Khaled Mattawa’s poetry contains “the complexity of a transnational identity” (MacArthur Fellowship citation) Fugitive Atlas is a sweeping, impassioned account of refugee crises, military occupations, and ecological degradation, an acute and probing journey through a world in upheaval. Khaled Mattawa’s chorus of speakers finds moments of profound solace in searching for those lost—in elegy and prayer—even when the power of poetry and faith seems incapable of providing salvation. With extraordinary formal virtuosity and global scope, these poems turn not to lament for those regions charted as theaters of exploitation and environmental malpractice but to a poignant amplification of the lives, dreams, and families that exist within them. In this exquisite collection, Mattawa asks how we are expected to endure our times, how we inherit the journeys of our ancestors, and how we let loose those we love into an unpredictable world.

The heroic story of Jewish resistance and survival during the Second World War.

Between 1783 and 1860, more than 100,000 enslaved African Americans escaped across the border between slave and free territory in search of freedom. Most of these escapes were unaided, but as the American anti-slavery movement became more militant after 1830, assisted escapes became more common. Help came from the Underground Railroad, which still stands as one of the most powerful and sustained multiracial human rights movements in world history. This work examines and interprets the available historical evidence about fugitive slaves and the Underground Railroad in Kentucky, the southernmost sections of the free states bordering Kentucky along the Ohio River, and, to a lesser extent, the slave states to the immediate south. Kentucky was central to the Underground Railroad because its northern boundary, the Ohio River, represented a three hundred mile boundary between slavery and nominal freedom. The book examines the landscape of Kentucky and the surrounding states; fugitive slaves before 1850, in the 1850s and during the Civil War; and their motivations and escape strategies and the risks involved with escape. The reasons why people broke law and social convention to befriend fugitive slaves, common escape routes, crossing points through Kentucky from Tennessee and points south, and specific individuals who provided assistance--all are topics covered.

"Frontispiece: Poem and calligraphy by Adonis, XXXX. Translated by Bassam Frangieh" --T.p. verso.

Writing into the wounds and reverberations of the Israel/Palestine conflict, Philip Metres’ fourth book of poems, Shrapnel Maps, is at once elegiac and activist, an exploratory surgery to extract the slivers of cartography through palimpsest and erasure. A wedding in Toura, a suicide bombing in Jerusalem, uneasy interactions between Arab and Jewish neighbors in University Heights, the expulsion of Palestinians in Jaffa, another bombing in Gaza: Shrapnel Maps traces the hurt and tender places, where political noise turns into the voices of Palestinians and Israelis. Working with documentary flyers, vintage postcards, travelogues, cartographic language, and first person testimonies, Shrapnel Maps ranges from monologue sonnets to prose vignettes, polyphonics to blackouts, indices to simultaneities, as Palestinians and Israelis long for justice and peace, for understanding and survival.

The Moody Atlas of Bible Lands integrates the geography of Bible lands with the teachings of the Bible. Its one hundred thousand words provide useful commentary for more than ninety detailed maps of Palestine, the Mediterranean, the Near East, the Sinai, and Turkey. Learn of God's protection and guidance by following Israel's forty-year sojourn in the wilderness. Appreciate the results of the Great Commission to 'teach all nations' by seeing the scope of Paul's three missionary journeys. Dr. Barry Beitzel has blended the topographical and historical in multi-colored maps that accurately reflect evangelical Christianity. Pages of timeless information aid in sermon preparation and in personal Bible study. The Moody Atlas of Bible Lands is an invaluable asset to Sunday school teachers and to seminary and Bible college students. Text and unique maps make this one of the most useful and accurate atlases available today.

In No Chronology, Karen Fish’s third collection of poems, she investigates those moments when the boundary of everyday life merges with history, imagination, and art. Fish was trained as a visual artist, and this way of seeing is intrinsic to her approach to poetry. Fish’s reflections on art and life speak to our common experiences, and her power to illuminate the subtle complexities of the world around us lies in her keen and compassionate observations. These poems invite us to join her in looking both at and beyond ourselves. The outside world vanishes. No help comes. Imagine, staring into the sun, then, how the clouds spread out and open like wallets over a few corrugated roofs. Throughout this collection, Fish seeks truths about memory and loss, shame and redemption. She faces uncomfortable questions arising from our individual and collective actions, asking whether we are complicit in extinctions of species and how we reduce the humanity of prisoners by tying their identity to their crime. But these poems are also about naming life’s particular joys: driving in spring, walking through the woods with dogs, or hearing a child speak through the mail slot. They offer a space to encounter lyrical meditation as an experience in and of itself.

