Arthur Sze has rare qualifications when it comes to translating Chinese: he is an award-winning poet who was raised in both languages. A second-generation Chinese-American, Sze has gathered over 70 poems by poets who have had a profound effect on Chinese culture, American poetics and Sze's own maturation as an artist. Also included is an informative insightful essay on the methods and processes involved in translating ideogrammic poetry. MOONLIGHT NIGHT by Tu Fu can only look out alone at the moon. From Ch'ang-an I pity my children who cannot yet remember or understand. Her hair is damp in the fragrant mist. Her arms are cold in the clear light. When will we lean beside the window and the moon shine on our dried tears? Sze's anthology features poets who have become literary icons to generations of Chinese readers and scholars. Included are the poems of the great, rarely translated female poet Li Ching Chao alongside the remorseful exile poems of Su Tung-p'o. This book will prove a necessary and insightful addition to the library of any reader of poetry in translation. The poets include: T'ao Ch'ien Wang Han Wang Wei Li Po Tu Fu Po Chü-yi Tu Mu Li Shang-yin Su Tung-p'o Li Ch'ing-chao Shen Chou Chu Ta Wen I-to Yen Chen Arthur Sze is the author of six previous books of poetry, including The Redshifting Web and Archipelago. He has received the Asian American Literary Award for his poetry and translation, a prestigious Lannan Literary Award, and was recently a finalist for the Leonore Marshall Poetry Prize. He teaches at the Institute of American Indian Arts. from A Painting of a Cat Nan Ch'uan wanted to be reborn as a water buffalo, but who did the body of the malicious cat become? Black clouds and covering snow are alike. It took thirty years for clouds to disperse, snow to melt. -Pa-ta-shan-jen (1626-1705) The Last Day Water sobs and sobs in the bamboo pipe gutter. Green tongues of banana leaves lick at the windowpanes. The four sur

Alexander's cross-cultural perspective and sense of global identity (gained from her childhood in India and the Sudan, and her adult life in New York City) infuses her poems. She writes about violence and civil strife, love, despair, and a hard-won hope in the midst of a post-September 11 world.

Winner of the Carl Sandburg Award for Poetry Angela Jackson brings her remarkable linguistic and poetic gifts to the articulation of African-American experience. The recurrent motif of the spider, which she presents as both creator and predator, demonstrates her deliberate reshaping of myth in the context of contemporary human experience. Informed by African-American speech and poetic traditions, yet uniquely her own, these poems display Jackson's stylistic grace, her exuberance and vitality of spirit, and her emotional sensitivity and psychological insight.

Mary Gordon. Kenzaburo Oe. Amy Bloom. Ivan Klima. James Dickey. Paul Theroux. Jane Hirshfield. W. S. Merwin. And many others. Acclaimed International Writers Explore the Essence of Eros Now the editor of Yellow Silk, the world's premier publication of erotic literature, assembles a collection of over 40 new erotic short stories and poems -- many never before available -- from around the world. From Mary Gordon's tribute to seeing and being seen, to James Dickey's ode to "interspecies infatuation" ... from Dany Laferriere's confession of Haitian secrets to Ingrid Hill's revelation of Chinese ones ... from W. S. Merwin's account of sexual initiation in backwoods America to Kenzaburo Oe's adventures in urban Japan and Amy Bloom's tale of a luxurious sexual experience before the eyes of God ... Yellow Silk II conveys the power and the transformative nature of passion with the brilliance and intensity only great writing can conjure. Expect to be moved. Expect to reacquaint yourself with the many astonishing faces of sex, love, and Eros itself.

“The tropic foliage of Anna Journey’s book is so lushly ashimmer with invitation andthreat that it’s difficult to tell the two apart. Which is just what this poet intends: the world seduces us to enter, and to enter again, and to do so is both to find pleasure and to perish into a field of ghosts.”— Mark Doty, author of Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems "Anna Journey has talent to burn: gothic, elegiac, and celebratory by turns, her poems possess a giddy imaginative dexterity that is exceedingly rare in a debut collection. More important, there is a gravity and heft to her poems; they are willing to confront the Big Issues and militantly resist the easy tour de force. Jarrell says somewhere that a certain helplessness before her material is one of the poet’s principal tools. I hear that haunted helplessness in lines such as these: 'I can’t stop— / the story // going like the tongue goes: // lit and loosed, moving, / like Lucifer, / down.' Anna Journey is on the threshold of a significant career."—David Wojahn, author of Interrogation Palace: New and Selected Poems 1982-2004

Silk Elegy tells the story of a young girl from an immigrant family whose life is disrupted by a mentally ill mother.

