"Some Say the Lark is a piercing meditation, rooted in loss and longing, and manifest in dazzling leaps of the imagination—the familiar world rendered strange." —Natasha Trethewey Chang’s poems narrate grief and loss, and intertwines them with hope for a fresh start in the midst of new beginnings. With topics such as frustration with our social and natural world, these poems openly question the self and place and how private experiences like motherhood and sorrow necessitate a deeper engagement with public life and history. From "The Winter's Wife": I want wild roots to prosper an invention of blooms, each unknown to every wise gardener. If I could be a color. If I could be a question of tender regard. I know crabgrass and thistle. I know one algorithm: it has nothing to do with repetition or rhythm. It is the route from number to number (less to more, more to less), a map drawn by proof not faith. Unlike twilight, I do not conclude with darkness. I conclude. Jennifer Chang is the author of The History of Anonymity, which was a finalist for the Glasgow/Shenandoah Prize for Emerging Writers and listed by Hyphen Magazine as a Top Five Book of Poetry for 2008. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry 2012, The Nation, Poetry, A Public Space, and elsewhere. She is an assistant professor of English and Creative Writing at George Washington University and lives in Washington, DC with her family.

'A charming and brilliantly entertaining novel... shot through with the light-hearted Nesbit touch' Penelope Lively, from the introduction "When did two girls of our age have such a chance as we've got - to have a lark entirely on our own? No chaperone, no rules, no..." "No present income or future prospects," said Lucilla. It's 1919 and Jane and her cousin Lucilla leave school to find that their guardian has gambled away their money, leaving them with only a small cottage in the English countryside. In an attempt to earn their living, the orphaned cousins embark on a series of misadventures - cutting flowers from their front garden and selling them to passers-by, inviting paying guests who disappear without paying - all the while endeavouring to stave off the attentions of male admirers, in a bid to secure their independence. 'To come upon any Nesbit today, hitherto unread... is like receiving a letter from a friend whom you have believed dead' New York Times 'A wry, charming delight of a book' The Pool

"In Cecily Parks' beautiful poems, the natural world teeters between being and seeming—the seeming a simulacrum projected onto the world by a mind's yearning, taxonomy and dread. Deeply metaphysical, and deeply attentive to our spiritual as well as physical uses and abuses of nature, O'Nights implicates language's —indeed, lyric poetry's—sad role in this endeavor."—Susan Wheeler In O'Nights, Cecily Parks constructs stunning manifestations of a modern Thoreauvian wilderness, investigating how the natural world gives shape to the self, body, and emotions. These lyrical, transcendental poems study the duality of nature's feminine and masculine identities, and in its simplicity, offers a space where humankind truly belongs. From "Bell": This progress, as in the wind-scalloped snowmeadow pretending to be moon. This love that sets us scrambling over the map's last ridge, our red hoods bright in shrunken sky. This metallic weather in which we are the ore. This alder. These crimson-tipped willows reverberating next to a river of turquoise ice. This following the deep tracks of one coyote stepping where another has stepped. This wilderness that we trespass, burning like berries in the juniper and becoming the air in the belfry. Cecily Parks is the author of the chapbook Cold Work (Poetry Society of America, 2005) and the collection Field Folly Snow (University of Georgia Press, 2008), which was a finalist for the Norma Farber First Book Award and the Glasgow/Shenandoah Prize for Emerging Writers. Her poems have appeared in Boston Review, Kenyon Review, Orion, Tin House, Virginia Quarterly Review, the Yale Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

This debut collection of vivid, lyrical poems explores the emotional landscape of childhood without confession and without straightforward narrative. Chang sweeps together myth and fairy tale, skirting the edges of events to focus on the psychological tenor of experience: the underpinnings of identity and the role of nature in both constructing and erasing a self. From the edge of the ocean, where things constantly shift and dissolve, through "the forest's thick, / where the trees meet the dark," to an imaginary cliffside town of fog, this book makes a journey both natural and psychological, using experiments in language and form to capture the search for personhood and place.

Mead’s fifth collection candidly and openly explores the long process that is death. These resonant poems discover what it means to live, die, and come home again. We’re drawn in by sorrow and grief, but also the joys of celebrating a long life and how simple it is to find laughter and light in the quietest and darkest of moments.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the award-winning author a "powerful and emotionally piercing" novel (The New York Times) set during the 1950 in West Virginia and Korea, that intertwines family secrets, war, dreams, and ghosts in a story about the love that unites us all. Lark and Termite is a rich, wonderfully alive novel about seventeen year old Lark and her brother, Termite, living in West Virginia in the 1950s. Their mother, Lola, is absent, while their aunt, Nonie, raises them as her own, and Termite’s father, Corporal Robert Leavitt, is caught up in the early days of the Korean War. Told with deep feeling, the novel invites us deep into the hearts and thoughts of Lark, on the verge of adulthood, and her brother, Termite, a child unable to walk and talk, who is filled with radiance. We are also with Corporal Leavitt, trapped by friendly fire alongside the Korean children he tries to rescue. We see Lark’s dreams for Termite and her own future, and how, with the aid of a childhood love and a spectral social worker, she makes them happen. We learn of Lola’s love for her soldier husband and her children, and unravel the mystery of her relationship with Nonie. We discover the lasting connections between past and future on the night the town experiences an overwhelming flood, and we follow Lark and Termite as their lives are changed forever.

Widely regarded as the "rock star" of American poetry, Mary Oliver is a writer whose words have long had the power to move countless readers. Regularly topping the national poetry best-seller list and drawing thousands to her sold-out readings across the coutnry, Oliver is unparalleled in her impact. As noted in the Los Angeles Times, so many "go to her for solace, regeneration and inspiration" that it is not surprising Vice President Joe Biden chose to read one of her poems during the 9/11 remembrance at Ground Zero. Few poets express the complexities of human experience as skillfully as Mary Oliver. This volume, Oliver's twenty-first book of poetry, contains all new poems on her classic themes. Here, readers will find the deep spiritual sustenance that imbues her writing on nature, love, mortality, and grief. As always, Oliver is an accomplished guide to the rarest and most exquisite insights of the natural world. Ranking "among the finest poets the English language has ever produced," according to the Weekly Standard, Oliver offers us lyrics of great depth and beauty that continue her lifelong work of loving the world.

Robert Kehew augments his own verse translations with those of Pound & Snodgrass, to provide a collection that captures both the poetic pyrotechnics of the original verse & the astonishing variety of troubadour voices.

"Monica Hand's me and Nina is a beautiful book by a soul survivor. In these poems she sings deep songs of violated intimacy and the hard work of repair. The poems are unsentimental, blood-red, and positively true, note for note, like the singing of Nina Simone herself. Hand has written a moving, deeply satisfying, and unforgettable book."—Elizabeth Alexander In an intimate conversation with the "High Priestess of Soul," Monica A. Hand surveys the places and moods of alienation through poems that are as musical and stylistically diverse as Nina Simone's work. Hand readily embraces a "mass hypnosis" style, putting "a spell on [us]" with her intensely passionate cries and commitment to embracing both tragedy and exuberance in these insightful poems. From "Dear Nina": I am not recession depression oppression compression crooked line broken line polka dot parking lot or spot I am a Gift from God I know that I am an un-kept solo song Monica A. Hand is a poet and book artist currently living in Harlem, New York. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Aunt Chloe, Black Renaissance Noire, The Sow's Ear, Drunken Boat, Beyond the Frontier, African-American Poetry for the 21st Century, Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem's First Decade, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in poetry and poetry in translation from Drew University and is a founding member of Poets for Ayiti.

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