Inside a Toronto apartment with a view of Lake Ontario and a hillside covered with trees, seasoned poet David Murray penned his tenth collection of lyrical versesomehow meeting a lofty goal of writing one hundred poems in thirty days. While waiting for a rendezvous at a train station with a recently widowed friend, Murray passed the time during the longest month of his life by fueling his creativity and writing mostly sonnets that cover a variety of subjects and emotions. Murrays poems not only explore feelings of anticipation, grief and hope but also the unpredictable beauty of nature as spring attempts to make an entrance, the questions that arise while gazing at old photographs and the unforeseen as distant lovers wait for an event. The Longest Month and Other Poems share a seasoned poets reflections as he contemplates the past, present and the possibilities of a new beginning.

In recent years, poet David J. Murray formed an unusual connection with a friend, a widow as he is a widower. They began a collaboration in verse, creating collections of poetry together that form a unique and intriguing conversation. Interchange and Other Poems, Murray’s 13th poetry collection and the 3rd in this series, weaves together many different components of life using the thread of interchanging communication to enrich and maintain a mutually acceptable relationship. Language and content combine beautifully as Murray blends concrete detail with abstraction. His mellifluous marriage of the tangible and the universal shows that stable relationships beneath the human experience when well maintained. These verses moves smoothly from one aspect of life to another, from one poem to the next, carried along by the constant undercurrent of the relationship’s recurring repair and renewal.

In the summer and early fall of 2015, the warmest September ever recorded in Toronto, a widow and a widower made an unusual connection. Following their meeting for the first time as single people, the pair began visiting each other, either at his place in Toronto or at her place in the Quebec countryside. They also travelled as sightseers to Montreal and to Kingston and attended a wedding at a vacation resort. Summer in September and Other Poems emerged from that connection, a collection of poetry written from the widower to his friend and including several poems written by her in response. Featuring ten topical sections, these verses recall the poets deceased spouses, consider their various travels both together and separately and explore ideas of romance, nature, old age, praise and sleep. Short and compelling, the poems of this collection offer an intriguing view of romance following grief. Surfacing Socializing here, alone, was fun, But Ive been impatient to have it over and done And let my undermind, obsessed with you, Surface at last, lucid, untrammeled and true, Until it vies with the hillscape I see here In producing sonic colours, pure and clear.

For the monumental Poetry Competition in Six Hundred Rounds (Roppyakuban uta’awase), twelve poets each provided one hundred waka poems, fifty on seasonal topics and fifty on love, which were matched, critiqued by the participants and judged by Fujiwara no Shunzei, the premiere poet of his age. Its critical importance is heightened by the addition of a lengthy Appeal (chinjō) against Shunzei’s judgements by the conservative poet and monk, Kenshō. It is one of the key texts for understanding poetic and critical practice in late twelfth century Japan, and of the conflict between conservative and innovative poets. The Competition and Appeal are presented here for the first time in complete English translation with accompanying commentary and explanatory notes by Thomas McAuley.

Donald Keene, a noted authority in the field, offers a guide through the first 900 years of Japanese literature. This period not only defined the unique properties of Japanese prose and prosody, but also produced some of its greatest works.

Jamie teaches respectful use of personal pronouns in this lighthearted, multigenerational story. Jamie is excited to spend the day walking around the neighborhood with great-grandma Bubbie. They meet so many friends and neighbors throughout the dayalong the way . . . but Jamie has to correct Bubbie when she incorrectly assumes Ms. Wallace is a he and their server is a she. “You can’t always know if someone goes by he or she or something else. Sometimes a person will tell you. If they don’t, you can use the person’s name or you can say they.” Jamie helps Bubbie understand that it’s important not to assume a person’s pronouns based on appearance, and to always use the name and pronouns they go by: he, she, they, or something else. Jamie and Bubbie introduces children, through an accessible fictional narrative, to the nonbinary experience, the use of gender-neutral pronouns, and how to respectfully use personal pronouns. They will learn the importance of using the correct pronouns, and that sometimes a person’s name and pronouns can change. The story stays lighthearted and sweet, while diving into an often misunderstood, evolving topic, so children can build empathy and begin to explore their own feelings about gender identity. A section at the back of the book includes tips for teachers, parents, and caregivers for expanding on the concepts in the book and for talking with children about gender. The Jamie Is Jamie Series The Jamie Is Jamie series invites young children to join Jamie as they build confidence through imaginative free play, break down gender stereotypes, respect pronouns and gender identity, and learn self-advocacy skills. Each book includes a section for adults to help them reinforce the books' messages.

In her third collection, Indonesian American poet Cynthia Dewi Oka dives into the implications of being parents, children, workers, and unwanted human beings under the savage reign of global capitalism and resurgent nativism. With a voice bound and wrestled apart by multiple histories, Fire Is Not a Country claims the spaces between here and there, then and now, us and not us. As she builds a lyric portrait of her own family, Oka interrogates how migration, economic exploitation, patriarchal violence, and a legacy of political repression shape the beauties and limitations of familial love and obligation. Woven throughout are speculative experiments that intervene in the popular apocalyptic narratives of our time with the wit of an unassimilable other. Oka’s speakers mourn, labor, argue, digress, avenge, and fail, but they do not retreat. Born of conflicts public and private, this collection is for anyone interested in what it means to engage the multitudes within ourselves.

A remarkable late-in-life collection, elegiac and bracing, from master poet Jack Gilbert, whose Refusing Heaven captivated the poetry world and won the National Book Critics Circle Award as well as the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. In these characteristically bold and nuanced poems, Gilbert looks back at the passions of a life—the women, and his memories of all the stages of love; the places (Paris, Greece, Pittsburgh); the mysterious and lonely offices of poetry itself. We get illuminating glimpses of the poet’s background and childhood, in poems like “Going Home” (his mother the daughter of sharecroppers, his father the black sheep in a family of rich Virginia merchants) and “Summer at Blue Creek, North Carolina,” a classic scene of pulling water from the well, sounding the depths. The title of the collection is drawn from the startling “Ovid in Tears,” in which the poet figure has fallen and is carried out, muttering faintly: “White stone in the white sunlight . . . Both the melody / and the symphony. The imperfect dancing / in the beautiful dance. The dance most of all.” Gilbert reminds us that there is beauty to be celebrated in the imperfect—“a worth / to the unshapely our sweet mind founders on”—and at the same time there is “the harrowing by mortality.” Yet, without fail, he embraces the state of grief and loss as part of the dance. The culmination of a career spanning more than half a century of American poetry, The Dance Most of All is a book to celebrate and to read again and again.