Leaving Saturn, chosen by Al Young as the winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, is an ambitious and honest collection. Major Jackson, through both formal and free verse poems, renders visible the spirit of resilience, courage, and creativity he witnessed among his family, neighbors, and friends while growing up in Philadelphia. His poems hauntingly reflect urban decay and violence, yet at the same time they rejoice in the sustaining power of music and the potency of community. Jackson also honors artists who have served as models of resistance and maintained their own faith in the belief of the imagination to alter lives. The title poem, a dramatic monologue in the voice of the American jazz composer and bandleader Sun Ra, details such a humane program and serves as an admirable tribute to the tradition of African American art. Throughout, Jackson unflinchingly portrays our most devastated landscapes, yet with a vividness and compassion that expose the depth of his imaginative powers.

ABOUT THE BOOK:Saturn, god of the saturnine disposition, is popularly associated with doom and gloom. But Saturn in Transit reveals the planet's useful and developmental influence in our lives. Saturn assists the modern hero and heroine, during its

Dr. Carl Slagel is commissioned to design and supervise the building of a giant space station. The reasons given to the world population by the super powers were lies. It was the secret goal of a few to launch the station, then create a nuclear holocaust to destroy the population, then return and establish their own rule. The world was nearly destroyed, but Dr. Slagel and a handful of people managed to endure.

"The book is like a dream you want to last forever" (Roberta Silman, The New York Times Book Review), now with a gorgeous new cover by the famed designer Peter Mendelsund A masterwork of W. G. Sebald, now with a gorgeous new cover by the famed designer Peter Mendelsund The Rings of Saturn—with its curious archive of photographs—records a walking tour of the eastern coast of England. A few of the things which cross the path and mind of its narrator (who both is and is not Sebald) are lonely eccentrics, Sir Thomas Browne’s skull, a matchstick model of the Temple of Jerusalem, recession-hit seaside towns, wooded hills, Joseph Conrad, Rembrandt’s "Anatomy Lesson," the natural history of the herring, the massive bombings of WWII, the dowager Empress Tzu Hsi, and the silk industry in Norwich. W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants (New Directions, 1996) was hailed by Susan Sontag as an "astonishing masterpiece perfect while being unlike any book one has ever read." It was "one of the great books of the last few years," noted Michael Ondaatje, who now acclaims The Rings of Saturn "an even more inventive work than its predecessor, The Emigrants."

A novel of the ringed planet-and the humans who explore her

A breathtaking look at the most beautiful of all the planets with its magnificent rings and moons. From School Library Journal: "An introduction to the planet and its major satellites. Despite the strength of the text, it is the color photos that steal the show, highlighting [the] planet’s exotic beauty in much the same way that black-and-white photography accented the moon's starkness. In all, a delightful coupling of sound exposition with dazzling illustrations.” Newly Updated 2012.