A failed rockstar, an awarded scientist, a work-obsessed misanthrope, and a ghost, whose untimely death ruptured the once-solid quartet, steel themselves for their thirty-fifth high school reunion dinner. Set during a surprise snowstorm in New York City the day of the reunion, Talking to the Wolf is a lyrical exploration of female friendship, friend breakups, and reconciliations across decades.

By Rebecca Chace.

From war-torn El Salvador to the streets of LA, Canicula / Dog Days is a bold, bilingual collection chronicling exile, memory, and resilience across borders.

William Archila's Canicula / Dog Days is a bilingual selection of his first two books of poetry, The Art of Exile and The Gravedigger's Archaeology, two collections that chart the emergence of a newcomer in the chorus of Latin Poetry. Canicula, which means "dog days" in English, takes the reader on a poignant journey from the unrest in El Salvador in the 1980s to the urban landscape of the US immigrant, revealing the turmoil and memory of the disempowered, the impoverished, and the displaced who struggle back home in Central America. In lyrical and often harrowing language, Archila unearths the vestiges of war and the exile's return in an elegy, the fragments of a myth, or a jazz riff. They come together like the bilateral symmetry of a volcano, and the result is the introduction to Archila's poetry for the Spanish reader.

Desde un El Salvador devastado por la guerra hasta las calles de Los Angeles, Cani­cula / Dog Days es una antologia bilingue audaz, que narra el exilio, la memoria y la resiliencia a traves de las fronteras.

Canicula / Dog Days de William Archila es una seleccion bilingue de sus dos primeros libros de poesi­a, El arte del exilio y La arqueologia del sepulturero, dos poemarios que marcan el surgimiento de un nuevo referente en la poesi­a latina. Dog Days, que significa "cani­cula", lleva al lector a traves de un viaje conmovedor desde la agitacion en El Salvador en la decada de 1980 hasta el paisaje urbano del inmigrante en los Estados Unidos, revelando la angustia y la memoria de los marginados, los empobrecidos y los desplazados, que luchan por volver a su hogar en Centroamerica. Con un lenguaje li­rico y a menudo desgarrador, Archila desentierra los vestigios de la guerra y el regreso del exiliado en una elegia, en los fragmentos de un mito o en un riff de jazz. Estos se conjugan como la simetria de un volcan, y el resultado es la presentacion de la poesia de Archila al lector en espanol.

A nuestros lectores en espanol: por favor perdonen la ortografia de esta descripcion. Desafortunadamente, el software de Givesmart no permite el uso de caracteres "especiales" como los acentos.

At nineteen, Susie Vogelman should be coasting: she's an NYU dropout with no responsibilities, endless prescription pills, and a Brentwood estate to waste away in. But Los Angeles has other plans. A string of brutal murders targeting addicts spreads through the city, and Susie's ivory tower begins to crumble. The headlines point too close to home: her father's ties to an opioid empire, a sinister secret society, and her own complicity in the systems holding it all together.

Then there's Peter Holiday, a disgraced professor running a rehab scam so audacious it's almost admirable. When their lives collide, Susie and Peter are dragged into a web of privilege, corruption, and violence, where every escape leads deeper into the rot.

Dark, satirical, and razor-sharp, Kill Dick is a modern literary thriller that unflinchingly dissects wealth, exploitation, and the perilous line between survival and self-destruction.

By Luke Goebel.

In Mexico City for a family funeral, Detective DJ Arias encounters a group of Robin Hood-style thieves who call themselves the Jaguars. Their activities reach across the border into Los Angeles with a Hollywood murder that entangles LA's elite and the nannies, housekeepers, and gardeners who serve them, and threatens DJ's own loved ones. A follow up to the mystery A Punishing Breed, A Shadow of Jaguars finds DJ and partner Bobby Talbot struggling to untangle a murder where Hollywood, wealthy powerbrokers, and an immigrant population struggle to coexist and survive. Throughout it all, his faithful dog Evidence is by his side.

By DC Frost.

The KITCHEN ACTIVIST is a spirited guide to transforming daily food choices into meaningful environmental action. With warmth, humor, and grounded research, Florencia Ramirez invites readers to reimagine the kitchen as a catalyst for change-after all, the global food system accounts for over 30% of greenhouse gas emissions, and the home kitchen is responsible for 42% of all food waste. From smart meal planning to low-waste shopping and regenerative food sourcing, this book offers practical strategies rooted in environmental science, cultural wisdom, and personal storytelling. Whether you're a seasoned cook or just starting out, The Kitchen Activist meets you where you are, with no judgment, only encouragement to begin making a difference. A follow-up to her award-winning Eat Less Water, this book serves as both a toolkit and a manifesto for anyone ready to connect their plate to the planet.

