BOA Editions Ltd. – förlag

Poems by Nguyen Phan Que Mai

Translated from the Vietnamese by Bruce Weigl and Nguyen Phan Que Mai

Nguyen Phan Que Mai is among the most exciting writers to emerge from post-war Vietnam. Bruce Weigl, driven by his personal experiences as a soldier during the war in Vietnam, has spent the past 20 years translating contemporary Vietnamese poetry. These penetrating poems, published in bilingual English and Vietnamese, build new bridges between two cultures bound together by war and destruction. The Secret of Hoa Sen, Que Mai''s first full-length U.S. publication, shines with craft, art, and deeply felt humanity.

I cross the Lam River to return to my homelandwhere my mother embraces my grandmother''s tomb in the rain,the soil of Nghe An so dry the rice plants cling to rocks.My mother chews dry corn; hungry, she tries to forget.

Ece Temelkuran is arguably Turkey’s most accomplished young writer. In Book of the Edge, she describes an allegorical journey wherein the speaker, or explorer, encounters strange creatures, including a butterfly, bull, swordfish, sow bug, and cruel city dwellers. These poems point to the undeniable connection between all living beings.

Born 1973 in Turkey, Ece Temelkuran (www.ecetemelkuran.com) has published eight books of poetry, prose, and nonfiction. An award-winning daily columnist for Milliyet, she was a 2008 visiting fellow at the University of Oxford’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.

Translator Deniz Perin received the 2007 Anna Akhmatova Fellowship for Younger Translators.

The poems in this highly anticipated second book are elegiac poems, as concerned with honoring our dead as they are with praising the living. Through Aracelis Girmay''s lens, everything is animal: the sea, a jukebox, the desert. In these poems, everything possesses a system of desire, hunger, a set of teeth, and language. These are poems about what is both difficult and beautiful about our time here on earth.

Aracelis Girmay''s debut collection won the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award. A Cave Canem Fellow, she is on the faculty at Drew University and Hampshire College. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Tagalog is a language spoken by twenty-two million people in the Philippines. Diwata is a Tagalog term meaning "muse." Diwata is also a term for a mythical being who resides in nature, and who human communities must acknowledge, respect, and appease in order to live harmoniously in this world.

In her book Diwata, Barbara Jane Reyes frames her poems between the Book of Genesis creation story and the Tagalog creation myth, placing her work somewhere culturally between both traditions. Also setting the tone for her poems is the death and large shadow cast by her grandfather, a World War II veteran and Bataan Death March survivor, who has passed onto her the responsibility of remembering. Reyes'' voice is grounded in her community''s traditions and histories, despite war and geographical dislocation.

From "Estuary 2":

She was born with fins and fishtail,A quick blade slicing water.

She was her father''s mermaid child,A river demon, elders said.

She mimicked her cetaceous brothers,Abalone diving bluest depths.

She polished smooth her brothers'' masks,Inlaid nacre half moon eyes.

She lit oak pyres and bade the windA whispered requiem.

Barbara Jane Reyes is author of two previous poetry collections including Poeta en San Francisco, which was awarded the 2005 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. She was born in Manila and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. She works as adjunct professor in Philippine studies at the University of San Francisco.

"These soul-infused, deftly crafted stanzas pulse with the rhythms of a poet who lives his life out loud. Sean Thomas Dougherty has always shunned convention in favor of his fresher landscapes—and this book will be the one that stamps his defiant signature on the canon."—Patricia Smith

Sasha Sings the Laundry on the Line is a powerful, grief-driven, deeply felt collection that finds the beautiful and the true, the little epiphanies that give our lives meaning no matter how ephemeral they might be.

The author of ten previous poetry collections, Sean Thomas Dougherty teaches poetry at Case Western University and lives in Erie, Pennsylvania, and Cleveland, Ohio.

From his first book of poems, Chessboards of Hours (1995), Aleš Šteger has been one of Slovenia''s most promising poets. The philosophical and lyrical sophistication of his poems, along with his work as a leading book editor and festival organizer, quickly spread Šteger''s reputation beyond the borders of Slovenia. The Book of Things is Šteger''s most widely praised book of poetry and his first American collection. The book consists of fifty poems that look at "things" (i.e. aspirin, chair, cork) which are transformed by Šteger''s unique poetic alchemy.

Translator Brian Henry is a distinguished poet, translator, editor, and critic.

Walking the Dog''s Shadow rose to the top of nearly eight hundred submissions to win the ninth annual A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. Tony Hoagland, who served as final judge for the contest, writes, "Deborah Brown''s poems remind me a little of the great Polish poet, Wistawa Szymborska. They both make thinking look easy. . . . Brown''s poems aren''t just about a eureka moment; they taste of the whole journey. Walking the Dog''s Shadow is a beautiful book, wise and sure of itself, fresh with wit and gravity, serious and true."

