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From the powerful drama and formal boldness of "The Status Seekers" to the various theories of criticism in "The Nervousness of Yvor Winters," Kathleen Ossip's second collection takes up the crazed threads of modern experience and all its contradictions. Each poem, each new approach is an attempt to extract something concrete from an era not yet past. Yet as the poet probes and wonders, she gradually reveals another narrative, built on strangled emotion and subdued lyricism. The Cold War is jagged and thought-provoking. It questions the origins and premises of contemporary American culture.

“Ah to be the one for whom the love poems in this sexy, brainy, elegant book were written.”—Linda Gregerson

The Coronary Garden is a collection braiding love and mortality. In “Love Poem, Unwritten,” Townsend identifies a physical abnormality of the poet’s heart as a figure for human love: fragile, vulnerable, our very imperfections opening us to connection and grace. Ann Townsend is the author of Dime Store Erotics (1998). She lives in Granville, Ohio.

Winner of the 2001 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry.

"Barot’s mature linguistic skills really come down to a metaphorical and musical intelligence that refuses to value one element over another, that will not let the language or the longing take over."—From the Foreword by Stanley Plumly

"This is a book of lyric wonders: wit that turns dark, darkness that blazes up again in music and story."—Eavan Boland Rick Barot is currently Jones Lecturer in Poetry at Stanford University. He was born in the Philippines and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. He attended Wesleyan University, the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, and Stanford, where he was a Wallace E. Stegner Fellow in Poetry.

"A stunning follow-up to Allen’s award-winning New and Selected. Accessible and profound. "No matter how tactile and specific he is, Allen always retains a sense of the greater world. . . . [H]is pristine poems flow like timelines, drawing unexpected connections between happenings both major and minor, and observations both subtle and life changing."—Booklist

Dick Allen has received the Robert Frost Prize for Poetry and The Hart Crane Poetry Prize. His books include Ode to the Cold War, Flight and Pursuit, Overnight in the Guest House of the Mystic, Regions With No Proper Names, and Anon and Various Time Machine Poems. He recently retired from his position as Charles A. Dana Endowed Chair Professor at the University of Bridgeport and lives in Trumbull, Connecticut.

"Kimbrell sings a serious song. . . . The poems are deft and sure, there is a sense of vision in them, and I have the feeling that this is the start of something significant."-from the Foreword by Charles Wright

In his debut collection (selected by Charles Wright as the 1997 winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry), Kimbrell revisits the mysterious landscapes of childhood and returns with poems that fathom meaning yet retain a sense of awe. The book's title section, a poignant ten-part poem, portrays a son's lifelong struggle to connect with a father made absent by mental and physical illness: "It's quite/The wonder, what madness can do for a man,//Much more than me far below the harsh light of heaven/Down here, in the make-shift center of this world." The Gatehouse Heaven serves as testament and guide to the kind of love that lies beyond anger.

James Kimbrell has received a Ford Foundation Fellowship, a Henry Hoynes Fellowship, and the Ruth Lilly Fellowship. He was twice winner of the Academy of American Poet's Prize and also received the "Discovery"/The Nation Award and Poetry magazine's Bess Hokin Prize. His poems and co-translations (with Jung Yul Yu) have appeared in magazines such as Poetry, The Antioch Review, The Quarterly, and Field. He is currently completing his Ph.D. in creative writing at the University of Missouri, Columbia.

Jan Carew combines Caribbean folklore, ghost story, adventure tale, and literature of European exile to create a spirited dialect and colloquial voice that startles and delights; he’s comfortable confronting anything, racial prejudice or whimsical fable, the natural world or city slum.

“When Susan Richards writes about horses and the interactions of the people involved with them, she brilliantly captures the characters, equine and human.”—Maxine Kumin

Strong, startling, funny—these stories are rich in their feeling for the human, natural, and sometimes supernatural world of Kentucky.

Susan Starr Richards has spent most of her life raising racehorses in central Kentucky, and writing. She has been a NEA Fellow in Fiction. Her stories have appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Sewanee Review, Shenandoah, The Southern Review, and in Thoroughbred Times, as winner of their first National Fiction Prize.

