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From National Geographic's 2014 Adventurers of the Year, a beautifully illustrated account of a year in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness

Presented in both English and Portuguese, this lyric poetry collection explores the "e;troublesome blessing and burden of being human"e; (Publishers Weekly).Love. Sex. Death. Meat. Traffic. Pets. In Cattle of the Lord, Rosa Alice Branco offers a stunning poetic vision at once sacred and profane, a rich evocation of daily life troubled by uneasy sacramentality.In a collection translated by Alexis Levitin and presented in both Portuguese and English, readers find themselves in a world turned upside down: darkly comic, sensual, and rife with contradiction. Here, liturgical words become lovers' invitations. Cows moo at the heavens. And chickens are lessons on the resurrection.Over the course of the collection, Branco's unorthodox-even blasphemous-religious sensibility yields something ultimately hopeful: a belief that the physical, the quotidian, and the animalistic are holy, too. Flesh, in all its meanings-the body of the other, caressed; the animals we abuse, and eat; the sacrificial offering of Christ-demands reverence.Writing at the boundaries of sense and mystification, combining sensuous lyrics and wit with theological interrogation, Branco breaks down what we think we know about religion, faith, and what it means to be human. "e;Lord, how much compassion will it take for you,"e; her speaker cries, "e;To be godfather at the Sunday barbecue?"e;Praise for Cattle of the Lord"e;In Rosa Alice Branco, via the compelling translations of Alexis Levitin, we find a poet of immense spiritual, as well as intellectual, curiosity."e; -Nicky Beer"e;A wild and sneaky book, filled with intelligence, wit, and theological anxiety. . . . Marvelous, moving, and obsessive."e; -Kevin Prufer"e;Throughout Cattle of the Lord, speakers wield their futile agency to beseech an impassive Lord in the face of their mortality. The result is a raw, daring interrogation that demands both contemplation and confrontation. Limbed with lush language, provocative imagery, and sharp sentiment, Branco's world is beautiful. But, make no mistake, it is foremost a bier."e; -The Los Angeles Review

A searing, urgent collection of poems centered around the Deepwater Horizon oil spill

"Alex Lemon is a brave, headlong writer, and he captures the life of the body with vivid and memorable intensity."--Mark Doty

From "one of the preeminent American visionaries of our moment" (G. C. Waldrep), a singular reflection on living well in a time of distraction and despair

The sermons of Joni Tevis youth filled her with dread, a sense that an even worse storyone you hadnt read yetcould likewise come true. In this revelatory collection, she reckons with her childhood fears by exploring the uniquely American fascination with apocalypse. From a haunted widows wildly expanding mansion, to atomic test sites in the Nevada desert, her settings are often places of destruction and loss.And yet Tevis transforms these eerie destinations into sites of creation as well, uncovering powerful points of connection. Whether shes relating her experience of motherhood or describing the timbre of Freddy Mercurys voice in Somebody to Love, she relies on the same reverence for detail, the same sense of awe. And by anchoring her attention to the raw materials of our worldnails and beams, dirt and stone, bones and bloodshe discovers grandeur in the seemingly mundane.Possessed throughout with eclectic intelligence and extraordinary lyricism, these essays illuminate curiosities and momentous events with the same singular light.

Bonobos have captured the public imagination in recent years, due not least to their famously active sex lives. Less well known is the fact that these great apes dont kill their own kind, and that they share nearly 99% of our DNA. Their approach to building peaceful coalitions and sharing resources has much to teach us, particularly at a time when our violent ways have pushed them to the brink of extinction. Animated by a desire to understand bonobos and learn how to save them, acclaimed author Deni Ellis Bchard traveled into the Congo.Of Bonobos and Men is the account of this journey. Along the way, we see how partnerships between Congolese and Westerners, with few resources but a common purpose and respect for indigenous knowledge, have resulted in the protection of vast swaths of the rainforest. And we discover how small solutionsfound through openness, humility, and the principle that poverty does not equal ignoranceare often most effective in tackling our biggest challenges. Combining elements of travelogue, journalism, and natural history, this incomparably rich book takes the reader not only deep into the Congo, but also into our past and future, revealing new ways to save the environment and ourselves.

