Sarabande Books

Contributors: Samuel Ace, Chase Berggrun, Sherwin Bitsui, Sophie Cabot Black, Jericho Brown, Anthony Ceballos, Marianne Chan, Jos Charles, Brendan Constantine, Cynthia Cruz, Steven Espada Dawson, Megan Denton Ray, Martín Espada, Megan Fernandes, Sarah Gorham, Joy Harjo, Mary Karr, Sophie Klahr, Michael Klein, Dana Levin, Ada Limón, Zach Linge, Layli Long Soldier, Sharon Olds, Airea Dee Matthews, Joshua Mehigan, Tomás Q. Morín, Erin Noehrem, Joy Priest, Dana Roeser, sam sax, Diane Seuss, Natalie Shapero, Katie Jean Shinkle, Jeffrey Skinner, Bernardo Wade, Afaa M. Weaver, The Cyborg Jillian Weise, Phillip B. Williams, Ocean Vuong

Elena Passarello is an actor, a writer, and recipient of a 2015 Whiting Fellowship in nonfiction. Her first collection with Sarabande Books, Let Me Clear My Throat, won the gold medal for nonfiction at the 2013 Independent Publisher Awards. She lives in Corvallis, Oregon.

“This is my favorite book by Debra Nystrom so far. It’s beautiful.”––Ann Beattie

“A fearless and elegiac book, deriving from those struggles which many of us know all too well—the final illness of the poet’s mother, the physical and mental decline of her father, and the emotional sufferings of her imprisoned brother. . . . Bad River Road arises from necessity.”—David Wojahn

Debra Nystrom grew up in South Dakota, where she returns each year to family land on the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation. She has published two previous books of poetry, Torn Sky and A Quarter Turn. She teaches at the University of Virginia.

Present Vanishing is a book where East and West meet, where Zen contends with social satire, often on the playing fields of American landscapes. In Dick Allen’s new poems, almost every word is a search for calm in the midst of contemporary chaos. Paradox is everywhere: the present vanishes, even as it unscrolls before us.

Author of six previous poetry collections, Dick Allen has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ingram Merrill Foundation. He is also the recipient of the Robert Frost Prize for Poetry and the Hart Crane Poetry Prize. He recently retired from his position at the University of Bridgeport and lives in Trumbull, Connecticut.

 “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.

"My Reptile"

Little frilléd lizard

with your big mouth
and your clutch of egg.
Pure urge iguana
—I wanna wanna
wanna—heavy pet
in a moist habitat.
Your dewlap licks
down my spine;
your creep yearns,
yearns your crawl,
like a small machine
that you rev and
rev and rev until
the engine floods.

Gin and bleach: two clear liquids aiming for purity, bordering the toxic. Catherine Wing's poems are soaked in her cocktail, mixing doubt, loneliness, rough elbows, and razor focus. It riddles, aiming askew for a straight answer: how do we make our way through this world?

“[Ander Monson’s] poems celebrate defiant excess. In this land of scarcity, right-living involves using up what you have, where you have it; otherwise someone might wreck, steal, or use it and you might not get any. A carpe diem for obscure, doomed youth.”—Stephen Burt

Inspired by the cult Japanese video game Katamari Damacy, these poems increase in size and momentum, rolling more and more into their orbits as they go. Formally inventive and fun, The Available World examines the beauty and terror of excess.

Ander Monson lives in Tucson, Arizona.

"[Jarman's] poems explore faith in its many manifestations, but there is something here transcendent that speaks to everyone. Highly recommended."—Library Journal

Bone Fires collects work from over thirty years and charts Mark Jarman's spiritual development as he grows from a poet of childhood and nostalgia through adulthood and the struggles of faith. The section of new poems includes work published in American Poetry Review, Georgia Review, The New Republic, Poetry, and in the yearly anthology Best American Poetry. A landmark collection from one of our nation's most distinguished poets.

"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.

Through a partnership to promote wider access to literary voices of Mexican artists in the United States and American writers in Mexico, the National Endowment for the Arts, the United States Embassy in Mexico, and Mexico’s National Fund for Culture and the Arts have joined together to support a proposed three-year program of anthology publication and public outreach activities. In the first year, Sarabande has been named publisher of the poetry anthologies.