Mark Jarman is the author of ten poetry collections. He lives in Nashville, Tennessee.

"Mead's poems lay bare a pathology that evidences the world and the self as illness and cure, where language bears the hellish and the holy fruit of its culture. Mead unsettles me. And I'm grateful."-American Book Review

"Waiting for redemption from on high is a futile hope, and from that sudden understanding comes the animating imagination that carries these poems along. They read with an ease exceptional in poetry today, and at times with a playfulness akin to some of Roethke's last books."-Rain Taxi

"Jane Mead-Poet. Author of what may be the best book of poems for 1996-The Lord and the General Din of the World."-The Bloomsbury Review

"The Lord and the General Din of the World, spoken in an intensely open voice . . . suggests that the only stable existential presence can be created in the language of art. But at every turn the relationship between language and identity is questioned."-The Journal

"[These poems] may change your view of what has meaning in the madness of American culture. Such poetry could easily become tediously clinical or unbearably despairing, as so many poems on the subject are. In fact, Mead never lets the reader off easy the unearned hope or resolutions. She does reveal, however, possibilities for redemption."-Small Press Review

"These are not poems to be read silently, in a comfortable corner or chair. . . . [Mead's] poems enriched my appreciation of words and image and life in general."-Hodge Podge Poetry

In her introduction to The Man Back There, Mary Gaitskill writes simply, “I chose these stories because they made me feel. . . .” The reader of David Crouse’s collection is bound to agree, but the reasons are not easily explained. Crouse crawls inside the heads of a dozen male protagonists and tells us how they think. They are not always likeable. They are often losers—their thoughts hurry ahead or dawdle behind, disconnected from what little action occurs around them.

And yet, somehow, we wince for the dog-catcher who crashes his ex-wife’s Thanksgiving dinner in “The Castle on the Hill.” We sympathize with the latch-key kid who pillages toys in a dead boy’s closet in “Time Capsule.” And in “The Long Run,” we find it hard to condemn a ninety-two-year-old senator trying to salvage his career after his ex-wife publishes a scandalous tell-all book about his life.

In this deceptively quiet collection, the truth is something that simmers up through what is not said. A hero is a man who saves himself from himself, who placates his temper with self-awareness and, most importantly, self-forgiveness. The Man Back There is a feat of empathy and razor sharp vision.

David Crouse is the author of Copy Cats, which received the 2005 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. He lives in Fairbanks, where he teaches at the University of Alaska.

The Motel of the Stars is a novel set in Kentucky and North Carolina on the eve of the 1997 anniversary of the Harmonic Convergence, a mystical alignment of planets and a portending of universal peace first celebrated in 1987. Part satire of New Age philosophy and part commentary on a modern, fear-based era, the novel is the story of Jason Sanderson and Lory Llewellyn, who travel to the 1997 Anniversary Gathering at the foot of Grandfather Mountain in North Carolina. Both characters have for ten years mourned the loss of Sam Sanderson, Jason’s son and Lory’s lover, and both must emerge from grief into a new age of possibility and hope.

Karen Salyer McElmurray is the author of Surrendered Child: A Birth Mother’s Journey, described by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution as “a moving meditation on loss and memory and the rendering of truth and story.” The book was the recipient of the 2003 AWP Award for Creative Nonfiction and a National Book Critics Circle Notable Book. McElmurray’s debut novel, Strange Birds in the Tree of Heaven, was winner of the 2001 Thomas and Lillie D. Chaffin Award for Appalachian Writing. Her work has received support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Kentucky Foundation for Women, and the North Carolina Arts Council. She lives in Milledgeville, Georgia, where she is an assistant professor in creative writing at Georgia College and State University; she is also the creative nonfiction editor for Arts and Letters.

The Mother on the Other Side of the World is James Baker Hall's fifth book of poems. The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The American Poetry Review, and The Kenyon Review are among the many magazines to have published his work. He has received an NEA fellowship in poetry writing and has won both Pushcart and O. Henry prizes. He lives with his wife, fiction writer Mary Ann Taylor-Hall, in the Kentucky countryside and teaches at the University of Kentucky.

