Poetry. Southeast Asia Studies. VISITING INDIRA GANDHI'S PALMIST by Kirun Kapur is the winner of the 2013 Antivenom Poetry Award published by Elixir Press. "Kirun Kapur's debut volume VISITING INDIRA GANDHI'S PALMIST offers worlds of striking richness. From family lore marked by the 1947 partition of British India and the chaos that ensued, Kapur crafts a saga that is both personal and public. Her exploration of lives intersecting yet separated across time, culture, and continent reveals the many ways in which we carry, renounce, and rediscover the past. Kapur introduces us to an astonishing range of characters a father who 'speaks five languages, quotes Frost as easily as Ghalib' ('Meat and Marry'); a mother and onetime nun who foreswore her 'Benedictine coif' for love ('Family Portrait, USA'); Cain and Abel of the Bible; Prince Arjuna of the Gita. At the heart of this quest, however, is an inquisitive mind examining our creation stories personal, historical, and mythical. Through poems that are masterfully paced and densely layered, Kapur sets out to explore the tensions of our most basic human bonds: love and duty, violence and communion, family and nation." Ned Balbo, contest judge"

Misery Islands blends geographical and metaphorical landscapes of family and the choices we make to know who we are truly meant to be

Poetry. Winner of the 15th Annual Elixir Press Poetry Awards. Contest judge, Sarah Kennedy, says: "These are smart, savvy poems, but they are also humane in the best sense of that word: interested in the human and compassionate to all beings. Josephine Yu asks the right questions 'What animal am I?' and 'Ready to go home?' and the answers she gives are always those of an anxiety-born attention, not just to the self but to all of humanity. At the end of PRAYER BOOK OF THE ANXIOUS, our answer has to be yes, but in this ultimately outward-looking book, home is the world in which we all, nervously, exist."

Katherine C. Mooney recaptures the sights, sensations, and illusions of America’s first mass spectator sport. Her central characters are not the elite white owners of slaves and thoroughbreds but the black jockeys, grooms, and horse trainers who called themselves race horse men and made the racetrack run—until Jim Crow drove them from their jobs.

There are two menus in a Beijing restaurant, Rachel DeWoskin writes in the title poem, “the first of excess, / second, scarcity.” DeWoskin invites us into moments shaped by dualities, into spaces bordered by the language of her family (English) and that of her new country (Chinese), as well as the liminal spaces between youth and adulthood, safety and danger, humor and sorrow. This collection works by building and demolishing boundaries and binaries, sliding between their edges in movements that take us from the familiar to the strange and put us face-to-face with our assumptions and confusions. Through these complex and interwoven poems, we see how a self is never singular. Rather, it is made up of shifting—and sometimes colliding—parts. DeWoskin crosses back and forth, across languages and nations, between the divided parts in each of us, tracing overlaps and divergences. The limits and triumphs of translation, the slipperiness of relationships, and movements through land and language rise and fall together. The poems in Two Menus offer insights into the layers of what it means to be human, to reconcile living as multiple selves. DeWoskin dives into the uncertain spaces, showing us how a life lived between walls is murky, strange, and immensely human. These poems ask us how to communicate across the boundaries that threaten to divide us, to measure and close the distance between who we are, were, and want to be.

21 riveting stories from the battlefield about how India’s highest military honour was won The Brave takes you to the hearts and minds of India’s bravest soldiers, all of whom won the Param Vir Chakra, India’s greatest military honour. With access to the Army, families and comrades-in-arms of the soldiers, Rachna Bisht Rawat paints the most vivid portrait of these men and their extraordinary deeds. How hard is it to fight at 20,000 feet in sub-zero temperatures? Why did Captain Vikram Batra say ‘Yeh dil maange more’? How do wives and girlfriends of soldiers who don’t return cope? What happens when the enemy is someone that you have trained? How did the Charlie Company push back the marauding Chinese? How did a villager from Uttar Pradesh become a specialist in destroying tanks? Both gripping and inspiring, The Brave is the ultimate book on the Param Vir Chakra.

This first-ever biography of John William Ward, the fourteenth president of Amherst College, explores the roots of his idealism and covers his presidency, his later success in Massachusetts politics, and the events leading up to his eventual suicide. President from 1971 to 1979, Ward served during a tumultuous period in the history of the elite liberal arts college, and in the history of the nation. He presided over the once all-male college's transition to coeducation, worked to support African-American students in their fight for equality and justice, and was arrested for civil disobedience in protest against the Vietnam War. Ward was emblematic of his time. Idealist that he was, he tried to make Amherst College a model of a democratic society. Defeated in ugly battles with the faculty, Ward resigned as president but went on to great success in the rougher world of Massachusetts politics. He made headlines for his leadership of a state commission that spent more than two years investigating corruption in the awarding of building contracts, resulting in the passage of laws that guaranteed reforms. This long-overdue volume is the first complete study of Ward--a self-made man, proof that the American Dream could come true, but who ultimately saw his personal and professional life collapse. It sheds light on Amherst College, on higher education more broadly, on suicide, and on the United States in the 1960s and '70s.