O, The Oprah Magazine, "42 Best LGBTQ Books of 2020" NPR's Favorite Books of 2020 In his fourth collection, 13th Balloon, Mark Bibbins turns his candid eye to the American AIDS crisis. With quiet consideration and dark wit, Bibbins addresses the majority of his poems to Mark Crast, his friend and lover who died from AIDS at the early age of 25. Every broken line and startling linguistic turn grapples with the genre of elegy: what does it mean to experience personal loss, Bibbins seems to ask, amidst a greater societal tragedy? The answer is blurred— amongst unforeseen disease, intolerance, and the intimate consequences of mismanaged power. Perhaps the most unanswerable question arrives when Bibbins writes, “For me elegy/ is like a Ouija planchette/ something I can barely touch/ as I try to make it/ say what I want it to say.” And while we are still searching for the words that might begin an answer, Bibbins helps us understand that there is endless value in continuing—through both joy and grief—to wonder.

A compendium of stories about the importance of poems in people’s lives, accumulating a remarkable history of Copper Canyon Press. For its fiftieth anniversary, Copper Canyon Press invited a broad community of staffers, board members, and poets to help curate a celebratory anthology that it named A House Called Tomorrow. The response to that invitation, however, exceeded the book. The Press received so many stories about the poems, from people far and wide, that it knew it had to publish a second volume—this one. Come Shining is both an oral (and visual) history of Copper Canyon Press and a lasting testament to the power of poetry within people’s lives. If A House Called Tomorrow is the birthday cake, this is the birthday party: a joyous din of reminiscences, laughter, support, and yet more poems, all bound between two covers. Contributor stories are organized across thematic sections—such as “Personal Voltas” and “Stories for Our Tomorrow”—and are accompanied by a timeline of the Press, historic photos, and facsimiles of touching notes that Copper Canyon has received from readers and poets. The result is a remarkable account of a half-century of publishing, proof positive that poetry is, indeed, vital to language and living.

“Follows the development of US aviation from the captive balloons of the Civil War, through WWI and into the post war years . . . Highly Recommended.” —Firetrench Strike from the Air looks at the early development of the U.S. military aviation branches, starting with the Civil War and moving to the first use of military aircraft during General Pershing’s pursuit of the revolutionary Pancho Villa. Before the country was drawn into the First World War, a number of Americans traveled to Europe to volunteer for the Lafayette Escadrille in France, as well as the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Naval Air Service. Many of these men eventually joined the newly created United States Air Service, taking their valuable experience and knowledge with them. Among the notable early US aviators were individuals such as Eugene Bullard, the first African-American military pilot, and eccentric loners like Frank Luke. The part played by the US Navy and USMC is not neglected. At the end of the First World War, a group of American pilots joined together to form the Kosciuszko Squadron that fought against the Russians in the Polish/Russian War. The final part of the book contains escape reports by USAS pilots and observers, which gives a real insight into the conditions they were subjected to in German prison camps during the First World War. To complete this fascinating look at those exciting and challenging early days, Strike from the Air includes approximately 250 photographs, many of which have ever been seen before. “A remarkable book that shows just how difficult a start American military aviation endured.” —New York Journal of Books