Award-winning poet Martín Espada gives voice to the spirit of endurance in the face of loss. In this powerful new collection of poems, Martín Espada articulates the transcendent vision of another, possible world. He invokes the words of Whitman in “Vivas to Those Who Have Failed,” a cycle of sonnets about the Paterson Silk Strike and the immigrant laborers who envisioned an eight-hour workday. At the heart of this volume is a series of ten poems about the death of the poet’s father. “El Moriviví” uses the metaphor of a plant that grows in Puerto Rico to celebrate the many lives of Frank Espada, community organizer, civil rights activist, and documentary photographer, from a jailhouse in Mississippi to the streets of Brooklyn. The son lyrically imagines his father’s return to a bay in Puerto Rico: “May the water glow blue as a hyacinth in your hands.” Other poems confront collective grief in the wake of the killings at the Sandy Hook Elementary School and police violence against people of color: “Heal the Cracks in the Bell of the World” urges us to “melt the bullets into bells.” Yet the poet also revels in the absurd, recalling his dubious career as a Shakespearean “actor,” finding madness and tenderness in the crowd at Fenway Park. In exquisitely wrought images, Espada’s poems show us the faces of Whitman’s “numberless unknown heroes.”

In 1942, with a black-market chicken tucked under his arm by his mother, Leo Marks left his father's famous bookshop, 84 Charing Cross Road, and went off to fight the war. He was twenty-two. Soon recognized as a cryptographer of genius, he became head of communications at the Special Operations Executive (SOE), where he revolutionized the codemaking techniques of the Allies and trained some of the most famous agents dropped into occupied Europe. As a top codemaker, Marks had a unique perspective on one of the most fascinating and, until now, little-known aspects of the Second World War. This stunning memoir, often funny, always gripping and acutely sensitive to the human cost of each operation, provides a unique inside picture of the extraordinary SOE organization at work and reveals for the first time many unknown truths about the conduct of the war. SOE was created in July 1940 with a mandate from Winston Churchill to "set Europe ablaze." Its main function was to infiltrate agents into enemy-occupied territory to perform acts of sabotage and form secret armies in preparation for D-Day. Marks's ingenious codemaking innovation was to devise and implement a system of random numeric codes printed on silk. Camouflaged as handkerchiefs, underwear, or coat linings, these codes could be destroyed message by message, and therefore could not possibly be remembered by the agents, even under torture. Between Silk and Cyanide chronicles Marks's obsessive quest to improve the security of agents' codes and how this crusade led to his involvement in some of the war's most dramatic and secret operations. Among the astonishing revelations is his account of the code war between SOE and the Germans in Holland. He also reveals for the first time how SOE fooled the Germans into thinking that a secret army was operating in the Fatherland itself, and how and why he broke the code that General de Gaulle insisted be available only to the Free French. By the end of this incredible tale, truly one of the last great World War II memoirs, it is clear why General Eisenhower credited the SOE, particularly its communications department, with shortening the war by three months. From the difficulties of safeguarding the messages that led to the destruction of the atomic weapons plant at Rjukan in Norway to the surveillance of Hitler's long-range missile base at Peenemünde to the true extent of Nazi infiltration of Allied agents, Between Silk and Cyanide sheds light on one of the least-known but most dramatic aspects of the war. Writing with the narrative flair and vivid characterization of his famous screenplays, Marks gives free rein to his keen sense of the absurd and wry wit without ever losing touch with the very human side of the story. His close relationship with "the White Rabbit" and Violette Szabo -- two of the greatest British agents of the war -- and his accounts of the many others he dealt with result in a thrilling and poignant memoir that celebrates individual courage and endeavor, without losing sight of the human cost and horror of war.

The Silk the Moths Ignore animates the liminal, sometimes gothic, spaces of miscarriage, pregnancy, and early parenthood with exquisite defamiliarizing detail. Weaving together prose versets, sonnets, and short poems with titles like "Against Choking" and "To Acknowledge Damage," the collection sings, bleeds, and casts spells to "carry hope like a weight." As evidenced by the reception to Michelle Obama's Becoming, as well as recent writing by Chrissy Teigen and Meghan Markle, The Silk the Moths Ignore arrives at a moment when people finally seem willing to discuss miscarriage with an openness that has previously been taboo. Tate brings a fresh and embodied language of grief and song to a conversation still beset with platitude and euphemism. For the many people who have experienced loss, this book offers the peculiar comfort of an alien yet instantly recognizable landscape.