“We are pleased to introduce readers to the best of contemporary Mexican and American poetry through these comprehensive bilingual anthologies,” states National Endowment for the Arts Chairman Dana Gioia. “I believe they will quickly become essential volumes for poetry lovers and grant new insight into both cultures.”

Contributors include: Kay Ryan, Larry Levis, Thomas Lux, Marilyn Nelson, Ron Silliman, Molly Peacock, Amy Uyematsu, Jorie Graham, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Naomi Shihab Nye, and more.

"Ultimately, the lyrics in Hoodwinked read as odes to mortality. They marvel nonstop, unsentimentally, and with necessary ambivalence, at the world as given and the human inability to consistently rise to the exhausting challenge of making every second count. These poems constantly acknowledge that 'all flesh is grass.' They make us hear the wondrous, terrifying hum of impending obliteration, while at the same time never growing immune to beauty, never ceasing to be curious about what the grass itself makes of our common temporal conundrum."
—Amy Gerstler, from the introduction

Inherent untrustworthiness—of received opinion, the trompe l’oeil deceptions of nature, and the workings of our own unfaithful minds—is given its proper menace in David Hernandez’ Hoodwinked. In poems that range from the backyard to Iraq and back again, Hernandez disturbs the surface of contemporary life to reveal barely submerged worlds that, impossible to fathom, make fools of us all.

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.

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.

“Fort Red Border—the title itself an anagram for the name of this remarkable collection’s imaginary beloved—shows how language can be pleated, unfolded, and creased all over again into an endless origami of Eros. . . . By turns clowning, worshipful, heartbroken, and Faulknerian, these lyrics transport the reader to a familiar place made utterly strange.”—Srikanth Reddy

"Jerusalem" is a stucco cottage
Filled at all hours with angels,
Devils, and assorted orphans
Who dance and drink
And hand-tint engravings.

Blake himself is up in the attic
Night and day—
Even in eternity, he's still scribbling.

Gregory Orr is the author of ten collections of poetry. The recipient of National Endowment for the Arts and Guggenheim fellowships, he has been a Rockefeller Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Culture and Violence. He has taught at the University of Virginia since 1975, where he is professor of English.

“Kinesthetic, compassionate, unflinching, sometimes narrative, sometimes surreal, C. E. Perry’s poems turn this world’s full ripeness and strangeness as a farmer turns soil—that out of disruption and loss, something new might take root, grow, and sustain.”—Jane Hirshfield

“Reading C. E. Perry you suddenly discover a deeply intelligent, sane, courageous, fresh voice. It surprises you as any such voice would. I am delighted with the breadth of interest and the wisdom.”—Gerald Stern

C. E. Perry graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and from Dartmouth Medical School. She is a family medicine physician at a community health clinic in San Francisco.

Paul Praeder—an immensely complex character with the bravado of a Hemingway hero, the literary erudition and despair of Berryman’s Dream Songs persona, and the dark, self-destructive magnetism of Conrad’s Captain Kurtz—is a new and disturbing addition to the pantheon of American literary characters. His story unfolds over his 30-year correspondence with a young poet, and it is a story of lost moral compass, in which artistic integrity is traded for commercial success, and friendship and fidelity fall to lust and greed.

James Baker Hall is currently the Poet Laureate of Kentucky.

"Muench's lush figures give great pleasure to both ear and eye, and her imaginative leaps can feel both mysterious and inevitable, in a way that recalls not only Desnos, but also Neruda."—The New York Times Book Review

"Her language is refreshing, musical, attenuated."—Anne Waldman

Simone Muench lives in Chicago.

Through a partnership to promote wider access to literary voices of Mexican artists in the United States and American writers in Mexico, the National Endowment for the Arts, the United States Embassy in Mexico, and Mexico’s National Fund for Culture and the Arts have joined together to support a proposed three-year program of anthology publication and public outreach activities. In the first year, Sarabande has been named publisher of the poetry anthologies.

“We are pleased to introduce readers to the best of contemporary Mexican and American poetry through these comprehensive bilingual anthologies,” states National Endowment for the Arts Chairman Dana Gioia. “I believe they will quickly become essential volumes for poetry lovers and grant new insight into both cultures.”