Why would a talented young woman enter into a torrid affair with hunger, drugs, sex, and death? Through five lengthy hospital stays, endless therapy, and the loss of family, friends, jobs, and all sense of what it means to be "normal," Marya Hornbacher lovingly embraced her anorexia and bulimia -- until a particularly horrifying bout with the disease in college put the romance of wasting away to rest forever. A vivid, honest, and emotionally wrenching memoir, Wasted is the story of one woman's travels to reality's darker side -- and her decision to find her way back on her own terms.

The winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, as well as seven other awards, The Sympathizer is one of the most acclaimed books of the twenty-first century. With the pace and suspense of a thriller and prose that has been compared to Graham Greene and Vladimir Nabokov, The Sympathizer is a sweeping epic of love and betrayal. The narrator, a communist double agent, is a "man of two minds," a half-French, half-Vietnamese army captain who comes to America after the Fall of Saigon, and while building a new life with other Vietnamese refugees in Los Angeles is secretly reporting back to his communist superiors in Vietnam. The Sympathizer is a blistering exploration of identity and America, a gripping spy novel, and a powerful story of love and friendship.

Set during a doom-fated vacation to the Oregon coast, The Disappointment follows a couple trying to hold close to one another while a bent reality-warped by personal losses and an ever-increasing drift toward the surreal-threatens to unravel them

It's the night before a much-needed vacation, and Jack-a former playwright mourning his failed career-catches his husband, Randy, packing his mother's urn. They had agreed: no mother on this trip. Parents, living or otherwise, aren't the ideal guests for romantic getaways. But Randy has been carrying his mother's remains everywhere since her death, and he isn't ready to let go now.

Despite its natural beauty and kitschy charm, the Oregon coast does not provide the respite the couple seeks. Instead, their surroundings and encounters with locals grow increasingly surreal as the days pass. An overly -dedicated Method actor, tantra-obsessed neighbors, and a child environmentalist who may be able to communicate with the dead are but a few of the characters whose presence exposes long-simmering tensions that threaten to undo Jack and Randy's marriage-to say nothing of their hold on reality.

Told with sly, irreverent humor, and shot through with dark currents of envy and longing for something other than what one has, The Disappointment explores the mutual exhilaration and terror of being placed center stage in one's own life.

By Scott Broker.

In his fifth collection of verse, The Opposites Game, poet Brendan Constantine inspires us to revel in the abundance of life by reckoning its many astonishments (and antonyms). Through a simple yet profound framework of odes, lists, memoirs, and classroom assignments, Constantine asks us to think critically about how we define and understand each other, urging us to look beyond simplistic binaries and engage with the deeper nuances of meaning.

The Opposites Game is a powerful reminder of the intricate relationship between words and the realities they represent, and an invitation to explore the rich, beautiful, and often perilous terrain of human thought and emotion.

The speaker of Testify returns to divulge his parents' love story. Set in Anderson, Indiana in the 1960s, '70s, and '80s, Trouble Funk exposes ways Black Love is thwarted but never destroyed by racism, classism, and sexism. Eschewing the "lyrical I" in favor of a third person omniscient point of view, this text exhibits how the latter half of the twentieth century rhymes with our current moment when it comes to political division, the hardships that Black folks face, and the rise of toxic right-wing policies. In many ways, Trouble Funk serves as a prequel to Testify in which Douglas Manuel seeks to better understand and love himself, his family, and his country.

An award-winning fusion of poetry and nature-inspired art, Morning Leaves: Cultivating a Life of Beauty, Meaning, and Joy is a tender, soul-stirring meditation on grief, healing, and the quiet rediscovery of wonder, one morning at a time.

Through movement, creativity, and a deep reverence for the natural world, Rikkers offers a compassionate path forward in difficult times. Her honesty and vulnerability invite reflection, while opening space for joy, connection, and renewal.

Infused with luminous art and verse, Morning Leaves is the perfect gift for anyone seeking healing, resilience, and hope. Step with her among the trees and find your way through the shadows back into the sunlight.

By Laing Rikkers.

