In She Who Lies Above, Beatriz Hausner brings Hypatia of Alexandria, the fourth-century Byzantine mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher, to life. She does so through layered ventriloquism: publishing amorous correspondence from the feminist icon's friend and former student, Synesius of Cyrene, and scribing Hypatia's replies in turn.These letters are "discovered" by Bettina Ungaro, a librarian and archivist by day and poet by night. She, in turn, collates the correspon...

Juxtaposing the diction of surrealism with Ovid, Callimachus, and popular music—punk and new wave—the poems in Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart concern themselves with various aspects of Eros.From wistful romance to explicit sex, these poems are inspired by the troubadour poets of Provence and Italy, and invoke such historical figures as the Byzantine Empress Theodora and her husband, Emperor Justinian, not to mention the Countess of Dia—Beatriz—a major poet of the troubad...

Enter the Raccoon documents a love affair between a woman and a raccoon. They are a couple that loves without preconceptions, whose being together eschews all limits until their beliefs in the self are put to the test. Their story unfolds each time one surrenders to the other in a sometimes melancholic and cruel, other times joyful, even ecstatic embrace.

In The Book of Marvels, award-winning poet Lorna Crozier offers a delightful series of prose meditations on household objects: everything from doorknobs, washing machines, rakes, and zippers to the kitchen sink. Operating as a kind of a literary detective, Crozier brings her rapt attention to the everyday things she explores, uncovering the mystery that lies at their essence. She offers tantalizing glimpses of the household's inhabitants, too, probing hearts, brains, noses, and na...

I have read many manuals in my life, ranging from manuals on how to mend boats to ones telling me how to use a computer (nowadays, of course, the computer itself tells us what we should do). Gradually, I developed something of a passion for the manual and started to draw up my own, based on my observations of daily life. When Celso Loducca asked me to write a book, I thought: Why not collect together all the manuals Ive written over the years and publish them? The result is the book youre ...

From "a genuine American Dostoevsky" ( The Washington Post): a dazzling, funny, bittersweet exploration of the mysteries of relationship, both human and animal.When his favorite cat Biscuit goes missing, Peter Trachtenberg sets out to find her. The journey takes him 700 miles and many years into his past-- into the history of his relationships with cats and the history of his relationship with his wife F., who may herself be on the verge of disappearing. Wh...

"People are bullets, fired," the narrator declares in one of the desperate, eerie stories that make up Greg Jackson's Prodigals. He's fleeing New York, with a woman who may be his therapist, as a storm bears down. Self-knowledge here is no safeguard against self-sabotage. A banker sees his artistic ambitions laid bare when he comes under the influence of two strange sisters. A midlife divorcée escapes to her seaside cottage only to find a girl living in it. A journalist is either ...

Winner of the Man Booker International Prize"You read Lydia Davis to watch a writer patiently divide the space between epiphany and actual human beings by first halves, then quarters, then eighths, and then sixteenths, into infinity," says The Village Voice. Indeed, Lydia Davis is mathematician, philosopher, sculptor, jeweler, and scholar of the minute. Few writers map the process of thought as well as she, few perceive with such charged intelligence.T...

A bold and strikingly original new work from one of America's greatest living poetsAlice Notley is considered by many to be among the most outstanding of living American poets. Notley's work has always been highly narrative, and her new book mixes short lyrics with long, expansive lines of poetry that often take the form of prose sentences, in an effort "to change writing completely." The title piece, a folksong-like lament, makes a unified tale out of many stories...

Heaven's Thieves is a collection engaged with the big questions -- What are bodies for? What does it mean to be alive? What is beauty and why does it have such power over us? What is the point of art? -- and the urgent ones -- how to live in a shattered ecology, what to do about grief, illness, betrayal. Sinclair turns her attention to these questions with fearless curiosity, economy, and an originality born of her willingness to pursue her own line of inquiry to its limit. These poems get...

Straight from the Heart is a collection of poetic works by Mary K. Johnson. She describes it in her own words: "Each poem I have written was inspired by the walks we take through life. We are alike more than we might realize. There are five senses we all have in common, and I used this fact to touch bases with all feeling, emotions, thoughts and doubts, of each and every one whether good or bad. It's easy to say, “Wow, I have always thought that same way, or felt that same way.” But we nev...

In this book the author has used observations from the natural world to convey feelings about living through the seasons of life.