Contributors include: David Huerta, Alberto Blanco, Coral Bracho, Ricardo Castillo, Vicente Quirarte, Rafael Vargas, Alicia Garcia Bergua, Fabio Morábito, Silvia Tomasa Rivera, Myriam Moscona, and more.

“With Stevensian proliferations and Dickinsonian refractive speed, Enter Invisible puzzles without ruse, conveying a lightning-quick mind, always electric, fiercely inventive. The descriptive angularities, formal variance, and musical resources are sassy, tricky, and intriguing, full of razzle-dazzle and enormously beguiling, even as a tragic sense simmers within their marvelous contraptions. Catherine Wing is confident enough to entertain us and skilled enough to leave us haunted by what makes us laugh.”—Dean Young

Catherine Wing grew up in Kentucky. She received her undergraduate degree from Brown University and, most recently, her MFA in poetry at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Taylor's love of literary tales is deeply embedded in-and extended by-her poems. References to Wilde, Rilke, Shakespeare, Chekhov, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Charlotte Brontë, and Lady Murasaki are rife, as are characters from fairy tales and children's stories. Even familial figures take on archetypal roles, lending the speaker's personal memory a mythic significance. The most pronounced motifs in Curios suggest a world enriched by fantasy: ghosts, fans, screens, masks, silk, windows, dreams, and curtains. But Taylor makes apparent that her imagination has bloomed not only to augment but to accommodate the world's multifariousness: I wanted everything connected to everything in a logical universe. / . . . In time, the world begins to shape your stubborn mind. ("She's Got Mail")

This debut collection is remarkable not only for its consistent style but also because it showcases a new form of poem-her own invention-a "curio" in itself. In extended lines, usually seven to eight, Taylor delivers deadpan statements and poses questions that are startlingly provocative-more like koans than interrogatives. Her poems range widely and wildly, at times taking surrealistic turns, yet they always maintain contact with the earth. It is a bonus to the reader that Taylor's grounding wire is humor. Even as the poems astonish by their swiftness, daring, and the accuracy of their surprising connections, they make us laugh: Do the stars hiss when they slash across the sky, cooling down? / Get a grip on yourself, said Mother often. ("Excess")

The volume's title, Curios, is remarkably apt. With unexpected images and questions reminiscent of childhood, Taylor riddles the surface of perception. These poems prove that curiosity-and imagination-will get the best of us. This title received a grant from the Greenwall Fund of The Academy of Ameri

“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.

“There isn’t a page in this book that isn’t bracing. . . .”—Marie Howe

Beginning with the word “defeat” and concluding on the word “alive,” Goodbye to the Orchard testifies that we must remain open in the face of loss, because loss is a given; and that our glimpses of the mysteries—whether of dying or living—are all we’re allowed.

Steven Cramer is the author of The Eye that Desires to Look Upward, The World Book, and Dialogue for the Left and Right Hand. He currently lives in Massachusetts.

From takeoff to landing and everything in-between, this anthology is about flying and the culture surrounding this precarious method of transportation. From the awe of being airborne to the shrink-wrapped airplane meals, from the phobia of flying to the very real reason for that fear, everything is explored.

Contributors include: Diane Ackerman, Margaret Atwood, Sharon Bryan, Andrea Hollender Budy, Kelly Cherry, Alain de Botton, Richard Garcia, Lise Goett, Albert Goldbarth, Jeffrey Harrison, Brenda Hillman, Peter LaSalle, Philip Levine, Lee Martin, William Matthews, Ian McEwan, Campbell McGrath, Carol Muske-Dukes, Marilyn Nelson, Naomi Shahib Nye, Barbara Ras, Sherrod Santos, Bruce Smith, Susan Stewart, Terese Svoboda, James Tate, Jean Valentine, Arthur Vogelsang, Charles Harper Webb, Jan Wesley, Colson Whitehead, Gary Young

"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.