It might surprise you who's a fan of poetry - when it meets them where they are.

Before he became an award-winning writer and poet, Brian Sonia-Wallace set up a typewriter on the street with a sign that said "Poetry Store" and discovered something surprising: all over America, people want poems. An amateur busker at first, Brian asked countless strangers, "What do you need a poem about?" To his surprise, passersby opened up to share their deepest yearnings, loves, and heartbreaks. Hundreds of them. Then thousands. Around the nation, Brian's poetry crusade drew countless converts from all walks of life.

In The Poetry of Strangers, Brian tells the story of his cross-country journey in a series of heartfelt and insightful essays. From Minnesota to Tennessee, California to North Dakota, Brian discovered that people aren't so afraid of poetry when it's telling their stories. In "dying" towns flourish vibrant artistic spirits and fascinating American characters who often pass under the radar, from the Mall of America's mall walkers to retirees on Amtrak to self-proclaimed witches in Salem.

In a time of unprecedented loneliness and isolation, Brian's journey shows how art can be a vital bridge to community in surprising places. Conventional wisdom says Americans don't want to talk to each other, but according to this poet-for-hire, everyone is just dying to be heard.

Thought-provoking, moving, and eye-opening, The Poetry of Strangers is an unforgettable portrait of America told through the hidden longings of one person at a time, by one of our most important voices today. The fault lines and conflicts which divide us fall away when we remember to look, in every stranger, for poetry.

From a simple question-"What do you need a poem about?"-an unforgettable portrait of America unfolds.

Following the commercial and literary success of her bestselling poetry collection, I Wore This Dress Today for You, Mom: Poems on Motherhood, Kim Dower delivers What She Wants: Poems on Obsession, Desire, Despair, Euphoria-turning her keen eye, vibrant imagination, trademark insight, and humor to the intensity of obsessive love. These steamy and provocative poems, combining humor and heartache, run through the four phases of Limerence, the state of being infatuated or obsessed with another person: Infatuation, Crystallization, Deterioration, and Ecstatic Release. From the opening poem, "She'll do anything for food," to the sexy title poem, "What She Wants," the painfully funny, "His Other Girlfriend," to the longing in "Visiting Baudelaire," and the sad, sweet final poem, "Fish's Lament," Kim Dower captures the essence of what it means to be stuck on someone-even on a squirrel! Her eclectic, growing readership will savor these poems that can be read in one sitting, like a story with an arc, or separately, each one recalling the moment of falling in or out of love, the moment our hearts skipped a beat.

Award-winning songwriter Amy Speace's debut collection of poetry, The Cardinals, is a lyrical investigation of marriage, divorce, mothering, and mysticism told through poems that read like intimate conversations but evoke the complexities of love and loss through the natural world. Speace tackles the internal language of coming together and splitting apart, evoking rivers and birds, the South and the North, weather and racism and family history and it all comes together like birdsong.

On the cusp of her 1993 college graduation in Olympia, Molly McCloy spends her time drunk and high, pulling dykey pranks, and thrashing in mosh pits-anything to avoid the troubled, working-class family she left behind in Arizona. But after a vivid nightmare involving her dad, Molly writes him a letter, asking him to apologize for nine instances of mental, verbal, and physical abuse. She revisits each of these nine grudges before working up enough courage to mail the letter. Then, to her surprise, her dad writes back.

Desire Lines is a fearless, lyric memoir-in-essays in which Kristen Millares Young excavates her matrilineage and the submerged histories of the divine feminine, blending personal narrative, mythology, and cultural critique to reclaim women's voices, maternal power, and selfhood across generations.

In her fearless debut memoir, award-winning novelist and journalist Kristen Millares Young excavates her matrilineage and the histories, myths, and silences that forge women's lives across generations.

Challenging herself to become a mother unlike those she has known, she retraces her family in diaspora from Cuba to Spain. There, she uncovers the remnants of a pagan cult whose mother goddess, Cybele, was obscured by the rise of the Virgin Mary. But Cybele was no virgin.

Blending personal narrative with mythology and cultural inquiry, Desire Lines maps the body's sacred intelligence and the relationship between struggle, estrangement, and self-determination. As Millares Young reckons with ovarian tumors, a shark, and the patriarchal forces that erase women's truths, she wields the lyric essay to awaken consciousness and reclaim the power of the divine feminine.

