Böcker utgivna av Persea Books Inc

In SOFAR, poet-naturalist Elizabeth Bradfield attends our current ecological and historic moment, her decades-long queer love, a life time of work on boats, and her body's shifting currents with wry yearning and linguistic delight. SOFAR is an acronym for the "sound frequency and ranging channel," a deep layer of oceanic water that enables sound to travel vast distances, and, drawing upon her deep knowledge and experience of the sea, Bradfield plumbs what can be heard by listening across the vast distances of our lives-within our memories and larger histories, between strangers and beloveds, and to the more-than-human world. Bradfield's work as a naturalist gives an earned intimacy and nuanced authority to her eco-grief, field observations, and metaphoric leaps as she regards whales, cusk eels, and storm petrels. These are the poems of a woman unafraid of navigating the depths and rip currents she moves through.

Brimming with music, bursting with flora, the poems in Valencia Robin's second collection are both a walking tour of local neighborhoods and a journey into space and across time-ways of looking and listening to the past in order to find our best way forward. Engaging with an array of artistic heroes-James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, Eavan Boland, Gwendolyn Brooks, Etheridge Knight, Audre Lorde, Nina Simone, Pablo Neruda, and Stevie Wonder among them-Robin looks for guidance, grounding, and even hope in spite of the traumas she witnesses and experiences daily. In one striking masterpiece, she gives voice to a prescient childhood icon, Lieutenant Uhura of Star Trek, who brings the show's unfulfilled vision of interstellar racial harmony to bear on the killing of black and brown bodies in contemporary America.  Whether set in space or down the block in Charlottesville or Milwaukee, the poems in Lost Cities offer us hope amid the heartbreak of a fractured world.

In Other Times, Midnight, her debut collection, Andrea Ballou explores the aftermath of loss-death, divorce, and departures-and asks the toughest questions: how do we contend with grief and remorse, and where does the spirit go to wait out trauma? Ballou's poems fight our "impulse to not speak," aware that naming, and that speech itself, is a matter of life and death. Her startling and often humorous images rooted in the fields, forests and domesticity of rural life are juxtaposed with oblique, at times irreverent, adaptations of Celtic and Greek myth and biblical stories. For Ballou, language is both tool and weapon, as useful and durable as a hoe, wheelbarrow, sword, thread. Caught "in the mouth of midnight," these poems wrestle with the numinous, their voices-cranky and cajoling, always compassionate and vulnerable-urging us toward the fullness of being human, daring us, despite it all, to love again.

"Ingenious out of necessity, A Mother Is an Intellectual Thing centers around the scapegoating and exile of the author by her mother. In these essays, Kimberly Grey harnesses her formidable intellectual and creative resources to create coherence for an unstable, traumatized self. To do so, she calls on-beseeches-dozens of brilliant thinkers and artists for help, among them Etel Adnan, Roland Barthes, John Cage, Anna Freud, Mina Loy, Elaine Scarry, Gertrude Stein, and Simone Weil. Grey's engagement with these figures (and many others) is part of her effort to stabilize, if not fully comprehend, the inconceivability of her maternal banishment. By thinking her pain rather than feeling it, Grey becomes an expert witness to her own trauma, a ponderer of motherhood even as her identity as daughter has been rescinded"--

We Call to the Eye and to the Night is an amalgam of eminent poets -Hayan Charara, Leila Chatti, Nathalie Handal, Fady Joudah, and Naomi Shihab Nye, among them-and those who have just begun to make their mark. These poets are descended from diverse countries and represent a breathtaking intersection of voices, experiences, and perspectives. Divided into whimsical sections (named for lines from poems they include), the anthology features an evocative array of erotic and romantic selections, as well as ones portraying love of family, friends, heritage, and homeland. Exquisitely curated and introduced by acclaimed authors Hala Alyan and Zeina Hashem Beck, We Call to the Eye and to the Night is at once sexy, sensuous, adventurous, and nostalgic-a treasury of love emanating from the Arab world and its diaspora.