"James Baker Hall has consistently pursued in his poetry a trajectory that is deeply authentic. It has produced writing of daring and delicacy, over a period long enough to make it plain that this is not a momentary brilliance but a sustained vision. He has been dedicated to making the language reflect the surprise, the turns and leaps of memory and recurrent apparition in which pain and beauty are often indistinguishable. This new collection displays an intimate authority and mystery of tone that are the fulfillment of a genuine gift and uncompromising devotion to it."-W.S. Merwin

"A delightful collection of poems depicting Hall's life long st

"Reading these poems is an uncanny experience. . . . We enter into this book alert to possibility, and leave knowing how asleep we've been."—Nick Flynn

Of all the meanings of exposed I think my favorite
is the raw nerve shivering bug-like in the lamp light
while the surgeon arranges his dainty knives.
You can get close to that. You can brush
its wriggling limb and hear the scream.
You can lie there on the table, say,
"little nerve oh nerve it'll
be all right; there
there, there there.

“The Preacher’s a poem with polyphonic voices, enormous range, and many of Stern’s familiar icons: his animism, his city grit, his philosophical fragments, his irony and justice quest, his reaching for the strain of memory.”—Ira Sadoff

Gerald Stern is the author of fourteen poetry books, including This Time: New and Selected Poems, which won the 1998 National Book Award. He taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop for fifteen years, and he is the recipient of many awards, including the Lamont Poetry Prize, the Ruth Lilly Prize, the Wallace Stevens Award, and the National Jewish Book Award for poetry.

"Eleanor Lerman's poems have sociological savvy, philosophical rue, historical recognition, and vernacular resilience. They sing a song that is bravely gloomy, but they sing it with a fierce and earned dignity."Tony Hoagland

“Lerman is as sly as a pool hustler, mapping complex constellations on the dark felt, setting gleaming images into spinning motion, then sinking each whirling sphere into a corner pocket.”Donna Seaman, Booklist

Eleanor Lerman has been a Chinese museum guide, a harpsichord kit workshop manager, and a comedy writer. She has received a National Book Award nomination and an NEA grant. She lives in New York.

Amelia Martens's prose poems reveal expansive ideas in compressed language. From the domestic to the geopolitical, from the mundane to the miraculous, these brief vignettes take the form of prayers, parables, confessions, and revelations. Intimate and urgent, Martens's poems are strange, darkly funny, and utterly beguiling.

Amelia Martens is the author of the chapbooks Purgatory (Black Lawrence Press, 2012), Clatter (Floating Wolf Quarterly, 2013), and A Series of Faults (Finishing Line Press, 2014). She received an MFA in Creative Writing from Indiana University, and lives in Paducah, Kentucky, where she teaches at West Kentucky Community & Technical College.

"Comer’s rhythms authenticate what she asserts. Page after page, the recognizably real and the imaginative flirt with and complement one another. . . ."—From the Foreword by Stephen Dunn

In The Unrequited Comer takes up and invigorates the line of American poetry called the "lyric surreal." The late poet James Wright was master of this mode, and Comer has a peculiarly American combination of humor and wild invention.

Carrie St. George Comer received her MFA from the University of Massachusetts, where she was awarded the Academy of American Poets prize and taught at Phillips Academy in Andover. She currently lives in Miami, Florida.

“Wright has a hunk of the ineffable in his teeth and he won’t let go. In poem after poem, he plumbs our deepest relationships with nature, time, love, death, creation. Wright’s search breaks all the barriers of time, space, action, for its dramatic narrative simply refuses to acknowledge the usual unities, as though all time were this time, all places this place and all actions one.”—Philip Levine, from his citation for the 1996 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize.

Charles Wright was named chancellor of The Academy of American Poets in 1999 and has won a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Critics Circle Prize and a Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Since 1983, he has been at the University of Virginia.