Desire Lines investigates the paths-of necessity, defiance, and longing-that emerge next to the routes that were planned for us. Seeking possibilities for women's liberation amid the ongoing erosion of our human rights, Millares Young centers her own body as a site of resistance and creation.

2025-2026 Writing in the Schools Student Anthology

The youngest of three siren sisters, Ceto is weary of an existence driven by hunger, no better than a fish. She trades her tail for life on land, marries the first man she meets, and bears a daughter, only to discover that domesticity is just as mundane as sirenhood. In search of something more, she flees with her daughter Naia to the ocean, where she establishes a mermaid burlesque and recreates herself, performing as a siren in a tank built into the limestone cliffs overlooking the sea. She trains more sirens, expanding Sirenland from a roadside attraction to a national sensation she rules without opposition-until Naia, at 15, begins to push back against the world Ceto has created and the role she performs in her mother's shows. A death at Sirenland threatens Ceto's authority and leads Naia to question whether this women-ruled kingdom is truly as empowering as her mother would have her believe. Bind Me Tighter Still explores power and hunger, sacrifice and motherhood, and celebrates the fierceness of female strength in a male-dominated world.

ADVANCED PRAISE

"The poetic prose mixed with the intense subject matter creates an undertow that will pull readers in." -Booklist

"A gorgeous, playful, thoughtful novel for feminists, for mothers and daughters, for those of us who grew up on the *other* version of mermaids, and who've thought from time to time that we might prefer to join the sirens rather than tie ourselves to the mast."
-Amber Sparks, author of And I Do Not Forgive You

"A thought-provoking and often intense exploration of motherhood, sisterhood, and the ties that bind."
-Kirkus Reviews

When a healer begins murdering hospital patients, Professor Adrien Desfourneaux discovers that the threat is far closer to him than he could have imagined. Still recovering from a recent institutionalization and unable to trust his own mind or magic, Adrien is drawn into the witch hunt as suspicion falls upon those closest to him. The city's inquisitors and witchfinders are losing control, the magicians are growing more and more resentful, and the scars from Adrien's last brush with disaster refuse to fade. To put an end to the innocent deaths, to keep his dearest friends, and to prove himself worthy of a potential new romance, Adrien is forced to confront his own blind spots before he's fatally ensnared by the angel of death's machinations.

ADVANCED PRAISE

"ÃÆ'Ã'¢Ã¢'Ã'¬Ã'Ã'¦readers will be thrilled with this second look into Adrien's world." -Kirkus Reviews, starred

"Nakamura displays phenomenal skill in writing intense, engaging dread while maintaining an inherent kindness to the narrative: the characters will hurt, but they'll also love and be loved. Desfourneaux's narrative is sharp, a knife wielded to cut desperately to the truth. I feared the moments it would be used against him and celebrated whenever it struck home where it deserved instead. A queer, smart, bewitching read."
-Meredith Katz, author of The Cybernetic Tea Shop

Animal Wife is composed of fifteen stories unified by girls and women seeking liberation from family responsibilities, from societal expectations, from their own minds. They address the complexities of transitioning from innocence to experience and take on the anxiety of motherhood. The majority of the stories are set in an off-kilter version of our world, where the fantastical can exist side by side with-and reveal the absurdities of-the mundane. They often include monsters, mothers, and monstrous mothers.

ADVANCE PRAISE

"From the first sentence Animal Wife grabbed me and never let go. Sensual and intelligent, with gorgeous prose, it made me dizzy with its exploration and illumination of the inner and outer lives of girls and women."-Ann Hood, New York Times bestselling author

"In this sparkling debut collection, Ehrlich draws on the dark undersides of fairytales to portray the growth, strangeness, and ferocity of childhood with haunting beauty. Each story takes us deeper into the rabbit hole: with mythical monsters and Ovidian transformations, girls discover their own strength and darkness. As the women in these stories cast about for freedom, they become dangerous beings themselves; Ehrlich reminds us how thin the line is between violence and desire. She is a master observer of the magic and mystery that lurk at the edge of our lives. This collection is the arrival of a startling and undeniable new talent in the world of genre-breaking fiction."-Blair Hurley, author of The Devoted

The poems in Variations in Blue cycle through the traumatic residue of dysfunctional relationships, the complexities of Latinx representation through a series of ekphrastic poems, and reimagine Nicaragua as a homeland set in a volcanic landscape. Each section contains a series of poetic variations on a theme, and the poems reverberate and rotate through the indeterminacy of language. Najarro's Variations in Blue insists that the complexities of experience must be understood one version at a time, each distinctly unfolding its unique design.

