Aimee Nezhukumatathil Our Lady of the Flood sets before its altars all the rapturous junk and glorious miscellany of a world both rooted in tradition and constantly in flux. Alison Pelegrin dazzles us, once again, with a richness of experience that makes us hunger "for fig cookies, glossy loaves of bread, and for ambrosia, / confection snubbed by food snobs / as a poor folks food," and introduces us to Our Lady of the Flood herself, asking, "Lady, is that you, with a citronella halo, / ghosting the mud-milk waters / with a laundry basket of kittens in one arm?" The divine and the ordinary intersect and intertwine throughout this collection, while a steady, spirited voice shows us "a tangle of bridges," or "the ghost of wind lurching through kudzu leaves," and "the movement of a horse minus the horse itself." Readers, prepare to be astonished and transformed. Alison Pelegrin's Our Lady of the Flood is the answer to our prayers. Mary Biddinger

Our Lady of the Flood

Alison Pelegrin

Jared Harél has been awarded the 'Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize' from American Poetry Review, as well as the 'William Matthews Poetry Prize' from Asheville Poetry Review. Additionally, his poems have appeared in such journals as the Bennington Review, Massachusetts Review, The Southern Review, and Tin House. Harél teaches writing at Nassau Community College, plays drums, and lives in Queens, NY with his wife and two kids. Funny, heartbreaking, and downright scary-all at the same time. Don't get cozy with this book, because here, even during the most joyful domestic moments like playing airplane with a child, death is always near: "I don't notice the ceiling fan / until it nearly scalps her." When you're laughing out loud, this book will stalk you and pounce. And as Jared Harél admits: "There is nothing I can say / to make it stop." Anders Carlson-Wee Harél's lucid poems are filled with the miracle of the domestic and daily, and backlit by a sense of how fragile any life may be in the struggle to deal with contemporary reality's undercurrent of malice, accident, absurdity, and terror. These poems reflect a searching intelligence in the precision of each line and in fresh portrayals of how our choices cannot be unmade. I'm grateful for the hard-purchased clarity of these poems and their radiant explorations of a fully genuine life. Lee Upton As with so many of us, Jared Harél is waging a battle with solitude and loss, the harm that can hide, even within love. He does so, though, with rare grace and tenderness, in poems of great imagination and beauty. I want to kiss you. Build asylum inside you brings to mind what I like best about his work-that the connections between us earn more of his singing than do the ways we spin apart. Bob Hicok

Go Because I Love You

Jared Harel

Catherine Bresner's poetry has appeared in The Offing, Heavy Feather Review, Gulf Coast, Poetry Northwest, Passages North, The Pinch, Handsome , and elsewhere. She has worked as the coordinating editor for The Seattle Review and as a publicity assistant for Wave Books. Currently, she is the managing editor for BOAAT Press and the associate production editor for Kirkus Reviews. Catherine Bresner's first collection the empty season is a formally audacious, dexterous, &amp; heart/filled book of bravery &amp; strange. Head-butting the strictures that surround a traditional poem she collapses the collage, the erasure, the illustration, musical notation, the hyperlink, &amp; the high lyric. One piece opens "Write, they say, like a band-aid / when writing feels like the wound." &amp; these poems perform both functions, the wound &amp; the suture. This is a beautiful book. sam sax Beautiful and imagistic, the empty season feels as if it is being written in real time, with its contemporary ear and relevant sorrows. Indeed, this is a book of the times. The strong voice in these poems and poetry comics is innovative, fresh, sincere, and maybe most importantly, has an intelligent curiosity. "Today the chore of being alive" is what I feel when I look at these poems: gorgeous collage, illustration, language-that is the music that keeps me going as a reader. It is delicious to read and see this book in the world. Bianca Stone Catherine Bresner brings a freshly savvy vision to the conditions of modern life-to our broken intimacies with others, to our alienation from our own best selves, and to our impaired commitments to civic wholeness. Dark in its whimsy and subversive in its truth-telling, the empty season is full of a kind of Baudelairean spleen, bitter and exuberant at the same time. Rick Barot

THE EMPTY SEASON

Bresner, Catherine

Paul Guest is the author of four volumes of poetry and a memoir. His debut, The Resurrection of the Body and the Ruin of the World, was awarded the 2002 New Issues Poetry Prize. His second collection, Notes for My Body Double, was awarded the 2006 Prairie Schooner Book Prize. His third collection, My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge, was published by Ecco Press/ HarperCollins in 2008. His poems have appeared in Harper's, The Paris Review, Poetry, Tin House, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. His memoir, One More Theory About Happiness, was published by Ecco and selected for the Barnes &amp; Noble Discover Great New Writers Program. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Whiting Writers' Award, Guest teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Virginia. With vital, pulsating, elegiac poems that puncture the world with their tenderness and awful truths, Guest has once again proven he's a brilliant poet raging both against and in defense of the world. Here are shiver-inducing poems that look steadily into our current destructive times and still manage to sing of love, desire, of something worth saving. Ada Limón This splendid new collection by Paul Guest begins with a trumpet blast-two blasts, actually, with the first poem describing a post-apocalyptic world from which words have disappeared and the second addressing America as Allen Ginsberg might, saying "America, you know / the words; sing them with me." Alternating between sound and silence, ecstasy and despair, Guest struggles as he takes on "this emergency we call life," yet he finds much more to praise than to lament. That doesn't mean that praise comes easily: "It is terrifying / to unhinge my mouth," he says, "but I do." The old Greeks would have called these passionate, noisy poems dithyrambs. I call them contemporary poetry at its very best. David Kirby

Because Everything Is Terrible

Paul Guest

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