These Hands I Know offers readers the first-ever intimate view of the inner workings of black family life from the point of view of prose and poetry writers. This collection of seventeen essays includes portraits of fathers, mothers, nieces, brothers, grandparents, husbands, wives, and daughters—in short the full spectrum of absolute humanity in contemporary black families. Here, in letter form, a man speaks to his aunt, the family matriarch. A daughter rejects her father’s ideas of African-American identity. A young woman holds her niece in her hands for the very first time. And a son faces his father as an old man and finally comes to terms with his failings. These Hands I Know seeks to gather a resolutely honest picture of family life, however painful or joyous that truth may be.

"Family life is an insistent vessel traveling the space of our struggles to love and to be loved. . . . Africans and their descendants in America have always been nothing more and nothing less than human. If anything is constant and universal, it is suffering—personal, social, and political. If these essays offer anything, it is the affirmation of humanity."—From the Introduction by Afaa Michael Weaver

Marketing Plans:
Advertisements in key literary and trade magazines
Newsletter, brochure, catalog, and postcard mailings
Reader copies available to booksellers through participation in Book Sense Advance Access Program

Contributors include:
Fred D'Aguiar
Tara Betts
Gwendolyn Brooks
Karen Chandler
Edwidge Danticat
Jarvis Q. DeBerry
Gerald Early
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Lise Funderburg
Walter Warren Harper
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers
Trent Masiki
E. Ethelbert Miller
Marilyn Nelson
Kalamu ya Salaam
Della Scott
Alice Walker

Also available by Afaa Michael Weaver
Multitudes: Poems Selected and New
TC $24.00, 1-889330-40-X • CUSA
TP $14.95, 1-889330-41-8 • CUSA

Eleven women confront dramas both everyday and outlandish in Caitlin Horrocks' This Is Not Your City. In stories as darkly comic as they are unflinching, people isolated by geography, emotion, or circumstance cut imperfect paths to peace—they have no other choice. A Russian mail-order bride in Finland is rendered silent by her dislocation and loss of language, the mother of a severely disabled boy writes him postcards he'll never read on a cruise ship held hostage by pirates, and an Iowa actuary wanders among the reincarnations of those she's known in her 127 lives. Horrocks' women find no simple escapes, and their acts of faith and acts of imagination in making do are as shrewd as they are surprising.

In the middle of the night, when the fruit
is scariest. I hold my hand out

and feel your nibbling. Don't worry,
my eyes are still closed. I've only

peeked that once. The cold
that is your breath—these windows

of fog. If I were outside,
I'd read your name backward again and again.

Trey Moody is from San Antonio, Texas. He earned an MFA from Texas State University and a PhD from the University of Nebraska. He is the author of the chapbook How We Remake the World, co-written with Joshua Ware, and winner of the Slope Editions Chapbook Prize.

"Like a great conversationalist, Hanick paints a generous canvas, and I rode the length of this powerful book much like I first experienced the American interstate: songs on the stereo, windows down, and the bittersweet sense that youth is fleeting. Three Kinds of Motion holds open a wild and beautiful journey, not to be missed."—Thalia Field

In 1943, Peggy Guggenheim commissioned a mural from Jackson Pollock to hang in the entryway of her Manhattan townhouse. It was the largest Pollock canvas she would ever own, and four years later she gave it to a small Midwestern institution with no place to put it. When the original scroll of On the Road goes on tour across the country, it lands at the same Iowa museum housing Peggy's Pollock, revitalizing Riley Hanick's adolescent fascination with the author. Alongside these two narrative threads, Hanick revisits Dwight D. Eisenhower's quest to build America's first interstate highway system. When catastrophic rains flood the Iowa highways with their famous allure and history of conquest, they also threaten the museum and its precious mural. In Three Kinds of Motion, his razor-sharp, funny, and intensely vulnerable book-length essay, Hanick moves deftly between his three subjects. He delivers a story with breathtaking ingenuity.

Riley Hanick is an essayist, journalist, and translator. His work has received support from the Jentel and McKnight foundations and he has served as a writer-in-residence for the University of Iowa Museum of Art. He teaches at Murray State University.