In her riveting sixth poetry collection, Blood Wolf Moon, Elise Paschen explores the story lines of her Osage heritage. The core of the book grapples with a dark period of American history, "The Reign of Terror," when outsiders murdered individual members of the Osage for their oil headrights. Paschen searches her cultural past and family history in poems about the land, ancestors, childhood, loss, nature, transformation, flight, and language. In this cinematic book, she builds drama in overlapping narratives, reinventing ways to approach the line on the page. Described by poet Timothy Donnelly as "one of today's most formally astute poets," Paschen opens Blood Wolf Moon with the long poem, "Heritage," a bracelet of crown poems, then shifts registers to formal poems and prose sequences. Poet and editor Esther Belin calls the concluding poems with their use of Osage language, "significant leaps into literary sovereignty." Blood Wolf Moon captivates with its emotional intensity and unrelenting quest for the translation of identity. It's a book you can't put down.

In vivid, poetic prose, Nancy Kricorian's The Burning Heart of the World tells the story of a Beirut Armenian family before, during, and after the Lebanese Civil War. Returning to the fabular tone of Zabelle, her popular first novel, Kricorian conjures up the lost worlds and intergenerational traumas that haunt a family in permanent exile. Leavened with humor and imbued with the timelessness of a folktale, The Burning Heart of the World is a sweeping saga that takes readers on an epic journey from the mountains of Cilicia to contemporary New York City.

Queenie Rivers was raised by her grandparents in coastal Los Angeles. As she approaches thirty, her erratic lifestyle is forced back on course by a car accident and her grandmother's intervention. But her recovery is interrupted by a break-in and Gran's death. Gran's last act was to set Queenie up with a job at an upscale seaside bistro with a shady reputation-the owner of which, it turns out, was once a close friend. As Queenie digs into Gran's past for answers about the break-in, the murder, and the unnerving circumstances surrounding the restaurant and her new boss, she discovers that her grandmother, a Romani Holocaust survivor, kept many secrets, some of them otherworldly-secrets that become hers to unravel when she becomes a suspect in Gran's murder case.

In his fifth collection of verse, The Opposites Game, poet Brendan Constantine inspires us to revel in the abundance of life by reckoning its many astonishments (and antonyms). Through a simple yet profound framework of odes, lists, memoirs, and classroom assignments, Constantine asks us to think critically about how we define and understand each other, urging us to look beyond simplistic binaries and engage with the deeper nuances of meaning.

The Opposites Game is a powerful reminder of the intricate relationship between words and the realities they represent, and an invitation to explore the rich, beautiful, and often perilous terrain of human thought and emotion.

The razor-sharp but damaged Valerie Solanas, a doomed lesbian biker gang, recovering alcoholics, and teenagers barely surviving at an ice creamery: these are some of the larger-than-life, yet all-too-human figures, populating America's fringes. Rife with never-ending fights and failures, theirs are the stories we too often try to forget. But in the process of excavating and documenting these lives, Michelle Tea also reveals herself in unexpected and heartbreaking ways.

Delivered with her signature honesty and dark humor, Tea blurs the line between telling other people's stories and her own. She turns an investigative eye to the genre that's nurtured her entire career--memoir--and considers the extent to which art preys on life.

What represses unhomes in the sound

Who has made me what is made me

Is a voice just muscles and shape and

Breath to phrase a song boats assemble

At the mouth of the harbor mouth in

Earth you who wrote an ode to silence

Never wrote of what is silenced I did

Seek all resounding caves let the voice

Be lit all the lanterns in the new world we

Need the language of stone from string

To string quiver in the opening the garden

So beautiful Lucifer dark sun of morning

No Eden but innocence no expulsion

But after

from The Voice of Sheila Chandra

"John Henry Sleeping in High Grass"

Mowers miles away, mud flies on top

his hammer like they own it, his chest

cresting and falling in shapes shifting

between sunlight and leaves, black steel

his destiny, John is motion at rest,

tides of moon and waves in still waters,

suns igniting hearts of molten iron,

a hardened conviction, rose petals in rain.

Sleep is a dream, the real world a poundage,

work a sentence for being his mama's son,

the hammer in his crib, the supernatural

a drum song of woodpeckers, cow bells

in the field, heaven a home going back to

a place before the bugle call to be born.

from Spirit Boxing

"After the Storm"

The harsh sand stings. The salt air is bitter.