In the tradition of Jack London, Seth Kantner presents an Alaska far removed from majestic clichs of exotic travelogues and picture postcards. Kantners vivid and poetic prose lets readers experience Cutuk Hawclys life on the Alaskan plains through the characters own words feeling the pliers pinch of cold and hunkering in an igloo in blinding blizzards. Always in Cutuks mind are his father Ab,; the legendary hunter Enuk Wolfglove, and the wolves all living out lives on the unforgiving tundra. Jeered and pummeled by native children because he is white, Cutuk becomes a marginal participant in village life, caught between cultures. After an accident for which he is responsible, he faces a decision that could radically change his life. Like his young hero, Seth Kantner grew up in a sod igloo in the Alaska, and his experiences of wearing mukluks before they were fashionable, eating boiled caribou pelvis, and communing with the native tribes add depth and power to this acclaimed narrative.

Double Jinx follows the multiple transformations both figurative and literal that accompany adolescence and adulthood, particularly for young women. Drawing inspiration from sources as varied as Ovids Metamorphoses, the rewritten fairy tales in Anne Sextons Transformations, and the wild and shifting dreamscapes of Brigit Pegeen Kellys work, these poems track speakers attempting to construct identity.A series of poems depict the character of Nancy Drew as she delves into an obsession with a doppelgnger. Cinderella wakes up to a pumpkin and a tattered dress after her prince grows tired of her. A young girl obsessed with fairy tales becomes fascinated with a copy of Greys Anatomy in which she finds a pink girl pinned to the page as if in vivisection. Could she / be pink inside like that? No decent girl / would go around the world like that, uncooked.The collection culminates in an understanding of the ways we construct our selves, whether it be by way of imitation, performance, and/or transformation. And it looks forward as well, for in coming to understand our identities as essentially malleable, we are liberated. Or as the author writes, well be our own gods now.

A woozy logic dominates these poems: a heart can become a buzzing hive of bees, a rooster can trigger a series of bombs, a young man can embrace a city bus as his spirit animal. Yet Bazzett slices through his poems with a dangerous sense of humor. “Your humor is deft and cutting / my fingers off one by one,” as one poem puts it. Once dismembered, Bazzetts poems can re-member us and piece together the ways in which we once thought we knew ourselves, creating a new, strange sense of self. A meditation on who we are, who weve been, and what we might become, Bazzetts writing is like a note written in invisible ink: partially what we see on the page, but also but also the “many dozen doorways that we dont walk through each day.” You Must Remember This is a consistently slippery, enrapturing collection of poems.

Sara Eliza Johnson's stunning, deeply visceral first collection, Bone Map (2013 National Poetry Series Winner), pulls shards of tenderness from a world on the verge of collapse, where violence and terror infuse the body, the landscape, and dreams: a handful of blackberries offered from bloodied arms, bee stings likened to pulses of sunlight, a honeycomb of marrow exposed. All moments will shine if you cut them open. / Will glisten like entrails in the sun. With figurative language that makes long, associative leaps, and with metaphors and images that continually resurrect themselves across poems, the collection builds and transforms its world through a locomotive echoa regenerative forcethat comes to parallel the psychic quest for redemption that unfolds in its second half. The result is a deeply affecting composition that will establish the already decorated young author as an important and vital new voice in American poetry.

The eighteenth-century glass armonica, a musical instrument whose sound emits from rotating water-filled vessels, has long held the power to mesmerize with its hauntingly sorrowful tones. Just as its songwhich was once thought to induce insanitywraps itself in and around the mind, Rebecca Dunham probes the depths of human psyche, inhabiting the voices of historical female hysterics and inciting in readers a tranquil unease. These are poems spoken through and for the melancholic, the hysteric, the body dysmorphicfrom Mary Glover to Lavinia Dickinson to Freuds famed patient Dora. And like expert hands placed gently on the armonicas rotating disks, Dunham offers unsettling depictions of uninvited human contactof hands laid upon the female body, of touch at times unwanted, and ultimately unspeakable from behind the hysterics locked jaws. Winner of the 2013 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry, Dunhams stunning third collection is lush yet septic (G.C. Waldrep), at once beautiful and unnerving.