As noted in the introduction, in contemporary Korea, "poems are found on mountain boulders, on café walls, on placemats, T-shirts, and television game shows." And though Americans may know something of Korea’s modern history of tumult—division and repression—little of the country’s rich and varied poetry has been available to the English-speaking public.

In Three Poets of Modern Korea, American poet James Kimbrell, and his wife, translator and native speaker Yu Jung-yul, have gathered and translated leading representatives of three generations of Korean poets. From the Dada and surrealist influenced work of Yi Sang, to the colloquial, affirming poems of Hahm Dong-seon, and ending with the brilliant sensuality of Choi Young-mi, whose work also asserts a determination to be both a woman and a free individual, this is a superb introduction to the largely undiscovered treasures of contemporary Korean poetry.

Marketing Plans:
Advertisements in key literary and trade magazines
Newsletter, brochure, catalog, and postcard mailings
Reader copies available to booksellers through participation in Book Sense Advance Access Program

Yu Jung-yul holds degrees in French Literature from Pusan National University, and is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Kenyon College. A freelance photographer and translator, she is currently pursuing an M.F.A. in Studio Art at Florida State University and lives in Tallahassee, Florida.

James Kimbrell is the author of The Gatehouse Heaven (Sarabande, 1998) and is the recipient of a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, a "Discovery"/The Nation Award, Poetry magazine's Bess Hokin Award, and a Whiting Writer's Award. He teaches in the Creative Writing program at Florida State University and lives in Tallahassee, Florida.

Also available: by James Kimbrell
The Gatehouse Heaven,
Winner of the 1997 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry, Selected by Charles Wright
TC $20.95, 1-889330-13-2 CUSA
TP $12.95, 1-889330-14-0 CUSA

"You won't want to stop reading this other-worldly good book."—Dara Wier

11 is 2 bodies and these 2 bodies
want to crash into each other,
but there is no ambulance.
It is a nook of totem poles
on a stubby road and also
2 modest giraffes peering
at something unruly in the grass.

Francesca Chabrier is the author of the chapbook The Axioms (Pilot Books, 2013). Her poems have appeared in Action Yes, jubilat, notnostrums, Sixth Finch, and Sink Review. She is a graduate of the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

"Nystrom’s gift as a poet is that she doesn’t stop looking, and her poems make sure it is all still there for us to see."—Eamon Grennan

The landscape of Torn Sky is South Dakota, a place of extremes, where parched land meets frigid air and exiled Native Americans still struggle to live in peace alongside ranchers. Nystrom’s poems weave together the voices of her childhood with ghosts of the last two tumultuous centuries and articulate with such subtle and unsentimental grace that each side is understood.

Debra Nystrom was born in Pierre, South Dakota. She is the author of one previous book, A Quarter Turn. She lives in Charlottesville, Virginia, and teaches at the University of Virginia.

"Bingham writes with an austere and unerring knowledge of what it is to be human and—transgressive."—Paula Fox

"These are marvelous stories of experience and have the ripeness of wry, hard-won wisdom."—Phillip Lopate

"Bingham has the eye to see where a story lives, the heart to understand it, and the voice—and craft—to tell it."—Robin Morgan In her wise and sexy new collection, Sallie Bingham examines modern-day "transgressions" in affairs of the heart. She offers up a ménage à trois, an older woman’s affair with a student, a painter who uses his age as an excuse to behave indecorously. But the reader quickly discovers the real transgressions are those of the self against the self.

“Barot’s Want is dexterous and thrilling, and his capacious and generous vision shows us how the eye survives ‘to correct the heart.’”—Michael Collier

“In Rick Barot’s hands every poem casts at least two luminous shadows. Want is masterfully merciless and merciful at the same time.”—Terrance Hayes

 “Her stories have a fablelike quality, a dreaminess that lulls even as Miller explores the most contemporary issues.  Her characters seem to live on after the last word—I found myself thinking of them days after I’d finished the book, turning over what might have happened in later years....These psychologically acute stories are truly satisfying—imaginative, open-ended, haunting.”—O, The Oprah Magazine

"The latest collection from Miller skillfully explores the tension in Midwestern race and class relations....Miller's tales impart a real breadth of experience."—Publishers Weekly

