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The poems featured in this award-winning collection contemplate the realities of the contemporary Puerto Rican experience. Rooted in the archipelago’s landscapes and the emotional topographies of diaspora, this collection confronts the fallout from colonialism while celebrating the sustaining power of friendship, memory, artistry, and collective love.

Holding together a scattered geography, the poems recognize land as both tangible territory and collective imaginary, reflecting on interconnected political, social, and economic crises that shape the intimacies of everyday life. With striking clarity and intimate reverence, Amanda Hernández names the fractures—and the hopes—that shape contemporary Puerto Rican life, ultimately affirming love as the force that endures.

In poems selected from his long career, Jim Daniels focuses on Detroit and other Rust Belt cities, where issues of class and race and justice play out in the streets and kitchens and backyards and garages of the Americans trying to live and make a living there. Known for his courage, clarity, and accessibility, Daniels examines the tension between our idealized country and the messier cultural and economic divides, often focusing on those who can’t afford or have access to “magic.”

In this powerful debut collection, present-day women of the South Asian diaspora grapple with belonging and are haunted by intergenerational inheritances. Meghana Mysore, herself the daughter of Indian immigrants, spins her stories around narrators struggling to assimilate into the surreal world around them. At times, this disorientation skews speculative, where deceased mothers reappear as chiding, broken-down cars. At turns absurd and darkly humorous, the women in Mysore’s stories all experience transformation, be it small or monumental, where they find spaces of freedom and delight within their circumstances.

Nancy Lord, one of Alaska’s best-known writers, has been writing fiction and nonfiction in Alaska for more than fifty years. Let Them Tell You gathers selected stories from her three previous short fiction books, each first published in a different decade, alongside newer work, some published in journals and some unpublished until now.

Lord first wrote as a way to think about her life in Alaska when she was a young woman, and her curiosity took her farther afield with each book. Some stories draw on personal experience; others from newspaper headlines, historical events, and myths. Some respond to earlier writers and their literary works. Some are serious about social concerns and matters of justice; some are seriously funny. Animals and children, seekers and dreamers—in one case an entire community—all take turns as central characters. This collection traces Lord’s writerly influences and her concerns for both humankind and the natural world and suggests the ways writers and readers alike travel through time and imagined lives, learning as they go about cruelties, compassion, and the human heart. An introduction by the author and an afterword by scholar Eric Heyne supplement the stories with context about the writer’s journey and the evolution of Alaska literature.

Lord’s close observation of the natural world is a hallmark of her work, as is her attention to environmental themes and social issues. Let Them Tell You demonstrates the range of her talent for presenting not only variations on life in Alaska but the human condition on a larger and timeless scale.

Reaching across miles and memory to deconstruct the American Dream in the Midwest Rust Belt

Arjan, a teen refugee from postcommunist Albania, and Jess, a Midwestern high schooler, strike up an unlikely friendship working a seasonal job on a farm in Michigan. Now in their thirties, the two have taken different paths—he chasing the American Dream with a running rotation of day-labor gigs, and she living on the road and off the grid, trying to escape the very same ideal. When Jess lands in Hamtramck, just a few miles from her suburban Detroit upbringing after years wandering, they find themselves trudging the same unplowed sidewalks, spinning loads at the same laundromat, and picking the same jukebox songs at the local dive. Both are haunted by the ghosts of childhood traumas, a chorus of the collective unconscious that takes us from the Albanian coast to the Rust Belt heartland. So near one another and yet so far apart, they must reach across miles and memories to discover that the most important voice in our heads is our own. 

A kaleidoscopic novel-in-stories set at a fictional Midwest college

Two centuries old and covered in ivy, Wisconsin’s Buchanan College is populated by an eclectic mix of students, staff, and professors hailing from the nearby suburbs to the far corners of the globe. From the outside, Buchanan seems an idyllic world of higher learning. Yet behind its bucolic exterior, a series of interconnected dramas play out: a slew of first-year students mysteriously disappear within days of moving in; an injured hockey star discovers an unlikely fountain of youth; an alumna returns to campus after fifty years in the hope of reconnecting with a former love. And throughout the novel we follow the story of Jenny Ramirez, a social worker and the wife of a popular professor, who commits an act that alters how the college sees her, and how she sees herself. Over a span of four years, from orientation to graduation, the characters in Liberal Arts are forced to weigh their ideals and aspirations against the harsh and often ridiculous realities of the world, and are left asking what, if anything, a liberal arts education has left to teach them.