These are poems of absence. Written in the wake of the loss of her mother, River House follows Sally Keith as she makes her way through the depths of grief, navigating a world newly transfigured. Incorporating her travels abroad, her experience studying the neutral mask technique developed by Jacques Lecoq, and her return to the river house she and her mother often visited, the poet assembles a guide to survival in the face of seemingly insurmountable pain. Even in the dark, Keith finds the ways we can be filled with this unexpected feeling of living.

Often the most recognized, even brutal, events in American history are assigned a bifurcated public narrative. We divide historical and cultural life into two camps, often segregated by a politicized, racially divided "e;Color Line."e; But how do we privately experience the most troubling features of American civilization? Where is the Color Line in the mind, in the body, between bodies, between human beings? Ed Pavlic's Visiting Hours at the Color Line, a 2012 National Poetry Series winner, attempts to complicate this black-and-white, straight-line feature of our collective imagination, and to map its nonlinear, deeply colored timbres and hues. From the daring prose poem to the powerful free verse, Pavlic's lines are musically infused, bearing tones of soul, R&B, and jazz. Meanwhile, joining the influence of James Baldwin with a postmodern consciousness the likes of Samuel Beckett, Pavlic tracks the experiences of American characters through situations both mundane and momentous, and exposes the many textures of this social, historical world as it seeps into the private dimensions of our lives. The resulting poems are intense—at times even violent—ambitious, and psychological, making Visiting Hours at the Color Line a poetic tour de force, by one of the century's most acclaimed American poets.

"This is a bilingual edition; the poems have not been previously published in Vietnamese."

Based on sources as diverse as Heian period female Japanese writers and the world of science fiction, and drawing on her own experience as a second-generation Japanese American, acclaimed poet Lee Ann Roripaughs fourth collection explores a series of word betrayalsEnglish words misunderstood in transmission from her Japanese mother that came to take on symbolic ramifications in her early years. Co-opting and repurposing the language of knowledge and of misunderstanding, and dialoguing in original ways with notions of diaspora and hybrid identities, these poems demonstrate the many ways we attempt to be understood, culminating in an experience of aural awe. At once wonderfully lyrical and strikingly acute, Dandarians will further establish Lee Ann Roripaugh as one of the most important and original voices in contemporary Asian American literature.

From the poet whose stunning debut was praised as "e;transcendent"e; (Kevin Young) and "e;steadily confident"e; (Carl Phillips), Dangerous Goodstracks its speaker throughout North America and abroad, illuminating the ways in which home and place may inhabit one another comfortably or uncomfortablyor both simultaneously. From the Bahamas, London, and Cairo, to Bemidji, Minnesota, and Milledgeville, Georgia, Sean Hill interweaves the contemporary with the historical, and explores with urgency the relationship between travel, migration, alienation, and home. Here, playful "e;postcard"e; poems addressed to Nostalgia and My Third Crush Today sit alongside powerful reflections on the immigration of African Americans to Liberia during and after the era of slavery. Such range and formal innovation make Hill's second collection both rare and exhilarating. Part shadowbox, part migration map, part travelogue-in-verse, Dangerous Goods is poignant, elegant, and deeply moving.

In his first collection since Fancy Beasts, a book that "e;slice[d] straight through nerve and marrow on its way to the heart and mind of the matter"e; (Tracy K. Smith), Alex Lemon dazzles us again with his exuberance and candor. Whether in unrestrained descriptions of sensory overload or tender meditations on fatherhood and mortality, Lemon blurs that nebulous line between the personal and the pop-cultural. These poems are full of frenetic energy and images pleasantly, strangely colliding: jigsaws and bathtubs and kung-fu and X-rays. It's a distinct brand of edginess that readers of Lemon will once again applaud. A lean and muscular collection, The Wish Book marks a new high in this poet's unstoppable career.