"The poems in Glitter Bomb pull no punches: irreverent, devastating, even nasty at times, they capture the present moment in all its absurdity and hyper-reality. 'Lampwise by altarlight' (pace Dylan Thomas), Aaron Belz keep his eye on the object: often hilarious, he is also wise." -Marjorie Perloff

Road Scatter (as in tire-sprayed gravel) is an examination of breakage and survival, compelled by the decline and death of the poet's mother but engaged, too, by global encounters with the Iraq war, a rabid dog in Africa, and an at-large South American former dictator, for example. Though a book of mourning, it is also one of living, "rising from grief, returning light in all directions." --Jane Hirshfield

Miss Peabody, a lonely spinster in London, writes a fan letter to Diana Hopewell, an Australian novelist. In reply, Hopewell sends installments of her novel-in-progress, the zany adventures of a trio of gently lesbian ladies, a headmistress and two companions, touring Europe with a hapless student. With each mail delivery, Miss Peabody's involvement with the novelist and her characters intensifies until fantasy and reality poignantly merge. "Wonderful . . . gives great pleasure" (New York Times Book Review).

After an unplanned admission to a nursing home, Mr. Scobie must protect himself and his dreams from the soul-killing proprietress, Matron Price. Playing Brahms and reciting Wordsworth is not enough. Yet his very simple riddle and its ordinary answer may change the institution forever. Can a voice calling for dignity be heard? "A satire of great verve and acerbity" (New York Times Book Review), comparable to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

After his successful first novel, Meir suffers writer's block. Then his father, poet and charmer of women, who supposedly died decades earlier, contacts him and they arrange to meet. Fragmented, troubling memories of a forgotten childhood time spent alone with his father rise to Meir's consciousness. Swirling floodwater, a man hiding from the Gestapo, a woman flirting, a bloodstained sheet. What happened during that time, and why did his father disappear? While solving these riddles of the past, Meir inhabits the borderland between memory and artistic creation. There he finds emotions so deeply tangled in his being that they can only be expressed through art. He begins to write again-a story of a loving son who witnessed a seduction and perhaps also a murder.

A unique collection that delves deep into the consciousness of a West Virginian coal mining community.This extraordinary debut is an inhabiting of the town of Logan, West Virginia. In four gorgeous lyric sequences, Alena Hairston conducts the voices of this population of miners and their kin, poignantly rendering their destitution, their heartbreak, and their incongruous strength and spirit. Winner of Persea's inaugural Lexi Rudnitsky Poetry Prize, a first-book award for American women poets.

From one of our most charismatic poets, a personal song to America.This pulsating collection picks up the beat and imagery of Patrick Rosal's thrilling debut, Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive. Here, though, the poet's electric narratives and portraits extend beyond the working class streets of urban New Jersey. Modeling poems on the kundiman, a song of unrequited love sung by Filipinos for their country in times of oppression, he professes his conflicted feelings for America, while celebrating and lamenting his various heritageswhether by chatting up St. Patrick, riffing on race relations, or channeling Lapu Lapu in a rejoinder to Magellan. Passionate, provocative, and irrepressible throughout, My American Kundiman further establishes Rosal as a poet to be reckoned with.

Curt Flood was a dazzling center fielder for the St. Louis Cardinals when, in 1969, he was traded to the Philadelphia Phillies. But instead of accepting his fate, Flood shocked baseball by suing the sport over its Reserve Clause, an age-old rule that bound players to their teams in perpetuity. His extraordinary case went all the way to the Supreme Court and helped pave the way for major advancements in the rights of professional athletes.Stepping Up is Flood's astonishing story. Accessible to teens but of interest to baseball fans of all ages, it begins with Flood as a an artistic black kid in Oakland, and continues with his eye-opening experience as a minor leaguer in the racist South. It describes Flood's years with the exciting Cardinals teams of the 1960s (with teammates like Stan Musial, Joe Torre, and Bob Gibson), and his increasing frustrations with baseball's mistreatment of players-especially blacks. The book culminates with his historic suit, which changed his life and the sports world forever.In lively, conversational prose, Alex Belth provides fascinating details and anecdotes about Flood's Cardinals, the Negro Leagues, and many of the dramatic differences in baseball-and America-between Flood's era and today. Including a foreword by acclaimed broadcaster Tim McCarver (who, as a player, was traded with Flood to the Phillies), Stepping Up is the compelling tale of a ballplayer's desire to make a difference.