The sun makes everything sharp. I pick up

a seashell and it crumbles. My mother

is frail. She forgets. Everything is covered

with Post-its. An enriched beginning, a

new life, the lit espoused as if the past

washed away in a brutal wave and freed

her. Look, an aged sea turtle has left

its shell in the sand. The golden beach widens.

A generation of sea birds is dying.

We laid a grave of new sand to replace

what's lost, erected seawalls to forestall

erosion. The terrain is unsettled.

We can't save our beaches. Or anyone.

Gulls scavenge the plot: the ocean's embroiled.

You can count four sailboats in the water behind them and there is a gull's wing in the upper right corner of the photograph. The sun is directly overhead, behind great sheets of cloud, and the light falls evenly on them, on the picnic basket almost hidden behind the old man, on the one gull approaching a ball of waxed paper, on the listing boathouse, on the smooth pale sand, on small whitecaps breaking in the distance, on everything we see.

from Lucky Us

"Apparition"

Chilly noon on Seventh,

and I swear in the window

of the Eros Diner, corner

of 21st Street,

John Berryman's eating alone,

back against the wall,

face tilted down toward

his meal, iconic thick glasses

glinting like the sidewalk

in the cold, iconic thick beard

nodding a little as he lifts

his spoon, intent

on lunch, so happy

that a plate's in front

of him he never bothers

to look up at me.

"Silos"

Like martial swans in spring paraded against the city sky's

shabby blue, they were always too white and

suddenly there.

They were never fingers, never xylophones, although once

a stranger said they put him in mind of Pan's pipes

and all the lost songs of Greece. But to the townspeople

they were like cigarettes, the smell chewy and bitter

like a field shorn of milkweed, or beer brewing, or

a fingernail scorched over a flame.

No, no, exclaimed the children. They're a fresh packet of chalk,

dreading math work.

They were masculine toys. They were tall wishes. They

were the ribs of the modern world.

This is why we all read, isn't it? To know the world and ourselves better. To find our place in the world...It transforms you. Perhaps it lifts you up when you are at your lowest; perhaps it shows you what love is, or what it feels like to lose love; perhaps it brings you places far away or shows you how to stay put when you need to.

from Morningstar: Growing Up with Books

"On Cocoa Beach"

I am revisiting the idea of Florida, giving my vertebrae

a vacation from all the faded bouquets of urine in New York

and the darkened policies of snow in Vermont.

I am revisiting the idea of my wife's imperial gaze;

her three-cheese quiche and fluted mimosas

are the masters of my mornings.

I am revisiting the idea of lawn furniture.

By late afternoon on a Sunday my face blossoms

like a passion of lilies as I admire the spectral grace

of the sandhill crane or am caught lost thinking of Castillo

de San Marcos and the first people Timucua.

I am revisiting the idea of light and laughter and skin,

half-transported by wind. I like to think of myself

beside the crepe myrtle pondering the logos

of palm leaves and the kindnesses of beaches.

You can have your sororities of pain and darkened subways.

I will give myself to the great battles of clouds and surfs.

"Two Horses"

On a warm night in June

I went to the lake, got on all fours,

and drank like an animal. Two horses

came up beside me to drink as well.

This is amazing, I thought, but who will believe it?

The horses eyed me from time to time, snorting

and nodding. I felt the need to respond, so I snorted, too,

but haltingly, as though not really wanting to be heard.

The horses must have sensed that I was holding back.

They moved slightly away. Then I thought they might have

known me

in another life--the one in which I was a poet.

They might have even read my poems, for back then,

in that shadowy time when our eagerness knew no bounds,

we changed styles almost as often as their were days in the year.

The singer climbs into the corny tunes to find extra space, secret rooms. Yet he climbs them from inside, like the bars of a cage. The limits of the cage are those of the singer's life: his hunger for ecstasy, and his terror of it, too. At the top of the cage of practically every song, the singer screams, or barks, or howls, "It's too late to stop now!" The message might have been damning me to my life, the secret cage of my autonomy. I was nineteen.

from The Feral Detective

I knock on the door of the universe, asking:

What makes the light of the stars?

What makes the heat of my flesh?

What makes the tear shape of rain?

Questioned, the world walks on little feet.

