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Poems that question the world with tenderness and restless introspection

In I Love You But I Don’t Speak Your Language, brushes with the profound may lead to brushes with the mundane, or vice versa. Cause and effect become unreasoned and transcendent, at times lifting the arbitrary into the sublime or the sublime into happenstance. Intuitive leaps pull us through oscillations between humor, introspection, and the surreal. These poems don’t follow a straight path; instead, they capture the way thoughts shift, contradict, and collide.

Inspired by the poet’s dreams, as well as travels throughout central Europe, the West Indies, and Central and South America, the poems are alive in voice and detail, yet the speaker’s connections, and more so, disconnections, turn toward isolationism, solitude, and loneliness. At times, the collection leans into restless emotion: “I want to cry / when I think of how / I’ll look back at this moment someday / and cry.” Other moments pull the reader to “a far away place / of limitless palm trees and sunsets.” This is poetry that doesn’t try to fit into a traditional form. It questions, observes, and rethinks the world around it. Some moments might seem absurd, others deeply reflective, but all of them work together to create a book that is both thought-provoking and unpredictable. 

A landmark survey of African American literature about Black experiences of the maritime environment.

The ocean is foundational to the story of Africans in America, beginning with the searing Middle Passage. Initially evoking terror, pain, and death, the ocean also became associated with escape, empowerment, freedom, and home, as over time, African Americans in seaport towns found work, built communities, and gained knowledge from travelers. David R. Anderson shows in this groundbreaking collection of memoir, fiction, poetry, and more that African American maritime literature summons many of the traditional themes—survival in the face of overwhelming natural force, sublimity, demonstration of skill and merit, and self-discovery—but often with an eye on legacies of imperialism, slavery, discrimination, and cultural erasure.

Divided thematically across ten sections that address peril, labor, recreation, and more, the book gathers work by influential writers and intellectuals from the eighteenth century to the present, including: Lucille Clifton, Edwidge Danticat, Frederick Douglass, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, W. E. B. DuBois, Camille T. Dungy, Marcus Garvey, Robert Hayden, Zora Neale Hurston, Major Jackson, Harriet Jacobs, John S. Jacobs, Nella Larsen, Claude McKay, Toni Morrison, Walter Mosley, Natasha Trethewey, Phillis Wheatley, Colson Whitehead, and Kevin Young. 

Finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, 2026

Stephanie Niu’s I Would Define the Sun, awarded the 2024 Vanderbilt University Literary Prize, is a collection of poems that declare the impossibility of defining something as immense as the sun while striving toward that impossible act. In an era of planetary collapse, filled with bushfires, bleached coral, and burnout, Niu explores what love can do even through estrangement, even through being together at the end of the world. Recycling and folding language through duplexes, sestinas, and echoing couplets, this collection moves across great distances to include Christmas Island, Chinese-American immigration, and the precarity and abundance of the sea through formal and lyric poetry. Refitting the world into a size “made for [her] hands, [her] human tongue,” Niu propels readers into continuous motion as she searches for home.

Finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, 2026

Stephanie Niu’s I Would Define the Sun, awarded the 2024 Vanderbilt University Literary Prize, is a collection of poems that declare the impossibility of defining something as immense as the sun while striving toward that impossible act. In an era of planetary collapse, filled with bushfires, bleached coral, and burnout, Niu explores what love can do even through estrangement, even through being together at the end of the world. Recycling and folding language through duplexes, sestinas, and echoing couplets, this collection moves across great distances to include Christmas Island, Chinese-American immigration, and the precarity and abundance of the sea through formal and lyric poetry. Refitting the world into a size “made for [her] hands, [her] human tongue,” Niu propels readers into continuous motion as she searches for home.

Winner of the 2026 PIA MidAmerica GraphEx Award for Best of Category, Hardcover Book Binding

Finalist for the 2026 Locus Awards in the Illustrated and Art Books category 

"The Korshak Collection is a portrait and biography of a man and his family, who once looked upon the dark skies and saw Immortals, gods hunting in the storm clouds. Stephen Korshak decided to dedicate his life to tell us all how the thunder sounded and preserve the outlines of the cosmos for the awe of us all. Enjoy, believe—be amazed." —Guillermo del Toro, from the Foreword

