"A tribute to miners and working people everywhere."--Howard Zinn

The hard times faced by steelworkers and miners in America's rust belt inform these poetic oral histories.

Social Poetics documents the imaginative militancy and emergent solidarities of a new, insurgent working class poetry community rising up across the globe. Part autobiography, part literary criticism, part Marxist theory, Social Poetics presents a people’s history of the poetry workshop from the founding director of the Worker Writers School. Nowak illustrates not just what poetry means, but what it does to and for people outside traditional literary spaces, from taxi drivers to street vendors, and other workers of the world.

INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE FINALIST • From the award-winning, internationally bestselling Spanish author of A Heart So White comes an immersive, provocative novel propelled by a seemingly random murder. "Sometimes startling, sometimes hilarious, and always intelligent ... Marías [has] a penetrating empathy."—The New York Times Book Review Each day before work María Dolz stops at the same café. There she finds herself drawn to a couple who is also there every morning. Observing their seemingly perfect life helps her escape the listlessness of her own. But when the man is brutally murdered and María approaches the widow to offer her condolences, what began as mere observation turns into an increasingly complicated entanglement. Invited into the widow's home, she meets—and falls in love with—a man who sheds disturbing new light on the crime. As María recounts this story, we are given a murder mystery brilliantly encased in a metaphysical enquiry, a novel that grapples with questions of love and death, chance and coincidence, and above all, with the slippery essence of the truth and how it is told.

A compelling debut collection from the first Coptic American poet to be published in the United States.

Praise for Bill Berkson: "A serene master of syntactical sleight and transformer of the mundane into the marvelous."—Publishers Weekly Wide-ranging and experimental, Expect Delays confronts past and present with rare equilibrium, eyeballing mortality while appreciating the richness and surprise, as well as the inevitable griefs, inherent in the time allowed. Dress Trope Critics should wear white jackets like lab technicians; curators, zoo keepers' caps; and art historians, lead aprons to protect them from impending radiant fact. Bill Berkson is a poet, critic, and professor emeritus at the San Francisco Art Institute.

A significant presence at the St. Mark's Poetry Project and the Nuyorican Poets' Care, Michael Scholnick was one of a number of poets whose work successfully bridged the gap between the New York School and the Beats. The editors have compiled sixty poems for this publication from four manuscripts -- two poems which are published here for the first time.Scholnick brings to light items hidden yet at once revealing -- some particular offbeat detail that casts a new perspective on the moment. His poems illuminate in an extraordinary and minimalistic way life and family in New York.

While writing her first book, twenty-five-year-old Pearl Christomo is haunted by ghosts, images of the past, scenes from movies, and lines from tragedies. She confronts the roles and emptiness that previous writers have ascribed to women and discovers that the plots, details, and characters of her fiction begin to mirror her own story. Growing up with an elusive ghost-like father and raised in suburban Michigan by a mother always searching for something just beyond her reach, Pearl chooses to exile herself to a private school in the isolated Upper Peninsula. Once there, Pearl begins her novel, discovering that the characters - Hugh Denmark, a reclusive writer; Aaron and Rose, the not-so-perfect couple; Theresa, an actress; Mary Clare and Butternut, little sisters spying on the world - all come to resemble the players in her own life. Eventually the boundaries between the two narratives tangle and the limits of fiction, dream, and memory are lost.

Lucio Seguila lives on a tiny island in the middle of the Rio Grande, which he claims is independent from both the United States and Mexico - convenient for a coyote guiding illegal immigrants across the border. He rules this small kingdom, Republica Libre de Seguilandia, in a firm but generous patriarchal style, sitting on his La-Z-Boy and enjoying the devotion of his three daughters, the companionship of his grandson, and a reluctant partnership in the criminal forays of his amoral son-in-law. Yet, Seguila and his family cannot escape the rush of the Rio Grande and the unusual gift it brings them. In the wake of an unexpected flash flood, Simon Tucker, an American teenager who nearly drowns while on a marijuana border run, washes up on the shores of Seguilandia. Severely battered during the violent storm, Simon awakes to find that he has not only lost his memory but must fulfill the various contradictory expectations of his newfound family. Considered an angel, a long-anticipated boyfriend, and a high-stakes kidnap victim, the confused youth steals their serenity, the love of the youngest daughter, and eventually the life of the family patriarch. But even as the family is destroyed, we discover the seeds of its rebirth in a future that combines the swirling cultures that have disastrously collided.

From the Bowery to rural Southern Indiana, Coultas's poems are a millennial roadmap of American life.