I hear the dinner plates gossip
Mom collected to a hundred.
My friends say get on board,
but I'm not bored. Dad's a nap

lying by the fire. That's why
when radios broadcast news,
news broadcast from radios
gives air to my kinship, Dickey,

who says he'd go dead if ever
I discovered him to them.
I took care, then, the last time
bedrooms banged, to tape over

the outlets, swipe the prints
off DVDs, weep up the tea
stains where once was coffee.
Not one seep from him since.

“It’s impossible for me to imagine poems more fully integrated or more fully realized than those in this book, and it’s heartening to me that these poems were written by someone young.”—Michael Ryan

In Gabriel Fried’s debut volume, the reader weaves through details of daily life, dream-life, and the afterlife. In the process, we find ourselves unexpectedly amidst biblical and mythological stories so intimately retold that they seem populated by friends and relatives.

Gabriel Fried lives in New York City, where he edits the poetry series at Persea Books.

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.

After nearly ten years, Joseph Caldwell returns to the literary scene with a rich novel of immense and resonant scope. With Dostoevskyian ambition, Bread for the Baker's Child sets out to probe the large questions of good and evil, culpability and sacrifice, and the meaning of suffering.

In this tale of two lives immutably intertwined, Sister Rachel is a nun in a failing order, a painter with a history of madness, devoted to her dying Mother General. Her brother Phillip is an accountant serving time for embezzlement, a man capable of great violence and anger who has turned his back not simply on the church, but faith as well. They have nothing in common except for a shared childhood tragedy.

Or do they? In this masterful display of structural precision, Caldwell slowly unravels the complementary nature of these two lives—at first glance hermetically sealed from one another—until their shared fate becomes a symbiotic relationship, as though they were two sides of the same coin, intersecting and reflecting one another. Through events operatic in tone and reach, Rachel and Phillip come to redefine our notions of love and kinship, and embody the human need for redemption and forgiveness.

Marketing plans for Bread for the Baker's Child:
• Author tour in Northeast area (New York City, Boston, Washington, D.C.).
• Newsletter, brochure, catalog, and postcard mailings.
• Advertisements in key literary and trade magazines.

Playwright and novelist, Joseph Caldwell is the author of four previous novels, The Uncle From Rome, Under the Dog Star, The Deer at the River, and In Such Dark Places. He twice held the John Golden Fellowship in Playwriting at Yale University's School of Drama, and was awarded The Rome Prize in Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in New York City.

"Nostalgic"

Jar of feathers becoming,
finally, another map:
cloistered homage to a decade of geese
haunting the grid of our
steadfastness.
Un-find the coveted

ibis; kiss the scarlet of the robin's
blurred departure.
In the end, we were landmark,
compass, same as the lingered-over
pond, the marsh
where cattails remained when all else
left. Ragged in salt,
cloud-headed.

Paula Bohince's poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, and Poetry. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Amy Clampitt Trust, and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and an Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship.

Powers of Congress exhibits, in dazzling language and complex rhetorical structures, a passionate curiosity about all aspects of modern American life. Sven Birkerts, in The Boston Review, called Fulton a "prodigiously gifted poet," and Powers of Congress more than meets that claim. Back by popular demand, this is a reprint of an important collection that continues to exert a wide influence upon contemporary poetics. It will surely intoxicate all those who love the erotic involvement of language with thought.

"She is an ambitious, powerful poet.... She is a thematic gambler of the best sort. Her poems are daring and broad."—Eavan Boland, Partisan Review

"Powers of Congress is a rigorous, generous book, by one of the finest young poets in the country."—David Baker, Poetry

"In Powers of Congress Alice Fulton shows she's learned a thing or two about levitation."—David Barber, Hungry Mind Review

Marketing plans for Powers of Congress
o Newsletter, brochure, catalog, and postcard mailings.
o Advertisements in key literary and trade magazines.

Powers of Congress was first published by David R. Godine in 1990. Alice Fulton's other books of poems include Felt, Sensual Math, Palladium, and Dance Script with Electric Ballerina. A collection of her essays, Feeling as a Foreign Language: The Good Strangeness of Poetry, was published by Graywolf Press in 1999.

Alice Fulton's poems appear in five editions of The Best American Poetry series, as well as in The Best of the Best American Poetry. She is currently Professor of English at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and lives in Ypsilanti, Michigan.

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.