“Alyce Miller has the eye and the skills for getting the short story right. . . . She writes vividly about people in various degrees of emotional extremis, and she avoids the temptation to invent resolutions for the dilemmas they’re in. She deftly captures individual psychologies.”—Norman Rush, from the introduction

In this startling new collection by prize-winning author Alyce Miller, changing images of water as a force both destructive and healing are woven throughout. Whether giving voice to the nameless wife from a tale by Chekhov or illustrating the fears driving apart black and white communities in small-town Ohio, Miller makes vivid the heart of human interaction. These stories, told from different perspectives of age, race, and gender, acknowledge a common rhythm in each of us—unsettled desire.

Alyce Miller has authored a collection of stories, The Nature of Longing (W.W. Norton & Company), winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, and a novel, Stopping for Green Lights (Anchor Doubleday), as well as more than 120 stories, poems, and essays that have appeared in literary magazines and anthologies. Her other awards include the Lawrence Foundation Prize from Michigan Quarterly Review, The Kenyon Review Award for Literary Excellence in Fiction, and distinguished citations in The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Essays, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and The Pushcart Prize. She leads a double life as an attorney specializing in animal law and a professor in the graduate writing program at Indiana University Bloomington.

Winner of the 2000 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction

Welcome to the strange, wonderful world of Brock Clarke. Here you will meet florists, dental hygienists, high school teachers, and peddlers of porno novelty items, all trying to be normal, good people and failing miserably. Reaffirming that "life, at its core, is embarrassing," What We Won't Do is a collection of tales about the miseries of the average, blue-collar worker who is anything but average. Here is a portrait of the Homer Simpsons and Archie Bunkers of the world, Knut Hamson style. These stories are more than insightful; they're downright funny.

"The honesty herein is not the sugarcoated sort, it's the sort that exacts revenge by goading others into doing what we can't or won't do ourselves. . . . You haven't read these stories before, and that's the highest compliment that I can pay them. That and the fact that they made me laugh, out loud, and frightened me a little, and still do."—from the Foreword by Mark Richard

Marketing plans for What We Won't Do:
• Author tour in South Carolina (Clemson, Greenville), and upstate New York (Syracuse, Rochester).
• Will coordinate additional tour with Harcourt upon release of his novel, The Ordinary White Boy, in September 2001.
• Newsletter, brochure, catalog, and postcard mailings.
• Advertisements in key literary and trade magazines.

Brock Clarke is from upstate New York. He received his Ph.D. in English at the University of Rochester, and is currently an assistant professor of English and Creative Writing at Clemson University. He has received awards from the Sewanee Writers' Conference, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and the New York State Writers' Institute. He lives with his wife, Lane, and their son Quinn in Clemson, South Carolina.

"When is a mix of autobiography and good old storytelling that never forgets a basic writerly tenet: locality is the only universality. Whether the subject is Beethoven's maid hearing strange sounds, a deli waiter bemoaning his work or Wormser as a boy walking through Pikesville, Md., and imagining it's Baudelaire's Paris, the action in each poem is unique in its specific details. The insights the characters achieve, however, and the emotions they feel are universal. . . . Graced with humor, lust, and bracing
narrative momentum, Wormser's poetry presents a menagerie of wonderfully familiar strangers."-Publishers Weekly

"A steadfast characteristic of Baron Wormser's poetry is his absolute honesty. In When, . . . he puts aside any expectations of poetic prettiness to take a clear, linguistically fresh look at issues such as AIDS, Vietnam, the ethics of fast-food consumption, and the seduction of Vegas. . . . Wormser's love of the world is evident, despite the searing light that he shines upon it."-Small Press Editor's Recommended Book, Amazon.com

"The title When derives from Wormser's obsession with history. . . . This historical sense permeates his poems; it is critical to his approach to poetry. He is, in a manner of speaking, a time traveler. . . . Wormser makes references to people, objects, and events that define the time:

“Keep watching for Yolanda Barnes and her work. Her voice is her own and will be heard.”—George Garrett