Icons of the Fantastic: Illustrations of Imaginative Literature from the Korshak Collection features artwork by pioneering artists from over 160 years of published works of science fiction and fantasy. The illustrations in the collection appeared on the covers of timeless novels such as the Tarzan series by Edgar Rice Burroughs and classic pulp magazines from the 1930s through 1960s, such as Amazing Stories and Weird Tales. They accompany images of mischievous satyrs, ethereal mermaids, and spell-casting witches for texts ranging from The Tempest, Don Quixote, and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland to works by Edgar Allan Poe and H. G. Wells. Alongside essays about famous illustrators such as Arthur Rackham and Aubrey Beardsley, contributors engage in a critical reassessment of understudied artists such as José Segrelles, Wladyslaw Benda, Margaret Brundage, and Hannes Bok. The book includes a foreword by Guillermo del Toro, a preface by Kevin J. Anderson, an introduction by Michael Dirda, and an interview with renowned contemporary illustration artist Michael Whelan. 
 

In the second century CE, the multiethnic, multilingual, and religiously diverse Roman Empire grew to its greatest extent. To maintain order, Rome relied heavily on strict social hierarchies, established not only through legal frameworks like citizenship, but also through cultural markers (such as clothing and language) and personal traits (such as educational achievement). Even as Rome grew into one of the world’s most powerful empires, however, its social systems strained under the stresses caused by that very growth, which encouraged cultural interaction, long-distance travel, and social mobility—all of which threatened the hierarchies that underpinned Roman order.

It was during this time that the North African–born, Latin-speaking, Greek-educated Apuleius—whose own background showcases the multiplicity of identities available then to Roman individuals—flourished. He remains one of the ancient world’s best-known authors today, thanks particularly to his famous novel, Metamorphoses, known also as The Golden Ass. Taking a bird’s-eye view of his work, Ashli J. E. Baker proffers a bold new reading of Apuleius, proposing that across his writings there is a consistent focus on the theme of identity and its instability. By placing close readings in conversation with sociocultural and material contexts, she shows that because the structures of Roman power depended on inherently unreliable markers of identity, Apuleius’ work can be read as a biting critique of the fraught relationship between the individual, society, and the state in his contemporary Rome.

A powerful argument that the failure of ideology has created political disconnection and apathy

Political institutions increasingly fail to provide representations where citizens can recognize, identify, and imagine themselves as part of the institutions’ democratic project. Robin Truth Goodman argues that this disconnection is because ideology itself has gotten interrupted. Reversing Louis Althusser’s famous formulation of ideology as “calling” to citizens who, in response, turn toward the call, she argues that citizens now believe that ideology has turned away from them and stopped calling, endangering the most basic processes of modern democracies.

Deconstructing the widespread failure of democratic institutions to connect with individuals, Goodman examines recent works by authors such as Claire Vaye Watkins, Colson Whitehead, Ling Ma, Han Kang, and Ruth Ozeki that interrogate subjective agency within three different sites of social struggle: eco-catastrophe, pandemic, and food insecurity. She shows the themes that emerge from the novels reflecting and extending how the privatization and technologization of political decision-making have effectively cut off politicians and political institutions from the people they are supposed to serve.

Basing her study in the political philosophy of Judith Butler, Hannah Arendt, Julia Kristeva, and other prominent feminists, Goodman draws parallels with gender theory and argues that precarity in democratic societies has prevented citizens from finding points of engagement within politics. Diagnosing this widespread inability to translate private struggles into collective responses, Ideology, Interrupted is a powerful and inspiring call for new forms of societal bonds and political engagement to rejuvenate our democratic systems.

Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly.

Jennifer Franklin reimagines an Antigone for our times in her third collection, If Some God Shakes Your House, where filial devotion and ossified roles of gendered labor become the engine of her defiance. Franklin’s Antigone is ferocious, feeling, and unafraid of the consequences of speaking the truth to power about the political atrocities she has witnessed and personal traumas she has withstood. With a sensitivity that equally elevates the quotidian and the classical, and an attention that moves from the ancient ruins of Pompeii to the right of bodily autonomy and agency stripped away by our own Supreme Court, Franklin reveals the high stakes of our moment where “the one who does the judging judges things all wrong.” Franklin’s Antigone has embraced the sacrifice of self for something greater—a dual devotion to her disabled daughter and to her art. “For twenty years, I have been disappearing,” she writes in the book’s final poem, yet she continues to sing.