Humans were surrounded by other animals from the beginning of time: they were food, clothes, adversaries, companions, jokes, and gods. And yet, our companions in evolution are leaving the world both as physical beings and spiritual symbols and not returning. In this collection of linked essays, Alison Hawthorne Deming asks, and seeks to answer: what does the disappearance of animals mean for human imagination and existence? Moving from mammoth hunts to dying house cats, she explores profound questions about what it means to be animal. What is inherent in animals that leads us to destroy, and what that leads us toward peace? As human animals, how does art both define us as a species and how does it emerge primarily from our relationship with other species? The reader emerges with a transformed sense of how the living world around us has defined and continues to define us in a powerful way.

Spanning one year of the author's life, I Will Not Leave You Comfortless is the intimate memoir of a young boy coming to consciousness in small-town Missouri. 1984 is the year that greets ten-year-old Jeremy with first loves, first losses, and a break from the innocence of boyhood that will never be fully repaired. For Jeremy, the seeming security of family is at once and forever shaken by the life-altering events of that pivotal year. Through tenderhearted, steadfast prose redolent of the glories of outdoor life on the family farm Jackson recalls the deeply sensual wonders of his rural Midwestern childhood bicycle rides in September sunlight; the horizon vanishing behind tall grasses. Reanimating stories both heart wrenching and humorous, tragic and triumphant, Jackson weaves past, present, and future into the rich Missouri landscape.With storytelling informed by profound sense of place and an emotional memory remarkably sound, Jackson stands poised to join the ranks of renowned memoirists the likes of Tobias Wolff. Readers young and old will be charmed and transformed by his unforgettable coming-of-age tale.

Rafael de Grenade was twelve years old when she quit school and soon began to work on a rough-country mountain ranch in Arizona. There she learned how to sleep out when there was no fast way home; how to track her way by familiar spires and rivers; how to survive off the water that seeped from moss hidden in the valleys. But when she read about cattlemen working the far edges of the Australian outback, they sparked a dream in her far wilder than anything she had ever known. A little over a decade later she arrived on Stilwater Station with two shirts, two pairs of jeans, cowboy boots, and some doubt that she would ever come home. One thousand square miles of costal scrubinundated by monsoon floods in the winter, baked dry in the summer, and filled with the most deadly animals in the worldStilwater seems an unlikely home for a cattle operation. But in the countless miles beyond the station compound roam tens of thousands of cows, many entirely feral from a long period of neglect. Rafael has been hired, along with a ragged crew of ringers and stockmen, to bring them in for drafting. Over a season they use helicopters, motorcycles, bullcatcher jeeps, horses, ropes, and knives to win Stilwater Station back from the wild, to say nothing of their intuition, strength, muscle and wit. A deeply poetic inquiry into our desire to make order where we find wildness, Stilwater: Finding Wild Mercy in the Outback suffuses us with salt and scrub and blood, blurring the line between domestic and feral in wondrous, unsettling ways. This is a whirlwind of men, women, cattle, horses, machines and landscape in collaborative evolution, all becoming different manifestations of the same entitythe Australian Wild.

Copper Nickel is a meeting place for multiple aesthetics, bringing work that engages with our social and historical context to the world with original pieces and dynamic translations.A nationally distributed literary journal housed at the University of Colorado, Denver, Copper Nickel was founded by poet Jake Adam York in 2002. On hiatus since York's sudden death in 2012, it is now being revitalized under the editorship of Wayne Miller, the former Editor-in-Chief (2010-14) of the award winning journal Pleiades. Working with Miller are poetry editors Brian Barker and Nicky Beer, and fiction editors Teague Bohlen and Joanna Luloff. Starting in 2015, Copper Nickel will be published twice a year, in March and September.Copper Nickel 20 - the first issue produced by this new staff - features poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, including work by National Book Critics Circle Award-winning poets Troy Jollimore and D. A. Powell; National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize finalist Adrian Matejka; National Poetry Series winner Erika Meitner; along with Pushcart Prize winners, Guggenheim Fellows, and many other decorated writers. The issue also features two Translation Folios, focused on Cape Verdean poet Corsino Fortes and German poet Jan Wagner.