Ask and take wing while my body

Stays bound far below --

Body, poor stone

That will wear down

To dust,

Like this ruined villa perched on the sea.

So much I've lost,

I have nothing

Except a fierce hunger

To fathom this world.

Naked, I knock on the door,

Wearing only my questions.

from Song of Two Worlds

"Wayside Shrines"

Doomed as I was to follow a big rig

laden with pigs and a wrecker with its intermittent strobe

I was all the more conscious of piles of rock

marking the scene of a crash,

some with handwritten notes, others a cache

of snapshots in a fogged-up globe.

Even a makeshift mobile may see off one of Calder's

and the path among the alders

pan out like a prom-queen's occipital lobe,

yet nothing can confirm one's sense of being prized

like another's being anathematized.

"Moonlily"

When we play horses at recess, my name

is Moonlily and I'm a yearling mare.

We gallop circles around the playground,

whinnying, neighing, and shaking our manes.

We scrape the ground with scuffed saddle oxfords,

thunder around the little kids on swings

and seesaws, and around the boys' ball games.

We're sorrel, chestnut, buckskin, pinto, gray,

a herd in pastel dresses and white socks.

We're self-named, untamed, untouched, unridden.

Our plains know no fences. We can smell spring.

The bell produces metamorphosis.

Still hot and flushed, we file back to our desks,

one bay in a room of palominos.

We lie in wait for the right moment and the just cause, which, at this moment, is simply wanting to live. And even as we write this final sentence, the sentence that will not be revised, we confess to being certain of one and only one thing--we swear to keep, on penalty of death, this one thing:

We will live!

from The Sympathizer

"Marriage"

I watch my husband at a party,

a shy boy become a man at ease at last.

Success freshens his face, the boy now free

to pass beneath his expressions

as if slipping under a fence.

I used to slip under a fence

to swim in a stream-fed pond

and laze in the water till shocked

and delighted by a cold spot I swam through.

That's what his face is like,

infused by a source inside him.

I know I have a part in it,

Just as I was part of the pond

Where I loved to swim.

"CLOUD FOREST TRAIL"

"The Man Who Wouldn't Plant Willow Trees"

Willows are messy trees. Hair in their eyes,

they weep like women after too much wine

and not enough love. They litter a lawn with leaves

Like the butts of regrets smoked down to the filter.

They are always out of kilter. Thirsty as drunks,

They'll sink into a sewer with their roots.

They have no pride. There's never enough sorrow.

A breeze threatens and they shake with sobs.

Willows are slobs, and must be cleaned up after.

They'll bust up pipes just looking for a drink.

Their fingers tremble, but make wicked switches.

They claim they are sorry, but they whisper it.

"Alhazen of Bazra"

If I could travel a thousand years back

to August 1004, to a small tent

where Alhazen has fallen asleep among books

about sunsets, shadows, and light itself,

I wouldn't ask whether light travels in a straight line,

or what governs the laws of refraction, or how

he discovered the bridgework of analytical geometry;

I would ask about the light within us,

what shines in the mind's great repository

of dream, and whether he's studied the deep shadows

daylight brings, how light defines us.

"Home to Roost"

The chickens

are circling and

blotting out the

day. The sun is

bright, but the

chickens are in

the way. Yes,

the sky is dark

with chickens,

dense with them.

They turn and

then they turn

again. These

are the chickens

you let loose

one at a time

and small-

various breeds.

Now they have

come home

to roost-all

the same kind

at the same speed.

"I Dreamed of Ships"

"Pelt"

Pelt of self left or felt
Lept from corpse to kin
Plot plaited flat in fault
Paltered the pall you haloed
In hand platted the plat
The plan the plot polted
All the fallen pollen
In flawy feint or fall
Pell then pelt away
Pled and led safened by
Sweven by sabin each
Savan pauts and paups
What kine could spill
or spell pelf left a felt self

"Remember"

when we could see all kinds of animals
but not each other,

a curious deer among idle cars, every white
sedan a snowdrift?

Some of us spent those slow slow hours
reading to each other over the phone.

I looked into Druidism since the trees
were so stately and grave.

Every day at 5:00 a perfect stranger
sang to a toddler in a purple down

jacket and red mittens. He belted out
Paloma no llores

with only a coyote for an audience.
So I channeled Beyonce. A woman upstairs

did Blondie. We sang like we were afraid
we'd be indoors forever. But now

we're not. I love that. And I especially love
having coffee with Mr. Rodriguez

the troubadour and his granddaughter
Isabella Angelina.