If You Would Let Me uses the myth of Persephone and Demeter to explore, in an utterly contemporary idiom, the hellish descents and unequivocal love of a mother and an adolescent child. The old story is reimagined in new terms—a present-day Persephone’s cycles of psychic affliction giving rise to botched facial piercings, social media ghostings, and squalls of physical fury—and revoiced in poems that sing Demeter’s rage, the depths of maternal grief, the seasons of erasure and renewal. In an electric transposition of classic lore onto modern descriptive modes, Dietz casts the imperiling pubescence and anxiety of middle school as canonically significant and dangerously chimerical: “Persephone and her friends brought / Waxed paper cups of ice cream / To the meadow by the river,” where “Their laughter made ripples a heron / Mistook for alewives underwater” while “Under some of their shirts” grew “The first hiccups of puffy nipples.” Throughout these teenage transformations and the distances they grow, Dietz remains as constant as a lodestar, offering unwavering light for her child to see by in order to return. “You must know what I mean even if / You do not know you know: Child, // When you called my name I heard you / Though your cries could find no wind.”  Formally meticulous and sonically intricate, these poems hear as much as they make themselves heard, harnessing ancient energies to create a picture of our recycled world—a story for our own times, one not only familiar but perennially, timelessly true.  

This book examines early modern texts that portray Mary Tudor’s girlhood and betrothal to a foreign prince, her brief marriage to the aging king of France, and her untimely widowhood, as well as retrospective accounts that depict her life in France, her relationships with her husband and his heir apparent, and her surreptitious romance and clandestine marriage to an English duke. Here, texts from England are put into conversation with a significant body of work that was written in French, Spanish, Italian, and Latin, culminating in an examination of a novel from North America that passed itself off as a genuine sixteenth-century memoir. Author JoAnn DellaNeva also examines a spectrum of extra-literary texts—such as dialogues, popular songs, letters, speeches, portraiture, tapestries, fashion, jewelry, and book illuminations—for the ways they too helped shape Mary’s image. In so doing, she analyzes the intersection of history and literature, demonstrating how porous the borders between these disciplines can be. Through a series of close readings that are informed by an examination of the cultural context behind these texts, Imagining Mary Tudor, Queen of France seeks to explain how Mary’s fictional biography proved to be so slippery, vacillating between portrayals of her as a virtuous, generally powerless woman and as a wily and wicked minx.

A century ago, activists confronting racism and colonialism—in India, South Africa, and Black America—used print media to connect with one another. Then, as now, the most effective medium for their undertakings was the English language. Imperfect Solidarities: Tagore, Gandhi, Du Bois, and the Global Anglophone tells the story of this interconnected Anglophone world. Through Rabindranath Tagore’s writings on China, Mahatma Gandhi’s recollections of South Africa, and W. E. B. Du Bois’s invocations of India, Madhumita Lahiri theorizes print internationalism. This methodology requires new terms within the worldwide hegemony of the English language (“the global Anglophone”) in order to encourage alternate geographies (such as the Global South) and new collectivities (such as people of color).

The women of print internationalism feature prominently in this account. Sonja Schlesin, born in Moscow, worked with Indians in South Africa. Sister Nivedita, an Irish woman in India, collaborated with a Japanese historian. Jessie Redmon Fauset, an African American, brought the world home to young readers through her work as an author and editor.

Reading across races and regions, genres and genders, Imperfect Solidarities demonstrates the utility of the neologism for postcolonial literary studies.

Demonstrating how art and literature remain vital to alternative imaginaries beyond the power of imperialism and modernization

Imperial Decay: Literature, Autonomy, and the End of Modernization in the Americas employs a dynamic, comparative approach to contemporary literature and visual art, showing how fiction, photography, poetry, and film from Latin America and the United States vividly illuminate the present. Focusing on the period from the end of the Cold War to the financial crisis of the late 2000s, Emilio Sauri contends that what brings these media together is not just the history of hemispheric connections but also, and more strikingly, the question of the artwork’s autonomy.

Elaborating on influential accounts that reveal how US hegemony in Latin America and the resistance it inspired throughout the region are bound up with the promise of modernization, Imperial Decay offers unique insights into the hollowing out of this promise at the end of the so-called American Century. Tracing this commitment back to the modernisms of the last century and forward to more recent works, this book casts canonical figures such as Ernest Hemingway, Walker Evans, and Gabriel García Márquez in a new and necessary light while developing a compelling interpretive framework for contemporary writers and artists from across the region, including Roberto Bolaño and Benjamin Kunkel, Alejandro Cartagena and Yvonne Venegas, and Kleber Mendonça Filho. Ultimately, Sauri shows why the work of art remains vital to the task of envisioning alternatives to the immiserations, ecological devastation, and degraded forms of life wrought by imperial decay.

