Bøger udgivet af Persea Books

Straddling genres--prose poetry, micro memoir, fairy tale, autofiction--Where Will We Live If the House Burns Down is first and foremost the story of a marriage. Borrowing elements from surrealist writer and artists, it explores the affects of chronic illness, disability, and a spouse's gender transition. All of these issues swirl through the central marital relationship and the daily lives of its two lead characters, Sergeant and Grim--even as the book's narrator, unreliable and unobjective, increasingly takes center stage. Reminiscent as much of contemporary fiction by writers like Sabrina Orah Mark and Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum as of poets or memoirists, this book is as engrossing as it is experimental, traversing complicating difficult domestic and emotional terrain by way of Allison Blevins' vivid imagination.

In poems that bring together traditional American patriotic songs and current American horrors--and in which Yeats' famous apocalyptic figure of the Rough Beast takes a painting class, wears a spacesuit, and listens to public service announcements--[ominous music intensifying] takes on the too-muchness of contemporary, apocalypse-prone America with humor, conscience, and the occasional fiddle duel. In this fourth book of poetry, Alexandra Teague expands her subject matter to include chronic pain, generational poverty, and what it means to stay safe--physically and psychologically. Her new poems are reckonings with sexism and dental trauma, Mitch McConnell and UFOs, torture devices and sad clown paintings--and with some of the most urgent crises of our time: gun violence, pandemics, and climate change.

American Analects uses the Analects of Confucius as an inspiration to mediate upon the life, death, and the subsequent loss of the poet's influential, beloved mentor-the painter Gene Holtan. These poems are juxtaposed with poems about other losses-of parents, of friends and friends of friends. Some of these deaths were caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, others by age and the inescapable journey we all take. Still, this is not a dour book. Many poems celebrate our ability to inspire, to comfort, and to nurture one another, and the collection is leavened with poems about family, about poetry, and about the healing influence of landscape and of nature. In the end, American Analects is about resiliency, about moving on from personal loss, from the pandemic, and from catastrophic fires, to rejoice in what remains. These poems encourage us to acknowledge the fragility of our lives and of those we love, while we celebrate those who guide us, even in memory.

Published in 1993, America Street was the very first collection of stories about young people growing up in our diverse society. It has informed and inspired hundreds of thousands of readers. Now this influential and much-loved anthology is expanded and updated for a new generation. Twenty stories, twelve new and eight returning favorites, focus on life issues, from the personal to the political.Authors included are: Duane Big Eagle, Marina Budhos, Norma Elia Cantú, Sandra Cisneros, Lan Samantha Chang, Tope Folarin, Rivka Galchen, Joseph Geha, Veera Hiranandani, Langston Hughes, Gish Jen, Edward P. Jones, Francisco Jiménez, Mary K. Mazotti, Toshio Mori, Naomi Shihab Nye, Susan Power, Gary Soto, Justin Torres, and Michele Wallace.

Thirty-seven short stories from 1900 to the present, written by some of our best authors--African, Asian, European, Jewish, Middle Eastern, and Native American--follow the waves of immigration into and migration within the United States. These stories are unique in time and circumstance, yet they address a common dilemma: how to reconcile America's mythologized "promise" with its more complex reality. New to the collection are Sherman Alexie, Michelle Cliff, Edwidge Danticat, Junot Diaz, Chitra Divakaruni, Jewelle Gomez, Thomas King, Bruce Morrow, Agnes Rossi, and David Wong Louie. They join Toni Cade Bambara, Richard Bausch, Marita Bonner, Nash Candelaria, Sandra Cisneros, Louise Erdrich, Mei Mei Evans, Oscar Hijuelos, Gish Jen, LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Kim Yong Ik, Monfoon Leong, Bernard Malamud, Paule Marshall, Nicholasa Mohr, Toshio Mori, Bharati Mukherjee, Mikhail Naimy, Tahira Naqvi, Gregory Orfalea, Grace Paley, Jeanne Schinto, Leslie Marmon Silko, Michael Stephens, Sui Sin Far, Alice Walker, and Hisaye Yamamoto--making this, once again, the most authoritative and useful multicultural collection available.

Bound is a collection of poems that seeks to carve a space for Blackness and queerness in the world that isn't defined by trauma or lack, where Black and queer folks can seriously play, can create and conjure the worlds they want to live and love in. Beginning with a takedown of the God concept and moving through an incitement to revolution, Bound, along the way, plays with conventional notions of race, sex, sexuality, gender and pleasure, tearing down what we didn't build to make room for what's coming.

Striking and big-hearted, Glass Jaw depicts the grit and glamor of women's boxing based on the poet's time training as a fighter in New York City. Beginning on the ropes, fighting back against the limitations of gender, Raisa Tolchinsky situates us within the dynamic context of the boxing gym, through both a chorus of named women boxers and a single fighter battling for her selfhood. In a Dantean reimagining, we follow the boxer as she descends into the hellish "rings" of an abusive relationship with her coach. In a count-down from 34 to 1, sputtering at times, the fighter gets closer and closer to the heart of her brutal, solitary metamorphosis. Winner of the 2023 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize in Poetry, Glass Jaw explores a quest as spiritual as it is physical through poems that are muscular, musical, ecstatic.

This collection of prose poems chronicles a woman's childhood onset and adult journey through obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), which manifests in fearful obsessions and counting compulsions that impact her relationship to motherhood, religion, and the larger world. Cynthia Marie Hoffman's unsettling, image-rich poems chart the interior landscape of the obsessive mind. Along with an angel who haunts the poems' speaker throughout her life, she navigates her fear of guns and accidents, fears for the safety of her child, and reckons with her own mortality, ultimately finding a path toward peace.

