From August 25th-August 31st, get books from our unique international poetry series for only $2.99, including groundbreaking bilingual and trilingual eBook editions from some of the world's most distinguished poets. Including Xiao Hai's Song of Shadows, Víctor Terán's The Spines of Love, Tal Nitzán's At the End of Sleep, and Jimmy Santiago Baca's The Esai Poems and The Lucia Poems.
Bilingual Mandarin-English Edition
Translated from the Chinese by Zhu Yu
With delicacy and precision, the major Chinese poet Xiao Hai conjures shadows to explore philosophical questions of illusion and reality, history and time, art and language. Composed of several hundred interconnected poems, Xiao’s collection is, in his words, “a dynamic, creative, and open system of experience.” Deftly translated by Zhu Yu, Song of Shadows brings Wordsworth and Whitman into artful conversation with classical Chinese culture.
The Spines of Love collects work from Víctor Terán’s poetic oeuvre for the first time in a trilingual edition: in their original Isthmus Zapotec (an endangered indigenous Mexican language) and in David Shook’s Spanish and English translations. Sensual and intricately wrought, these poems take readers on an emotional journey through love and loss with a searing lyricism entirely Terán’s own. His lover’s body is a city where the poet can “give perfect directions,” her name slips over his tongue “like a fish between the hands / of a fisherman,” and when she leaves him it’s with memories like “an ocean of incessant fish.” The Spines of Love stands for a simple but bracing truth: Yes, love can hurt, but even after it departs, it strengthens us.
With At the End of Sleep, an anthology selected from the past decade of Israeli poet Tal Nitzán’s work, one of Hebrew poetry’s most powerful and acclaimed contemporary voices is finally given her English-language due. Reaching beyond lyricism for its own sake with her lucid, sharp, and occasionally ferocious verse, Nitzán illuminates sexuality and struggle, protests the abuse of power, and plumbs the depths of the Israeli condition.
American Book Award-winning poet Jimmy Santiago Baca endured decades in the penal system before becoming a renowned poet and a father. In these collections of strikingly expressive verse, Baca celebrates parenthood and presents, with brutal honesty, the daily complexities of adult life in the age of 9/11 and the Iraq War. This ex-convict, an essential voice in world poetry, chronicles the changes that envelop him upon the arrival of two of his children, Lucia and Esai. After “twenty-five years in the system, brutal, corrupt, hate-filled, and frenzied with violence . . . beatings, shock-therapy, abandonment, terror, death threats, stabbings,” he refuses to give in to evil and despair. Recalling the works of other poets who passed through the horrors of extreme experience—Nazim Hikmet, Paul Celan, Joseph Brodsky, Alexander Wat, Otto René Castillo, and a host of others—The Lucia Poems and The Esai Poems give poignant acknowledgement to one generation’s failings and pass on humane advice to the next. Taken together as Breaking Bread with the Darkness, these two collections offer a poetic primer for paternity, and a model for teaching the young history, politics, spirituality, and survival.
With a foreword by Carolyn Forché
"Esai and I
clap and laugh on the bed, two monkeys
waking in a rain forest canopy
thrilled to my hairy ass
swinging from tree to tree..."
With a foreword by David Ray
"you and I Lucia sit on the couch and peel garlic
you and I leap on the trampoline,
you and I pick tomatoes from the garden
you walk on my back to ease my spinal pain
and I call you doctor Baca..."