COMING SOON! San Francisco's first Latino poet laureate offers new poems written in the native tongue of contemporary America: English-and-Spanish.ALERT ME WHEN THE BOOK BECOMES AVAILABLE

Stray Truths is a stirring introduction to the poetry of Euphrase Kezilahabi, one of Africa’s major living authors, published here for the first time in English. Born in 1944 on Ukerewe Island in Tanzania (then the Territory of Tanganyika), Kezilahabi came of age in the newly independent nation. His poetry confronts the task of postcolonial nation building and its conundrums, and explores personal loss in parallel with nationwide disappointments. Kezilahabi sparked controversy when he published his first poetry collection in 1974, introducing free verse into Swahili. His next two volumes of poetry (published in 1988 and 2008) confirmed his status as a pioneering and modernizing literary force. Stray Truths draws on each of those landmark collections, allowing readers to encounter the myriad forms and themes significant to this poet over a span of more than three decades. Even as these poems jettison the constraints of traditional Swahili forms, their use of metaphor connects them to traditional Swahili poetics, and their representational strategies link them to indigenous African arts more broadly. To date, translations of Swahili poetry have been focused on scholarly interpretations. This literary translation, in contrast, invites a wide audience of readers to appreciate the verbal art of this seminal modernist writer.

Apparently the first original publication from the New York Review imprint (exclusively a reprint house until now), this collection makes an ideally readable introduction to this sometimes forbidding, internationally admired, poetic group. Fin-de-siecle concerns of love in cafés, of sun and song, flirtation and regret, give way to darker worries as the Russian Revolution runs its course: Blok and Boris Pasternak sound particularly effective in Schmidt's libretto-like, clarified versions, while Akhmatova--grown older, immersed in sorrow--proposes a toast to the terrible world we inhabit/ And to God, who never replied. Editor Catherine Ciepela offers a long and useful introduction, along with capsule biographies of Schmidt's eight poets; poet and biographer Honor Moore adds an epilogue. --Publishers Weekly.

Poetry. Taking as his subject a series of historically significant inventions--from ancient mythologies to modern scientific wonders--Anthony Etherin explores the structure of language, combining various forms of verse with the most severe literary restrictions. Many of Anthony's poems experiment with palindromes and anagrams: Palindromic sonnets; triolets and sonnets composed of anagrammed lines; and, at the extremes of combinatorial constraint, palindromic poems that are perfect anagrams of each other. This book also introduces Anthony's "aelindromes"--an anagram-palindrome hybrid, in which letters are parsed and reordered according to premeditated numerical sequences. Complemented throughout with experiments in visual poetry, STRAY ARTS (AND OTHER INVENTIONS) presents a complex poetic formalism of previously untested intricacy. "I've seen people able to do perfect bottom deals at casino poker tables for 100 thousand dollar stakes, under heat. I've seen people able to do bottom deals at illegal mob games where everyone was carrying. This poetry is only a bit safer but way, way harder. And impresses me more. I love it."--Penn Jillette "Anthony Etherin renders all my own virtuoso ventures obsolete. I truly covet this book."--Christian B�k "Anthony Etherin is a hard taskmaster with language, making it jump through hoops, run long distances backwards, and then turn in on itself, in a strenuous series of contortions that leave it gleaming with word-sweat--but all this exercise is more than worth it, because the poems Anthony produces are dictionaries of possibilities, maps of linguistic futures that are well worth exploring if you want to find joy and delight and jaw-dropping skill."--Ian McMillan

Stray Birds (1916) is a collection of poems by Rabindranath Tagore. Translated into English by Tagore after he received the 1913 Nobel Prize in Literature, Stray Birds is a powerful collection of short poems by a master of Indian literature. “Stray birds of summer come to my window to sing and fly away. And yellow leaves of autumn, which have no songs, flutter and fall there with a sigh.” The poems of Stray Birds are a masterclass in clarity and concision. Like birds themselves, they flutter across the sky of the page before passing beyond the limit of sight. In prayer, in celebration, and in evocations of the natural world, Tagore comes as close to the truth as possible, catching a glimpse before it can fly away forever: “Let me live truly, my Lord, so that death to me become true.” In plainspoken language, Tagore gives voice to the soul. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Rabindranath Tagore’s Stray Birds is a classic of Indian literature reimagined for modern readers.

"Hurry-scurry! / Flutter-flurry! / Running! Racing! / What's he chasing?" With loving exasperation and bewilderment, these playful poems muse about why cats do what they do.