"How to Talk to Water"

Be brief.

Don't use big words.

Go with the flow

but be concise.

When talking to a lake,

stream, river, or into

a puddle, it's okay

to smile at your

reflection. Go ahead,

wink. Say it all:

You're sick of your life,

you're tired of struggling.

You're not ready

to give up, but damn it,

you're ready

for something new.

The water is there for you.

If you're disgusted

go ahead, spit.

Watch it dissolve...

"Love Poem According to Quantum Theory"

For Mark

According to theory, there's another
in an equal and opposite world who
dreams into words all I've never
captured in a handful of rain, a feather,
or palms swaying under a tarnished moon.
According to theory, there's another
who's growing younger as I grow older,
who'll remember what I'll forget soon:
every word, every poem, every letter
I've written-memories will wither
and disappear into that dark vacuum
where according to theory another
keeps embracing, kissing all the lovers
I've unembraced, unkissed, except you
with me in this world of words I'll never
find for us, yet always reaching farther
than Orion to where the stars all bloom,
and according to theory there's another
for you whose words are far more clever.

We are living in an era of screen addiction and capitalist

pornography. As a species, we are squandering the exalted
gifts of consciousness, losing our capacity to pay attention,
to imagine the suffering of others. You are a part of all
this. It involves you. This is the hard labor we're trying to
perform: convincing strangers to translate our specks of
ink into stories capable of generating rescue.

from This Won't Take But A Minute, Honey

"CAREGIVERS"

Shizuko knows them well.

They take care of her disability,

they love her and she accepts their love.

They work behind the scenes;

they are underpaid and

undervalued for the care they give.

They are often like Shizuko,

children of immigrants,

people of color from low-income households.

Acts of kindness; compassion in daily life,

with caring comes courage.

The Buddha: "After enlightenment, the laundry."

from Secret Harvests

"Dogs and Poetry"

Last night I dreamed dogs were giving a reading
in my living room-long-haired, handsome, golden
and chocolate, teacup poodles, a mix or two-
panting, stacked on a loft, pouncing one at a time
onto center stage couch, poems wet in their teeth-
collies on edge, pugs in love, shepherds fierce
with loyalty, labs with their hot heads in my lap.
I was sitting with them, coaching, petting, biscuits
by my side, rewards for their poems (mostly about love!)
which astonished the audience-a miracle, so fresh,
original, they barked in iambic pentameter, singing
the blues these dogs were so damn cool we all wanted
to nibble their pink bellies, suck life into our tired souls.

"And Having Broken..."

there is no against
just to and fro
and where before I wondered
what and why now
I shyly bend and blend
into the sensible breeze
if there were anything
more to say
this pink of pink of pink
that I am
would be answer
enough

from A Wild Surmise

"Prayer 21"

This is a prayer for the waste, days, hours

badly spent, forays into the internet jungle-land

of links from the launch of the words symptoms

of recurrent breast cancer. For tangled sheets, and novels

whose plots are long lost, for staring at ceilings in the dark,

trying not to blink. For wasted fivers at coffee shops

or newsstands waiting for delayed flights. For Scrabble,

the weather underground, www whatever dot com, for

catalogs. Trying sweater after earring, convincing myself

I require new shoes and a more neutral color palette.

For staring out the window waiting for dawn, or the mail truck,

or the right line. For lingering near the duck pond

for no good reason. Arranging books alphabetically and

by size. To what end? For cleaning, wiping counters

of someone else's crumbs and butter smears. Cooking

by recipe, generally, an excuse not to be doing something

hard. And hey, why are those trees just standing there?

Bum birds hitched to their bum limbs. Wind blowing

their errant leaf tinsel and what-nots. Everything waiting

for the cows to come home, when they won't, ever.

They're cows, and need to be driven.

This is a love poem for the cows.

"Where the Poem Comes From"

a shiver of silver,

trembling sequins across

that mysterious river

at the base of

the spine.

Rapids over

glittering rocks.

Climax of language

like lovemaking,

bringing

peace.

from The World Began with Yes

"Gift"

the world is fish and water,

water and fish, and a dream of fish

fishing for fish in the water where fish fish

and if you love love as deep as

fish will fish then love will love you,

love, deeply, as love loves

give and take the giving for the

last take, the given take and give and take

and all the taking takes the given

from Swimming Swimmers Swimming