The best books about history are those that are also about the future. W. Todd Kaneko’ s marvelous This is How the Bone Sings is more than a mere song— it is a singing across time and distance. In lyrics both personal and political, Kaneko composes a score that spans four generations, connecting his grandparents, who were prisoners in the unfathomable Minidoka concentration camps, to his young son and this unfathomable era in which he was born. One of the many things I lo...
Selected Poems (Oxford Tagore Translations S., v. 4)
by Rabindranath Tagore
Acclaimed by Forster and Pound, for Yeats the poet whose poetry 'stirred my blood as nothing has for years', Tagore was and remains India's greatest writer this century. Prolific and innovatory as a poet, novelist, dramatist, musician and painter, he was also a leading figure in the Nationalist movement, an intimate of Gandhi, a vastly influential educationalist and philosopher and a luminary in world culture. William Radice's selections and translations from the Bengali reintroduce Tagore to a...
Exotics and Retrospectives (Lafcadio Hearn Library, v. 5)
by Lafcadio Hearn
The poems of the fourteenth-century Kashmiri mystic Lal Ded, popularly known as Lalla, strike us like brief and blinding bursts of light. Emotionally rich yet philosophically precise, sumptuously enigmatic yet crisply structured, these poems are as sensuously evocative as they are charged with an ecstatic devotion. Stripping away a century of Victorian-inflected translations and paraphrases, and restoring the jagged, colloquial power of Lalla’s voice, in Ranjit Hoskote’s new translation these po...
Spring and a Thousand Years (Unabridged) (Miller Williams Poetry Prize)
by Judy Halebsky
Finalist, 2020 Miller Williams Poetry Prize Inspired by Matsuo Basho's writings and teachings on poetics and haiku, the interrelated lyric poems in Sky of Wu investigate work and marriage, the question of becoming a parent while watching a parent age into dementia, and the realities of wrestling with inequality, pollution, and habitat loss while navigating everyday life in Oakland, California. Simultaneously, they converse with Chinese poets from the eighth century and Japanese writers from th...
In his prize-winning poetry collection Reliquaria, R. A. Villanueva embraces liminal, in-between spaces in considering an ever-evolving Filipino American identity. Languages and cultures collide; mythologies and faiths echo and resound. Part haunting, part prayer, part prophecy, these poems resonate with the voices of the dead and those who remember them. In this remarkable book, we enter the vessel of memory, the vessel of the body. The dead act as witness, the living as chimera, and we learn t...
