“Mindi Kirchner possesses an unblinking honesty and wit that is at once enchanting and heartbreaking. Her agile, beautifully crafted poems address the disappointments and sorrows of our uncrafted, ordinary lives and the painful distance between reality and imagination. She celebrates the joy in spite of, not because of, what is. Like a Buddhist she wishes for no other life, no reincarnation. And yet, as her reader, I can’t wait to see more, more lives, or at least many more books, from this talented new voice.”—Nin Andrews

A companion volume to Taken at the Flood, this book identifies areas of research and in-depth source materials for studies of the Maryland campaign.

Sounding the Whale is Christopher Sten’s comprehensive account of his own close encounter with Moby-Dick. Originally a long, self-contained chapter in The Weaver-God, He Weaves: Melville and the Poetics of the Novel, just published by Kent State University Press, this chapter-by-chapter study of Moby-Dick evolved as a book within a book. Sten argues that Melville not only was familiar with the traditional forms of narrative but that he refined them and appropriated them to his own original purposes. For Moby-Dick, he fused the heroic qualities of the ancient Homeric epic with the spiritual qualities of the early modern form found in Dante and Milton, then cast the whole enterprise in an unprecedented poetic prose form. Thus he formulated the first prose epic of its kind, and the only religious epic on the subject of whaling anyone is likely to write.

Annie Dillard, a foremost practitioner of the literary epiphany, has become a representative of a necromantic movement that combines the ecological interest of wilderness literature with the aesthetics of a highly stylized literature. This first full-length study of the Pulitzer prize-winning essayist considers her as wilderness philosopher, religious mystic, professional critic, and arch-romantic.

“There is a sadness to McBride’s poetry that only a deep thinker can recreate, someone who has been inside the beautiful dark hollows of disappointment. It is encouraging to read the powerfully rendered thoughts of a vulnerable mind in a cynical time—here is a poet unafraid to be hurt; here is a poet bleeding in his own glass crop. Encouraging? Yes, because McBride understands that defensive poetry has no value.” — Larissa Szporluk

The Special Activities Group (SAG) and its subordinate companies have received little attention from historians, despite being an elite combat unit and participating in highly classified and dangerous missions in Korea. Rarely receiving more attention than a footnote, their story usually begins and ends on the night of September 12, 1950, with an amphibious raid near Kunsan. Until their inactivation on March 31, 1951, SAG simply disappears from most Korean War histories. Spare Not the Brave corrects this omission.

Speak a Powerful Magic features poems by schoolchildren, immigrants and refugees, patients and caregivers, and veterans, alongside the work of well-known contemporary American poets, and it demonstrates that poetry is truly of the people. We turn to poetry to give voice to what is troubling us, to honor what we love, to make sense of our lives, to remember our past, and to commemorate what we’ve lost. Here, it becomes clear that poetry, especially when coupled with the visual arts, has the potential to broaden our understanding and bring people together in ways that more traditional communications simply cannot.

Speak English! The Rise of Latinos in Baseball chronicles how much— and how little—has changed since the first Latino played in the big leagues in the nineteenth century. By the middle of the next century, the Alous, Vic Power, and Rico Carty worked to earn their place in the game amid taunts and ridicule. Today, even established players and stars may be told to speak English in clubhouses—eliciting cringes or shrugs from individuals who are seemingly still hurting.

Winner of the 2013 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize
Mark Doty, Judge

“It’s a joy. . .to come nearer to a realm of experience little explored in American poetry, the lives of those who are engaged in the complex project of transforming their own gender… Oliver Bendorf writes from a paradoxical, new-world position: the adult voice of a man who has just appeared in the world. A man emergent, a man in love, alive in the fluid instability of any category.”

—Mark Doty, from the Foreword

Samuel Shem’s classic novel about medical internship, The House of God, is required reading in medical schools throughout the world and is celebrated for its authentic description of medical training and practice, for its Rabelaisian comedy, and for its humanism and vision. His new novel, and most ambitious work yet, The Spirit of the Place, tells the story of an expatriate doctor called home to Columbia, New York, in the early 1980s to face his own history and that of the place. It is a novel of love and death, mothers and sons, ghosts and bullies, doctors and patients, illness and healing.