Inspired by the Los Angeles riots of 1992, When It Burned to the Ground is an impressionistic vision of inner-city life. This stunning re-rendering of Eden takes place on imaginary Piedmont Street—an avenue of vital contradictions, with a pawnshop and cemetery, prostitutes and preachers, a street with no money in its pockets. Here we meet a variety of women embattled at society’s fringe—Cecile, once a schoolgirl at her history lessons of Pompeii, now a piano teacher down on her luck; Bernadette, seamstress and subject of rumor; an anonymous gardener planting dill as a curative against witchcraft and an amateur botanist studying the bird of paradise, which is both flame and woman’s hat.

Throughout this beautifully made montage, recurring images flash into focus and then recede—fire, dusk, the fearsome temper and pleasures of red (lipstick, fig and burning sun). And among them all appears the reluctant street preacher Daniel, a troubling messianic figure bothering Piedmont with warnings of hellfire.

As striking as Jean Toomer’s Cane, When It Burned to the Ground is a stark, bold lyric of place and time, an ambitious and innovative fiction. Its stories, sketches and fragments culminate into a haunting book of novelistic breadth and depth, creating a dreamlike and surreal reflection of our own strange world. It is an extraordinary and unique accomplishment.

Yolanda Barnes lives in Los Angeles, where she was born of Creole/black Southern heritage. She graduated from the University of Southern California, where she majored in journalism, and received her MFA from the University of Virginia. Her short fiction has appeared in TriQuarterly, Ploughshares and the O. Henry and Pushcart Prize collections.

Spanning over two centuries, this inventive novel follows fictional writer Hector de Saint-Aureole and his novel, and includes imaginary responses from his imaginary readers. It is an intrepid, whimsical read that delights with its sense of play and twisting narrative.

Lawrence Sutin is the author of two memoirs, Jack and Rochelle: A Holocaust Story of Love and Resistance and A Postcard Memoir; two biographies, Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick and Do What Thou Wilt: A Life of Aleister Crowley; and a historical work, All Is Change: The Two Thousand Year Journey of Buddhism to the West. He lives in Minneapolis.

"Fierce and bold, these beautiful stories provide a highly kinetic exploration of sameness and difference in terms of ethnic and racial origin. Through a romp of language—vital, outrageous, unpredictable—the fireworks of Neela Vaswani’s original genius cast shadows and illumine psyches that conventional monovisions never perceive. The stories of Where the Long Grass Bends are for readers willing to view the shape-shifting of both reality and literary form. Vaswani’s characters embrace their fates through such rigorous birthing that what has been internal finally contains and defines them."—Sena Jeter Naslund

"If it is true, as one of Vaswani’s characters claims, that a musical movement is the equivalent of a sentence, then the stories in Where the Long Grass Bends comprise an uncanny and beautiful symphony. This is a luminous collection, where each fiction evolves its own mythology. I want to live in the world of these stories just as I am afraid of this beautiful and often dark world. Neela Vaswani’s Where the Long Grass Bends is lovely, strange, lyrical, full of true mystery."—Victoria Redel

Where the Long Grass Bends is a delight of invention and language. In whirling, catch-me-if-you-can prose, Vaswani tells stories that subvert conventional narrative by employing Indian lore, Gaelic fable, and historical legend. Spare, fierce, and unpredictable, this debut collection is boundless, even boundary-less, because Vaswani has, as David Garnett said of Virginia Woolf, a mind that sticks to nothing.

Neela Vaswani lives in New York. Her short stories have appeared in numerous journals, including Prairie Schooner, American Literary Review, and Global City Review. In 1999, she was awarded the Italo Calvino Prize. She is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Maryland, and teaches in the Master of Fine Arts in Writing program at Spalding University.

“Cleopatra Mathis . . . brandishes the gifts of a talented poet who has hit her stride.”—The New York Times Book Review

“As long as we have Mathis’ clarity of imagination, the intricacy and breadth of her engagement with the world and the depth of her meeting of others, we’ll have the warmth to help us deal with our own centers of cold.”—A.R. Ammons

Strong, unsentimentally emotional sixth collection set on the frigid shores of Provincetown.