Deborah Brown teaches literature and writing at the University of New Hampshire-Manchester.

Your Father on the Train of Ghosts is one of the most extensive collaborations in American poetry. Over the course of a year, acclaimed poets G.C. Waldrep and John Gallaher wrote poems back and forth, sometimes once or twice a week, sometimes five or six a day. As the collaboration deepened, a third "voice" emerged that neither poet can claim as solely their own.

The poems of Your Father on the Train of Ghosts read as lyric snapshots of a culture we are all too familiar with, even as it slips from us: malls and supermarkets, museums and parades, toxic waste and cheesecakes, ghosts and fire, fathers and sons. Ultimately, these fables and confessions constitute a sort of gentle apocalypse, a user-friendly self-help manual for the end of time.

G.C. Waldrep is author of Goldbeater''s Skin (2003 Colorado Prize for poetry), Disclamor, and Archicembalo (2008 Dorset Prize). He has won awards from the Poetry Society of America and Academy of American Poets, fellowships at Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony; and an NEA fellowship. He holds an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers'' Workshop and teaches at Bucknell University.

John Gallaher is author of Gentlemen in Turbans, Ladies in Cauls, The Little Book of Guesses (Levis Poetry Prize), and Map of the Folded World. His poetry has been included in The Best American Poetry series and numerous journals and anthologies. He co-edits The Laurel Review, GreenTower Press, and the Akron Series of Contemporary Poetics. He teaches at Northwest Missouri State University.

"Singular and deeply pleasurable. Christopher Kennedy''s prosetry is a lonely anarchic nation-state unto itself, half vacation funspot, half eerie purgatorial layover."—Dave Eggers

The poems in Ennui Prophet, Christopher Kennedy''s fourth collection, range from deeply personal explorations of relationships with family and friends, to examinations of the political climate in the first decade of the millennium. Whether personal or public, Kennedy gazes through a slightly distorted lens to better see the world around us.

Christopher Kennedy''s previous book, Encouragement for a Man Falling to His Death (BOA Editions Ltd., 2007) received the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award. He directs Syracuse University''s MFA program in creative writing.

Selected by Jane Hirshfield from over six hundred manuscripts, Litany for the City is the winner of the tenth annual A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. Of Litany for the City, Hirshfield writes, "This book carries both startling imaginative freedoms and the impulsion of a person navigating the terrain of his life by means of the star-chart and sextant of poems––a winning combination, for me."

Ryan Teitman is a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University. He holds an MA and MFA from Indiana University. He currently lives in Berkeley, California.

"Nowhere else in American poetry do I come across a passion, a cunning, and a joy greater than his. And a deadly accuracy. I see him as one of the supreme poets of his generation."–Gerald Stern

The poems in True Faith are earthy, lyrical, honest, and empathic in a style that is both gritty and urbane. With wry humor, Ira Sadoff''s latest collection addresses family, faith, and the quiet joys of aging.

Ira Sadoff currently teaches in the MFA program at Drew University and serves as the Arthur Jeremiah Roberts professor of English at Colby College in Maine.

A winner of the Minnesota Book Award in fiction, poetry, and non-fiction, Barton Sutter''s latest collection details life on the Canadian border, presents portraits of northern plants and animals, rejoices in marriage, and traces the ancient ways of Siberian reindeer herders. The late Bill Holm called it "unlike anything Sutter (or anyone else) has done before." Sutter''s poetry reminds us that other cultures have survived for millennia by living closer to the ground.

Born in 1949, Barton Sutter was raised in Minnesota and Iowa. He retired from the University of Wisconsin–Superior in 2011 and now lives in Duluth, Minnesota.

"Aimee Parkison most often begins softly, slowly stripping away each layer of social interaction to get at what is numinous and frightening and necessary about living in the real world. These are stories both about the difficulty and the intense suddenness of human connection, about the profound link that exists between being in love and being alone."—Brian Evenson

From "The Glass Girl":

On certain evenings in dark motels, she could transform her lip into the edge of the bottle, imagining her face was made of amber glass and the men paused above her only to take a drink of breath. Over the years, men drank and drank until there were only two sips left inside. They began sucking the air out of the glass that grew warm in the wrong places because of heat radiating off their hands. The men''s breath along with white feathers fell over autumn winds drifting through open windows.

In this collection, Kurt Vonnegut Fiction Prize–winner Aimee Parkison''s characters struggle to understand what happens when the innocent party becomes the guilty party. With magical realist flair, secrets are aired with dirty laundry, but the stains never come clean. Carol Anshaw writes, "Aimee Parkison offers a distinct new voice to contemporary fiction. Her seductive stories explore childhood as a realm of sorrows, and reveal the afflictions of adults who emerge from this private geography."

Aimee Parkison has an MFA from Cornell University. She is associate professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where she teaches creative writing.