In American Waters is the catalog of an exhibition co-organized by Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, and Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts.

The exhibition and this associated catalog invite visitors to discover the sea as an expansive way to reflect on American culture and environment, learn how coastal and maritime symbols moved inland across the United States, and question what it means to be “in American waters.” Work by Georgia O’Keeffe, Amy Sherald, Kay WalkingStick, Norman Rockwell, Hale Woodruff, Paul Cadmus, Thomas Hart Benton, Jacob Lawrence, Valerie Hegarty, Stuart Davis, and many others is included, along with essays from scholars, critics, and the curators.

An innovative account of how literature has helped bridge the gap between ordinary human experience and the vast scale of the natural world.

Is it possible to connect our lived experience of time to the vast eons of the planet’s history? This question has perplexed writers and scientists for more than two hundred years, from Darwin’s account of natural selection through contemporary writing about climate change. Benjamin Morgan’s insightful study shows how literature of the nineteenth century helped readers leap from their everyday sense of time and space to the vast, inhuman scales of the natural world. 

Exploring writings that range from Arctic voyage narratives to Thomas Hardy’s novels, utopian fiction of the 1880s, H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine, and beyond, Morgan situates scalar incommensurability in its deeper intellectual and cultural contexts. Victorians struggled to grasp senses of proportion not only through time scales but also through scales of aesthetic magnitude, of relative value, of social totality, and of the planet’s future. Morgan argues that a scale is not just a timeline; it is a way of finding order and proportion through many kinds of comparative measurement. His literary history of scale illuminates both the challenge of imagining the vastness of planetary time and the history of creating a human sense of proportion.

An inspiring document of passion and advocacy, In the Spirit of Wetlands reveals the transformative power of restoration.

From National Book Award winner Patricia Smith 
 
One of the most magnetic and esteemed poets in today’s literary landscape, Patricia Smith fearlessly confronts the tyranny against the black male body and the tenacious grief of mothers in her compelling new collection, Incendiary Art. She writes an exhaustive lament for mothers of the "dark magicians," and revisits the devastating murder of Emmett Till. These dynamic sequences serve as a backdrop for present-day racial calamities and calls for resistance. Smith embraces elaborate and eloquent language— "her gorgeous fallen son a horrid hidden / rot. Her tiny hand starts crushing roses—one by one / by one she wrecks the casket’s spray. It’s how she / mourns—a mother, still, despite the roar of thorns"— as she sharpens her unerring focus on incidents of national mayhem and mourning. Smith envisions, reenvisions, and ultimately reinvents the role of witness with an incendiary fusion of forms, including prose poems, ghazals, sestinas, and sonnets. With poems impossible to turn away from, one of America’s most electrifying writers reveals what is frightening, and what is revelatory, about history. 

Winner, 2017 Los Angeles Times Book Prize 
Finalist, 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry 
Winner, NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in the Poetry category  
Winner, 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award 
Winner, 2018 BCALA Best Poetry Award 
Winner, Abel Meeropol Award for Social Justice 
Finalist, Neustadt International Prize for Literature 
Winner, 2021 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize

Reliving the overdoses of beloved friends, Malachi Black closes this book’s opening poem with a resuscitating command:  “Doctor, / turn back. One of us lives.”  Indirect Light is a testament to and apologia for this assertion of vitality, each eponymous poem an elegy dedicated to one of Black’s dearly departed. Though this book mourns an irretrievable past,  it wages war against amnesia, refusing to let death erase the vibrancy of their lives. These poems preserve “the breath we left beside us on the train tracks,” “the watery inscriptions of nearby dogwood branches / dipped in shade,” “our bookbags’ mouths / pouting open on our laps,” “our street-scabbed bodies / briefly tinseled in the sun.” 

Insofar as this collection returns to friends and kin to honor them by the indirect light of memory, it also seeks to memorialize the author’s personal experience of adolescence and addiction amidst the opioid epidemic. It is a lament for all that’s lost and a paean to the near misses and the just enough: a dim glow you can see by, a cup of coffee passed during NA, a prayer during detox to “be // as empty / as the sky” if floating means survival. 