Cate Marvin uses language the way a gymnast uses her body; she is a formalist who has thoroughly learned the pleasures and gains of abandon. But it is her excursions into wild image and passionate song that win the reader's heart. The heart is central in World's Tallest Disaster, which is essentially a book of love poems—love lost and found, love requited, love abandoned and betrayed. What Cate Marvin has done in her remarkably assured and powerful first collection is to remind us in fresh terms of the news that stays news: that our desire is "Not a sea of longing,// but the brack of wanting what's physical/ to help us forget we are physical."

"Violently passionate and firmly symmetrical, like tango or the blues, these poems-at first-are about sexual passion. . . . But in the great tradition of love poetry, these poems don't stop with love. They move from eros to imagination. Or they thrash between the two. . . . This is an encouraging book in the context of American poetry's fashions or factions, because it evades categories. [Marvin's] is an urgent as well as an artful voice."—from the Foreword by Robert Pinsky

Marketing Plans o Author tour in Ohio, Kentucky, and NYC
o Brochure and postcard mailings
o Advertisements in key literary and trade magazines

Book tour dates including:
o Cincinnati
o Louisville
o New York City

Cate Marvin was born in Washington, D.C. She received her B.A. from Marlboro College in Vermont, and holds two M.F.A.s: one from the University of Houston in poetry, the other from the Iowa Writers' Workshop in fiction. She has been awarded scholarships to attend both Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers' Conferences. Her poems have appeared in such magazines as New England Review, The Antioch Review, The Paris Review, The Georgia Review, and Ploughshares, among others. She is lives in Cincinnati, Ohio, and is currently a Ph.D. candidate in English at the university there.

“Vaswani is a confident writer whose unflinching eye shows the reader the beauty grounded in the mundane.”San Francisco Chronicle

“Vaswani’s voice is witty, sharp, innovative, unique.”Chitra Banerjee

You Have Given Me a Country is an emotionally powerful exploration of blurred borders, identity, and what it means to be multicultural. Combining memoir, history, and fiction, the book follows the paths of the author's Irish-Catholic mother and Sindhi-Indian father on their journey toward each other and the biracial child they create. Neela Vaswani's second full-length work thematically echoes such books as The Color of Water, Running in the Family, or Motiba's Tatoos, but it is entirely unique in approach, voice, and story. The book reveals the self as a culmination of all that went before it, a brilliant new weave of two varied, yet ultimately universal backgrounds that spans continents, generations, languages, wars, and, at the center of it all, family.

Neela Vaswani is the author of the short story collection Where the Long Grass Bends (Sarabande Books, 2004). Recipient of a 2006 O. Henry Prize, her fiction and nonfiction have been widely anthologized and published in journals such as Epoch, Shenandoah, and Prairie Schooner. She lives in New York City.

"Amy Gustine's You Should Pity Us Instead is a devastating, funny, and astonishingly frank collection of stories. Gustine can be brutally honest about the murky calculations, secret dreams and suppressed malice to which most of us never admit, not even to ourselves."—Karen Russell

"You Should Pity Us Instead is an unbroken spell from first story to last, despite the enormous range of subjects and landscapes, sufferings and joys it explores."—Laura Kasischke

"Amy Gustine's stories cross impossible borders both physical and moral: a mother looking for her kidnapped son sneaks into Gaza, an Ellis Island inspector mourning his lost love plays God at the boundary between old world and new. Brave, essential, thrilling, each story in You Should Pity Us Instead takes us to those places we've never dared visit before."—Ben Stroud

You Should Pity Us Instead explores some of our toughest dilemmas: the cost of Middle East strife at its most intimate level, the likelihood of God considered in day-to-day terms, the moral stakes of family obligations, and the inescapable fact of mortality. Amy Gustine exhibits an extraordinary generosity toward her characters, instilling them with a thriving, vivid presence.

Amy Gustine's short fiction has appeared in the Kenyon Review, North American Review, Black Warrior Review, the Massachusetts Review, and many other places. She lives in Ohio.