The biographer—so often in the shadows, kibitzing, casting doubt, proving facts—comes to the stage in this funny, poignant, endearing tale of how writers’ lives get documented. James Atlas, the celebrated chronicler of Saul Bellow and Delmore Schwartz, takes us back to his own childhood in suburban Chicago, where he fell in love with literature and, early on, found in himself the impulse to study writers’ lives. We meet Richard Ellmann, the great biographer of James Joyce and Atlas’s professor during a transformative year at Oxford. We get to know Atlas’s first subject, the “self-doomed” poet Delmore Schwartz. And we are introduced to a bygone cast of intellectuals such as Edmund Wilson and Dwight Macdonald (the “tall pines,” as Mary McCarthy once called them, cut down now, according to Atlas, by the “merciless pruning of mortality”) and, of course, the elusive Bellow, “a metaphysician of the ordinary.” Atlas revisits the lives and works of the classical biographers, the Renaissance writers of what were then called “lives,” Samuel Johnson and the obsessive Boswell, and the Victorian masters Mrs. Gaskell and Thomas Carlyle. And in what amounts to a pocket history of his own literary generation, Atlas celebrates the biographers who hoped to glimpse an image of them—“as fleeting as a familiar face swallowed up in a crowd.” (With black-and-white illustrations throughout)

This book explains the seeds of the conflict, and examines important topics such as the development and use of new tactics and weapons, the roles of the great commanders, the maritime war, and the war’s painful aftermath. The illuminating text is supported by over 100 full color maps, beautiful illustrations and photographs, and original black and white archive photographs presenting stark imagery from the front line.

&Lsquo;Githa Hariharan&Rsquo;S Fiction Is Wonderful&Mdash;Full Of Subtleties And Humour And Tenderness&Rsquo; &Mdash;Michael Ondaatje Mala&Rsquo;S Home In Delhi Is Empty, Save For A Lifetime Of Sketches Left Behind By Her Late Husband Asad And The Memories They Conjure. Sifting Through Them On Restless Afternoons And Sleepless Nights, Mala Summons Ghosts From Her Childhood, Relives The Heady Days Of Love And Optimism When Asad And She Robustly Defied Social Conventions To Build A Life Together&Mdash;And Struggles To Understand How Events Far Removed Could So Easily Snatch Away The Certainties They Had Always Taken For Granted. As Their Story Unfolds, Others Emerge: Of Sara, Mala And Asad&Rsquo;S Daughter, Who, Unable To Commit To A Cause That Will Renew Her Faith In Her Parents&Rsquo; Ideals And Her Own, Embarks On A Search For Purpose That Brings Her From Mumbai To Ahmedabad, The Venue Of Recent Carnage. Of Yasmin, Whom Sara Meets Across A Lately Created &Lsquo;Border&Rsquo;, A Survivor Of Mayhem Secretly Dreaming Of College And The Miraculous Return Of Her Missing Brother, Akbar, As She Navigates Menacing By-Lanes To Reach Her School Safely Every Day. Of Innumerable Other Lives Trapped In Limbo&Mdash;Some Caught In A Mesh Of Memory, Anguish And Hate, Others Seeking Release In Private Dreams And Valiant Hopes. Marked By An Astonishing Clarity Of Observation And Deep Compassion, Fugitive Histories Exposes The Legacy Of Prejudice That, Sometimes Insidiously, Sometimes Perceptibly, Continues To Affect Disparate Lives In Present-Day India. In Prose That Is At Once Elegant, Playful And Startlingly Inventive, Githa Hariharan Portrays With Remarkable Precision The Web Of Human Connections That Binds As Much As It Divides.