From the acclaimed, award-winning poet, this new collection is a gripping search for life and truth.From Thylias Moss, one of America's most innovative poets, comes Tokyo Butter, perhaps her most innovative book to date. Inventing new poetics as she goes, Moss applies her exhilarating capacity for language to a synthesis of the personal, the historical, and the cultural. She searches searches for vestiges of Deirdre, a beloved cousin who has left the living; for hints of Cindy Song, a college student missing since 2001; and for manifestations of her true self in the archaic wings of science.Moss' imagination is, as always, ravenous, interrogativebut in Tokyo Butter there is an urgency amidst the jagged, beautiful verse that has become her trademark.

Named by Black Issues as the best poetry book of 2004, this is the astonishing story of a slave girl in the antebellum South.This critically acclaimed verse-novel follows the unforgettable Varl, a slave on a plantation in Tennessee, on her path to freedom. Wise beyond her years and wildly creative, Varl must choose between the only life she's knownher Mamalee, her friends (especially her beloved Dob), the farmland she's explored since childhoodand her growing need for self-determination. Standing in her path, waiting to quash her spirit, is her master, the cunning Peter Perry, "a collector of rare things" who aims to add Varl herself to his perverse assortment of oddities.With Slave Moth, Thylias Moss shows herself yet again to be "a visionary storyteller" (Charles Simic). Written in gorgeous verse, it is an explosion of life in the face of servitude.

In Blue Venus, Lisa Russ Spaar explores the intimate relationship between the sensual and the sacred. Her nocturnal poems weave themselves into the very fabric of private fervorlyric, sexual, spiritualbeginning with "Dusk" and continuing on until "Dawn." Fierce and giving, Spaar's exquisite verse isolates essential moments of vulnerability and wonder. A series on insomniain the voices of some notable insomniacsis among the most moving extended sequences in recent memory. Elsewhere, she traces poetry back to its primordial rootsprayer, lullabye, mourning, exaltation. Propelled throughout by a resolute belief in the relationship between the human and the cosmic Blue Venus is "a brilliant new star in poetry's firmament" (Carol Muske-Dukes).

In a single volume, the essential work of a major Modernist poet and thinker. Some see Laura Riding and Laura (Riding) Jackson as virtually two separate writers, the former a strikingly original Modernist poet and critic, the latter a supposedly reclusive thinker on man and woman, language, meaning, and truth. However, encountering her work in this rich cross-section, one discovers a remarkable consistency of theme developing throughout, from the earliest poems and stories to the "post-poetic" writings of her final years. The selections presented here span sixty-four years (1923-1987) and include famous works of poetry and prosesome long out of print or difficult to findsignificant lesser-known writings, and an important previously unpublished late essay, "Body & Mind and the Linguistic Ultimate."

Individually, each of these 27 stories is authentic and immediate, as memorable as family history passed from one generation to the next; taken together, they comprise a vivid, enduring portrait of the struggles of immigrant Jews-particularly women-on New York's Lower East Side.

The debut collection from a vibrant, streetwise voice: Winner of the 2002 Members' Choice Award from the Asian American Writers Workshop.Patrick Rosal's poetry rings with the music of no-frills industrial towns of central New Jersey. Portraits of hip-hoppers and condemned men (whose misdeeds as boys forever shaped their futures) alternate with dynamic riffs on longingsexual and filialand on the poet's Filipino roots. Unpredictable and breathtaking as a sax solo, these poems are the indelible marks made by a world that has been simultaneously kept close and left behind.