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Reading various works by US expatriates Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein, Parry compares the cultural politics of U.S. canonical modernism with alternative representations of temporality, hybridity, erasure, and sexuality in the work of the Taiwanese writers Yü Kwang-chung and Hsia Yü and the Asian American immigrant author Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Juxtaposing poems by Pound and Yü Kwang-chung, Parry shows how Yü’s fragmented, ambivalent modernist form reveals the effects of neocolonialism while Pound denies and obscures U.S. imperialism in Asia, asserting a form of nondevelopmental universalism through both form and theme. Stein appropriates discourses of American modernity and identity to represent nonnormative desire and sexuality, and Parry contrasts this tendency with representations of sexuality in the contemporary experimental poetry of Hsia Yü. Finally, Parry highlights the different uses of modernist forms by Pound in his Cantos—which incorporate a multiplicity of decontextualized and ahistorical voices—and by Cha in her 1982 novel Dictee, a historicized, multilingual work. Parry’s sophisticated readings provide a useful critical framework for apprehending how “minor modernisms” illuminate the histories erased by certain canonical modernist texts.

Winner of the 2018 Hollis Summers Poetry Prize

Joseph J. Capista’s Intrusive Beauty reckons with reluctant ecstasy and the improbable forms that beauty assumes. In this powerful debut, Capista traverses earth and ether to yield poems that elucidate the space between one’s life and one’s livelihood. While its landscapes range from back-alley Baltimore to the Bitterroot Valley, this book remains close to unbidden beauty and its capacity to sway one’s vision of the world. Whether a young father who won’t lower the volume on the radio or a Victorian farm boy tasked with scaring birds from seed-sown furrows, the inhabitants of Intrusive Beauty are witness to the startling ease with which one’s assorted lives come in time to comprise a singular life. Mortality, love, duty, desire, an acute longing for transcendence: here, old themes resound anew as they’re uttered in a multiplicity of forms and means, holding fast always to the heart.

Part Baudelairian flâneur, an Arcadian shepherd, the speaker in John Isles’s brave new Inverse Sky encounters a fragmented history. It is nineteenth-century California, and the missions are still burning after the Americans establish the Bear Flag Republic; it is the twenty-first century, and the miners of '49 are relegated to a mural in an arcade. Both a loner and a lover, Isles’s pilgrim-poet takes us on a journey where Native Americans are “missing persons” outside a diorama of their ancestors, then sets us adrift in settings ranging from film noir to the clear-cut hills of modern-day California landscapes, under siege but not defeated.

Inverse Sky evokes the paradigm of a shocked and disbelieving child dealing with a broken promise, yet the poems carry within themselves the knowledge that promises will be kept. The only response to broken promises is “to come undone / to come and go in a single breath.” But this is a beginning as well as an end. Each poem becomes a new world—for if there is anything on earth worth loving, it is something made with the world as it has been handed down to us. Inverse Sky is an insistent effort to "love the things not loving back.”

The short lyric poems in Larissa Szporluk's new collection, Isolato, search for meaning and beauty—for poetry—in an unpredictable and incomprehensible world. Their voices break from the contemporary preoccupation with autobiography, held together by language rather than a sustained narrative or plot. Yet the narrative fragments clearly evoke certain themes and moods: interaction of and struggle between the human and natural world; violence, particularly against women and children; alienation and betrayal; the mysteries of the universe, God, and death; and, of course, poetry itself.

Variously called a religious, a metaphysical, or a visionary poet, Szporluk has been compared to Emily Dickinson and George Herbert as well as to twentieth-century poets like Sylvia Plath, Mark Strand, and Louise Glück. Her work is concise, experimental, and challenging. Language and syntax are often elusive, the logic that of dreams or music, the imagery mysterious. The poems, once read, are not easily dismissed. Like the poet's “Deer Crossing the Sea,”readers find “the promise of nectar / haunts them forever, the shore pecked out / of their eyes, and there, in its stead, / something greater to catch, / a scent that would paralyze God.”

2015 PEN Open Book Award Finalist

Angela Jackson’s latest collection of poetry borrows its title from a lyric in Barbara Lewis’s 1963 hit single “Hello Stranger,” recorded at Chess Records in Chicago. Like the song, Jackson’s poems are a melodic ode to the African American experience, informed by both individual lives and community history, from the arrival of the first African slave in Virginia in 1619 to post-Obama America.

It Seems Like a Mighty Long Time reflects the maturity of Jackson’s poetic vision. The Great Migration, the American South, and Chicago all serve as signposts, but it is the complexity of individual lives—both her own and those who have gone before, walk beside, and come after—that invigorate this collection. Upon surveying so vast a landscape, Jackson finds that sorrow meets delight, and joy lifts up anger and despair. And for all this time, love is the agent, the wise and just rule and guide.

In his plain-spoken lyrics and dramatic monologues, Michael Burns digs at the marrow. His poems—in formal and free verse—are quick, incisive, and always capable of revealing the dark whimsies of fate and the pain of our own actions and inactions.

These poems travel to Casqui mounds in the Arkansas Delta, traffic-clogged urban streets, a wasteland in Oklahoma, and Faulkner’s Rowan Oak. They assume the voices of others so convincingly that we find ourselves face to face with hunters, philanderers, husbands, a Union general, a Snopes, and even a version of God.

Gathering the images of each place, crafting lines in clear, unpretentious language, Burns comes across new knowledge, confronting the ever-present mysteries and the ways the mind loves to lie to itself.

In It Will Return, her most recent volume of poems, Julia Hartwig is in dialogue with other great artists—Keats, Rimbaud, Milosz, Beethoven, Ravel, Van Gogh—considering the implications of greatness. Alongside this expansive perspective, we find attention to the smallest details, composing quotidian moments that open out into unexpected meaning. For Hartwig, close attention to the material world is a kind of spiritual undertaking. Like her Nobel Prize–winning contemporary Wislawa Szymborska, she writes poems that appear simple but are somehow all the more capable of yielding profound insights.

It Will Return reflects Hartwig’s firsthand involvement in Polish history and culture, and its poems are sensitive to the calamities of Poland’s tumultuous twentieth century. But It Will Return is a human collection before it is a national one, and these political motifs form the backdrop for more universal dramas.

This anthology gathers fiction, poetry, memoirs, oral histories, and journalistic pieces by some of the best writers to chronicle the Italian American experience in the Garden State. These works focus on ethnic identity and the distinctive culture of New Jersey, which has long been home to a large and vital Italian American community.

Filled with passion, humor, and grace, these writings depict a variety of experiences, including poignant but failed attempts at conformity and the alienation often felt by ethnic Americans. The authors also speak of the strength gained through the preservation of their communities and the realization that it is often the appreciation of their heritage that helps them to succeed. Although presented from the vantage point of only one ethnic group, this book addresses in microcosm the complexities of American identity, depicting situations and conveying emotions that will resonate with people of all immigrant ancestries.

Among the many writers featured are Gay Talese, Bill Ervolino, Tom Perrotta, Louise DeSalvo, Carole Mazo, Diane di Prima, and Maria Laurino. Each of the contributors provides a fresh perspective on the diversity, complexity, and richness of the Italian American experience.

Publication of this book is made possible in part by a grant from the Institute of Italian and Italian American Heritage Studies, State of New Jersey.