In The Next Sky, history haunts and poems grapple with nostalgia and pain, the ancient and contemporary, to make sense of the places they intersect.Pulsing with evocative voice and imagery, Sherwin Bitsui’s The Next Sky ruminates on the past, present, and future, questioning where living things fit into the puzzle of the natural world. Here, blackbirds sigh obsidian and the “land whispers its name.” The air is woven by laughter and breath becomes ...

“Bitsui’s poetry returns things to their basic elements and voice in a flowing language rife with illuminating images. A great reading experience for those who like serious and innovative poetry.” —Library JournalDrawing upon Navajo history and enduring tradition, Sherwin Bitsui leads us on a treacherous, otherworldly passage through the American Southwest. Fluidly shape-shifting and captured by language that functions like a moving camera, Dissolve is urban and r...

"Sherwin Bitsui's new poetry collection, *Flood Song—*a sprawling, panoramic journey through landscape, time, and cultures—is well worth the ride."—Poets & Writers“Bitsui’s poetry is elegant, probative, and original. His vision connects worlds.”—New Mexico Magazine“His images can tilt on the side of surrealism, yet his work can be compellingly accessible.”—Arizona Daily Star“Sherwin Bitsui sees violent beauty in the Americ...

Ploughshares is an award-winning journal of new writing. Since 1971, Ploughshares has discovered and cultivated the freshest voices in contemporary American literature, and remains prescient in the digital age by providing readers with thoughtful and entertaining literature in a variety of formats. Find out why the New York Times named Ploughshares “the Triton among minnows.”As guest-editor Rigoberto Gonzalez writes in his introduction, “Writing amplifies our questions and illumina...

Dream Work, a collection of forty-five poems, follows both chronologically and logically Mary Oliver's American Primitive, which won her the Pulitzer Prize for the finest book of poetry published in 1983 by an American poet. The depth and diversity of perceptual awareness—so steadfast and radiant in *American Primitive—*continue in Dream Work. She has turned her attention in these poems to the solitary and difficult labors of the spirit—to accepting the ...

When New and Selected Poems, Volume One was originally published in 1992, Mary Oliver was awarded the National Book Award. In the fourteen years since its initial appearance it has become one of the best-selling volumes of poetry in the country. This collection features thirty poems published only in this volume as well as selections from the poet's first eight books.Mary Oliver's perceptive, brilliantly crafted poems about the natural landscape and the fundamental questio...

In 1977, Laura Bell, at loose ends after graduating from college, leaves her family home in Kentucky for a wild and unexpected adventure: herding sheep in Wyoming’s Big Horn Basin. Inexorably drawn to this life of solitude and physical toil, a young woman in a man’s world, she is perhaps the strangest member of this beguiling community of drunks and eccentrics. So begins her unabating search for a place to belong and for the raw materials with which to create a home and family of her own. ...

Two volumes of fiction from the National Book Award–winning author of Arctic Dreams : "Lopez feels a deep spiritual connection to the natural world." — San Francisco ChronicleTo National Book Award–winning author Barry Lopez, the desert and the river are landscapes alive with poetry, mystery, seduction, and enchantment. In these two works of fiction, the narrator responds viscerally and emotional...

Survival in the wilderness--Gary Paulsen writes about it so powerfully in his novels Hatchet and The River because he's lived it. These essays recount his adventures alone and with friends, along the rivers and in the woods of northern Minnesota. There, fishing and hunting are serious business, requiring skill, secrets, and inspiration. Luck, too--not every big one gets away.This book takes readers through the seasons, from the incredible taste of a spring fish fr...

“These molten poems radiate with the ferocity of desire, and in them Erdrich does not spin verse so much as tell tales—of betrayal and revenge, of hunting and being hunted.” —Minneapolis Star TribuneA passionate book of poetry from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Louise Erdrich.In this important collection, Erdrich has selected the best poems from her two previous books of poetry, Jacklight and Baptism of Desire, an...

In powerful language that reflects the conflicts between the primitive and the sophisticated, Joan Crate redreams the passions which animated and tormented her famous predecessor. Part white, part Mohawk princess, Pauline Johnson /Tekahionwake would perform her poems first in buckskin, then, after the intermission, in silk.

Jim Harrison has probed the breadth of human appetites--for food and drink, for art, for sex, for violence and, most significantly, for the great twin engines of love and death. Perhaps no American writer better appreciates those myriad drives; since the publication of his first collection of poetry . . . Harrison has become their poet laureate.”--Salon.comIn Jim Harrison’s new book of poems, birds and humans converse, biographies are fluid, and unknown gods flutter just out of si...