Studies bronze icons of Hindu and Buddhist deities to better understand the flow of ideas across the sea routes of Maritime Asia in the first millennium.

While the great temples of Southeast Asia have inspired research in the past, the careful study of their smaller and more portable counterparts—bronze icons of Hindu and Buddhist deities—gives us a more dynamic understanding of the movement of beliefs and practices across Asia. These sacred images—found across Java, Sumatra, Kalimantan, and Sulawesi—rank alongside monumental temple complexes like Borobudur as among the most significant artistic and religious achievements of the region. Yet they have too often been treated as mere antiquities, prized for their beauty but stripped of their deeper historical meaning. 

Mechling recovers what these bronzes can actually tell us. By tracing their distribution patterns alongside their artistic style, iconography, fabrication techniques, and metal compositions, she reconstructs the shared cults, ritual practices, and technological relationships that linked communities across the western Indonesian archipelago and beyond from the sixth to the tenth century. The picture that emerges overturns a long-held scholarly paradigm—inherited from the colonial era—of passive Southeast Asian reception of Indian cultural influence. In its place, Indonesian Buddhist Bronzes in the Making of Maritime Asia reveals a world of multi-directional exchange among active, cosmopolitan participants whose networks of creativity and devotion shaped one of history's most dynamic cultural crossroads.

Interiority in German Women’s Writing for the first time systematically gathers and engages with contributions of German women authors to the discourse on interiority (Innerlichkeit) from 1750 to 1850. This volume shifts the recent focus on abstract theoretical and medical discourses on inwardness to the origins of interiority in literature and philosophy as written and experienced by women from the Age of Sensibility (Empfindsamkeit) to the Romantic era. At the same time, it makes a claim for and explores the ramifications of understanding interiority as a feminine discourse. Contributors investigate the works of women authors who searched to find rescue from their cultural and personal entrapment via creative spaces and various modes of interiority in theatrical performances, poetic writings, letters, biographical narratives, prose, and fairy tales. From the case studies and literary analyses in the volume, interiority emerges as a spectrum of approaches to defining, resisting, and transforming the innermost self. 

In the early 1900s, a handful of unconventional couples emerged within the American radical Left. In Intimate Radicals, Ashley Walters tells the story of a group of young, East European Jewish women and white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant men— such as Jack London, Sinclair Lewis, and William English Walling, among other notable figures in American literature, domestic and international affairs, and early Hollywood—and how they imbued their romances with revolutionary principles. The relationships captivated the public and became a source of intrigue, largely driven by the growth of human-interest journalism. Through individual biographies, historical narrative, and literary analysis, Walters reveals the cultural and political contingencies of desire.

 As Progressive Era radicals rebelled against the constraints of an earlier era, East European Jews—and Jewish women in particular— came to embody a new cosmopolitan ideal and European revolutionary spirit. Drawing on letters, newspapers, literature, and film, Walters shows how the public reception of these patrician-immigrant relationships lent credence to a new cultural mythology of Jewish womanhood. The men’s desire for East European Jewish women, she also points out, can be viewed as a form of “radical tourism,” in which men who enjoy a degree of privilege pursue an alluring Other in the hope of obtaining a more worldly identity.

This book is published with the support of the Jordan Schnitzer First Book Publication Award, administered by the Association for Jewish Studies.

A book-length poem serving as a son’s elegy for his late father, an artist and forest steward.

Rob Schlegel’s long poem Inventory emerges from three discrete inventories the poet must catalog in the aftermath of a sudden loss: a selection of his father’s art to be organized for a posthumous exhibition, two hundred acres of trees in a forest stewarded by his father in western Oregon, and his own emotional landscape in the aftermath of his father’s death. As Schlegel moves through these collections of objects and emotions, he learns how to navigate grief. His father’s paintings act as an inventory of the poet’s own life, with each landscape recalling a moment in time, each sketch holding a story. Celebrating a close relationship while mourning its loss, Schlegel reflects on the ties between art and grief, parents and children, people and trees. 

At the time of his father’s death, an extreme heatwave was moving across the region, broadening the scope of grief from the personal and familial to encompass tragedies on a larger scale. Social disintegration and climate disaster weave through the lives of a family in mourning as they navigate the complexity of how to sit with loss, change, love, and art. Through quiet, measured verse and arresting simplicity, Inventory extends the ekphrastic tradition into a contemporary elegy rich in both profound sadness and optimism for the future.