On the occasion of her one hundredth birthday in 2001, a new edition of Laura Riding's collected poems. Always ahead of her time, no other major poet of the last century enters the twenty-first so fresh, so essentially unexplored as does Laura Riding. Her formidable credentials as a modernist need no longer distract attention from the class-of-her-own this writer occupies. Beginning in spiritual respect for Shelley, Whitman, and Francis Thompson, Riding's resolve to work toward nothing less than "the essence of the good in language" carries her across an entire poetic world within this volume--as it afterwards carried her out of poetry altogether. This centennial volume presents the entire content of the 1980 edition, together with the author's retrospective Introduction and Appendices, corrected and reset. The poem-text reproduces, with the few errata corrected, the typography and design of the celebrated first edition of 1938, as supervised by the author herself. Included are the ten memorable full-page illustrations by John Aldridge.

For nearly two decades, Patrick Rosal has been one of the most beloved and admired poets in the United States, bringing together the most dynamic aspects of literary and performance poetry. The son of Filipino immigrants (his father was a lapsed Catholic priest), he has made a life of bridging worlds-literary, ethnic, national, spiritual-through his poetry, and has been recognized with some of the highest honors and countless devoted readers. The Last Thing: New & Selected Poems, gives us a substantial playlist of new work-hard-hitting and big-hearted-along with ample selections from his first four books. Bursting with music, infused with love and awe, this is essential reading from a poet of vigor and conscience.

"Hamburger's starkly graceful selected translations [of Celan]...remain the best available."--Publishers Weekly

Edwin Page, a fussy middle-aged professor, no sooner bids farewell to his obstetrician wife, Cecilia, who accepted a fellowship abroad, when his new neighbors, Mrs. Botts and her sexy, twentyish daughter, Leila, arrive. Since they're locked out of their house, Edwin invites them in-and then can't get them to leave. He becomes obsessed with Leila and convinces himself that she is a perfect surrogate mother for the childless Cecilia. "Wickedly amusing . . . subversive" (New York Times Book Review), The Sugar Mother undoes the institution of marriage

A major literary event, Without Anesthesia offers a generous selection of the poetry of acclaimed Slovenian writer-critic Ales Debeljak. It includes the entirety of two recent collections, Unended and Below the Waterline, which have never before been published in English, as well as significant selections from his first three collections, Anxious Moments, The City and the Child, and (in new translations) Dictionary of Silence. Writing through wars, genocide, and political upheaval, Debeljak is a poet of Slovenia, of Europe, and of the West. Courtly yet elusive, his writing, in its variety of shapes and forms, presents a contemporary world that relentlessly sweeps us up in its currents, depicting its residual traumas and surprising pleasures with aplomb.

Set in 1940s wartime England, the trilogy follows young Vera, who leaves her cultivated Midlands home to become a nurse in a military hospital and is catapulted into adulthood through unorthodox love entanglements with both men and women, two illegitimate children, and finally emigration to Australia, where, from her new vantage point-now a doctor and writer-she looks back on her life's journey. Combining the beauty of Virginia Woolf with the spare, heartbreaking insightfulness of Jean Rhys, the trilogy is both a literary tour de force and an accessible, universal portrait of a woman in search of sustaining love.

From the New York Times best-selling anthologist, Elise Paschen, comes The Eloquent Poem, a groundbreaking collection of new poems by 128 contemporary poets, including Mary Jo Bang, Marilyn Chin, Billy Collins, Cornelius Eady, Martîn Espada, Kamiko Hahn, Joy Harjo, Edward Hirsch, Major Jackson, Laura Kasischke, Joy Ladin, Randall Mann, Paul Muldoon, Marilyn Nelson, Aimee Nezhukmatathil, Stanley Plumly, Rosanna Warren, and many others. This extraordinary volume is divided into sections by poetic approach-some formal, some occasional, and some thematic-and includes illuminating micro-essays from the contributors on how each poem came to be.

On January 6, 2021, at the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic in America, while the U.S. Capitol is under attack, Nicholas Montemarano drives six hundred miles to see his mother, who is hospitalized with COVID pneumonia and in a critical state. For ten days he lives in a hotel minutes from the hospital, alternating between hope and helplessness. This is the story of those ten days. It is the story of the pandemic told through the intimate prism of one family's loss.  Written with visceral urgency in the earliest days of grief, If There Are Any Heavens resists categorization: it is a memoir, a poem, a mournful but loving song. Its form asks readers to slow down and breathe between each broken line. At other moments, a chorus of voices-anti-maskers, COVID-deniers, and doctors-causes the reader to become breathless. It is an almost real-time account of the anxiety, uncertainty, and sorrow brought on by this pandemic. It is also, finally, a devastating homage to a family's love in a time of great loss.  Now, and many years from now, when people want to understand the personal cost of the COVID-19 pandemic, they will turn to this intimate and spare elegy from a son to his mother.

Whether in the title poem, spoken by those who lived longingly and vicariously through the famous missing aviator, or in "Circus Fire, 1944," which intimately recounts a haunting New England tragedy, Gabrielle Calvocoressi uses her prodigious gifts of imagination and empathy to give voice to the hope and heartbreak of small-town America. In painstaking, vernacular verse, she conveys the ambitions and failings of a distraught populacein the edgy jazz portrait, "Suite Billy Strayhorn," for example, or the enthralling, interwoven sequence, "At the Adult Drive-In," which conveys, at once, a personal and communal corruption. Penetrating and compassionate, The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart portrays, with a storyteller's arc, the troubled landscape of the left-behind.