”A gutsy, wholly original memoir of ragged grace and raw beauty.”—Kirkus Reviews (STARRED)From the memories of a childhood marked by extreme poverty, mental illness, and restrictive fundamentalist Christian rules, Janisse Ray crafted a memoir that has inspired thousands to embrace their beginnings, no matter how humble, and fight for the places they love. This edition, published on the fifteenth anniversary of the original publication, updates and contextualizes the story for a new generation and a wider audience desperately searching for stories of empowerment and hope.Janisse Ray grew up in a junkyard along U.S. Highway 1, hidden from Florida-bound travelers by hulks of old cars. In language at once colloquial, elegiac, and informative, Ray redeems her home and her people, while also cataloging the source of her childhood hope: the Edenic longleaf pine forests, where orchids grow amid wiregrass at the feet of widely spaced, lofty trees. Today, the forests exist in fragments, cherished and threatened, and the South of her youth is gradually being overtaken by golf courses and suburban development. A contemporary classic, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood is a clarion call to protect the cultures and ecologies of every childhood.

Life could toss your sanity about like a glass ball; books were a cushion. How on Earth did non-readers cope when they had nowhere to turn?Nell Stillmans road is not easy. When her boorish husband dies soon after they move to the small town of Harvester, Minnesota, Nell is alone, penniless yet responsible for her beloved baby boy, Hillyard. Not an easy fate in small-town America at the beginning of the twentieth century.In the face of nearly insurmountable odds, Nell finds strength in lasting friendships and in the rich inner life awakened by the novels she loves. She falls in love with John Flynn, a charming congressman who becomes a father figure for Hillyard. She teaches at the local school and volunteers at the public library, where she meets Stella Wheeler and her charismatic daughter Sally. She becomes a friend and confidant to many of the girls in town, including Arlene and Lark Erhardt. And no matter how difficult her day, Nell ends each evening with a beloved book.The triumphant return of a great American storyteller, Good Night, Mr. Wodehouse celebrates the strength and resourcefulness of independent women, the importance of community, and the transformative power of reading.

His arresting ninth collection of poems, Eric Pankeys Trace locates itself at a threshold between faith and doubtbetween the visible and the invisible, the say-able and the ineffable, the physical and the metaphysical. Also a map of the poets journey into a deep depression, these poems confront one mans struggle to overcome depressions smothering weight and presence. And with remarkable clarity and complexity, Trace charts the poets attempt to be inspired, to breathe again, to give breath and life to words. Ever solemn, ever existential, Pankeys poems find us at our most vulnerable, the moment when we as humansbelievers and nonbelievers alikemust ultimately pause to question the uncertain fate of our souls.

"e;THE EARTH BROKE OPEN CAUSE WE BROKE IT OPEN,"e; blares the first line of this enrapturing debut collection mapping the myth of Narcissus and Echo and the Iron Range roots of Bob Dylan onto a world growing increasingly self-obsessed. Against the backdrop of the mining town of Hibbing, Minnesota, Brian Laidlaw examines the ways narcissism has flooded culture. Much like a hawk has a horizontal sweet spot on its retina / for spotting prey on the prairie, the speaker of these poems has a narcissus / shaped sweet spot / all the better to spot himself.The volume comes combined with a brand new LP from Laidlaw produced by Brett Bullion, co-arranged by Hibbing native Danny Vitali, and featuring members of The Pines and Halloween, Alaska. Expanding on the themes addressed in Narcissus the Stuntman, the album provides listeners an innovative multimedia experience.

If you want the earth as it really is, N. Scott Momaday writes, learn it through its sacred places. With this quote as her guiding light, Melissa Kwasny traveled to the ancient pictograph and petroglyph sites around her rural Montana home. The poems in this collection emerge from these visits and capture the natural world she encounters around the sacred art, filling it with new, personal meaning: brief glimpses of starlight through the trees become a reminder of the impermanence of life, the controlled burn of a forest a sign of the changes associated with aging. Unlike traditional nature poets, however, Kwasny acknowledges the active spirit of each place, agreeing that, we make a sign and we receive. Not only do we give meaning to nature, Kwasny suggests, but nature gives meaning to us. As the collection closes, the poems begin to coalesce into a singular pictograph, creating a fading language that might be a bridge to our existence here.

In this inspired new collection, acclaimed poet and translator Jody Gladding takes the physical, elemental world as her point of inquiry, examining how language arises from landscape, and deriving a lexicon for these poems from the rich offerings of the world around her.