An anthology of contemporary poems and soup recipes to nourish us, comfort us, and bind us together—gathered by award-winning poet Major Jackson.Poetry and soup both offer sustenance and comfort. And yet, the secret ingredient to every great meal is not what we see on the plate, but who we see around the table. This anthology features poems by today's best poets that embody the idea of nourishment, comfort, and connection across cultures and generations. Among the ...

In this knock-out collection, Major Jackson savors the complexity between perception and reality, the body and desire, accountability and judgment.Inspired by Albert Camus’s seminal Myth of Sisyphus, Major Jackson’s fifth volume subtly configures the poet as “absurd hero” and plunges headfirst into a search for stable ground in an unstable world. We follow Jackson’s restless, vulnerable speaker as he ponders creation in the face of meaninglessness, chronic...

"A devastatingly beautiful collection of strange and wonderful poems." —Poetry DailyIn these poems of broken unions and acute longing, Major Jackson explores art, literature, and music as seductive forces in our lives.

Finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, 2026Stephanie Niu’s I Would Define the Sun, awarded the 2024 Vanderbilt University Literary Prize, is a collection of poems that declare the impossibility of defining something as immense as the sun while striving toward that impossible act. In an era of planetary collapse, filled with bushfires, bleached coral, and burnout, Niu explores what love can do even through estrangement, even through being together at ...

Melissa Range’s Printer’s Fist, awarded the 2025 Vanderbilt University Literary Prize, is a collection that tells the story of a political movement—its strides and setbacks, its unity and fractures—with a particular emphasis on print culture. Drawing upon more than a decade’s worth of archival research into nineteenth-century antislavery newspapers, pamphlets, broadsides, and more, Range highlights the expansiveness of the movement by focusing not on one, but a chorus of abolition...

Guest editor Nick Flynn selects and introduces a diverse collection of poems, essays, and stories. The issues features everything from Eric Fair's essay Consequence, on being an interrogator at Abu Ghraib, to Major Jackson's list poem, "Why I Write Poetry." A stylistically varied issue featuring several emerging poets like Samuel Amadon and Sophie Klahr, as well as established writers such as Mark Slouka, D. A. Powell, Claudia Rankine, and others.

'Thrilling, inventive, and fierce - a tale of malevolent empire and those who stand against it. Not to be missed' Max GladstoneThere is no escaping the Empire. Even in death, you will serve.In an Empire fuelled by necromancy, dead sorcerers are the lifeblood. Their corpses are wrapped in chains and drained of magic to feed the unquenchable hunger for imperial conquest.Born with magic, Arienne has become resigned to her dark fate. B...

The first collection of its kind to examine tourism as a complicated and vital force in southern history, culture, and economicsAnyone who has seen Rock City, wandered the grounds of Graceland, hiked in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, or watched the mermaids swim at Weeki Wachee knows the southern United States offers visitors a rich variety of scenic, cultural, and leisure activities. Tourism has been, and is still, one of the most powerful economic ...

**“The whole world is in these poems.” —David Kirby, The New York Times Book ReviewAn exuberant collection of two decades of Major Jackson’s passionately intelligent poetry.**A preeminent voice in contemporary literature, Major Jackson offers steady miracles of vision and celebrations of language in rapturous, sophisticated poems. Razzle Dazzle traces the evolution of Jackson’s transformative imagination and fierce music through five acclaimed volumes: his...

A Sense of Regard, says Laura McCullough, “is an effort to collect the voices of living poets and scholars in thoughtful and considered exfoliation of the current confluence of poetry and race, the difficulties, the nuances, the unexamined, the feared, the questions, and the quarrels across aesthetic camps and biases.”The contributors discuss issues as various as their own diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds. Their essays, which range in style from the personal and lyric...

"This is criticism at its best." —Carolyn Kellogg, Los Angeles TimesWriting in the tradition of Susan Sontag and Elaine Scarry, Maggie Nelson has emerged as one of our foremost cultural critics with this landmark work about representations of cruelty and violence in art. From Sylvia Plath’s poetry to Francis Bacon’s paintings, from the Saw franchise to Yoko Ono’s performance art, Nelson’s nuanced exploration across the artistic landscape ultimatel...

“Adrienne Rich is the Blake of American letters.”—Nadine GordimerAcross more than three decades Adrienne Rich’s essays have been praised for their lucidity, courage, and range of concerns. In A Human Eye, Rich examines a diverse selection of writings and their place in past and present social disorders and transformations. Beyond literary theories, she explores from many angles how the arts of language have acted on and been shaped by their creators’ world...