Selected by Juliana Spahr for Subpress, Mohawk/Samoa: Transmigrations draws on the songs and stories of two geographically distant cultures to create a unique poetic collaboration. By writing beautifully spare new poems that stem out of each other's translations from Mohawk and Samoan, James Thomas Stevens and Caroline Sinavaiana have "[created] an exciting mesh where Mohawk and Samoan inform each other to erase boundaries between individual and collective, past and present, inner and outer worlds." —Arthur Sze

Borrowing from the North American Jesuit Relations and the Lettres Edifiantes et Curieuses of the Jesuits in China, (dis)Orient focuses on the obsession of charting. Charting the lakes and rivers of lands on both sides of the Bering Strait, charting the borders of our own containers. Mapping as a means of showing greatness or inferiority. Do we map our borders based on what is reported or echoed back by others? "If the savages are to be believed.../...and we even traced out from their reports a map of the whole of the new country." An exploration of borders, based partially on the ideas of psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion, on history, but mostly of the self experienced though the other.

dis(Orient) was later collected into A Bridge Dead in the Water.

This extravagantly imagined tale chronicles the rehabilitation of a teacher who has had a love affair with a twelve-year-old boy. While the man's crime was to mistake molestation for love, his cure will partake of the same confusion: to help and rehabilitate him, the police and the doctors subject the teacher to increasingly bizarre forms of therapy. Called "an astonishment" by Dennis Cooper, The Sex Offender weds compelling mystery with comedy, satire, and politics.

In the small Dutch city of Deventer, a pair of projects recently emerged that unite individual art practice and urban planning: the development of a disused mid-twentieth-century hospital complex; and the transformation of a Catholic hospital monastery into the Jozef Health Centre Deventer. Deventer tells the story of these two projects.

A murder mystery set in the storied mountain city of Guanajuato, Mexico, by the author of Allan Stein and Landscape: Memory. When a wealthy and respected woman of the people is found dead on a remote mountain hillside, an unlikely young photographer is thrust into the cross-hairs of American money and Mexican politics. Moving swiftly from lavish dinners to seedy bars, Chloe Jarren's La Cucaracha brings the genre formalism and precision of a John Le Carré novel to bear on "the mongrel dynamism, the deluded optimism of 21st century neo-liberal politics." It can be read for free online here.

Comic, erotic, and richly imagined, Allan Stein follows the journey of a compromised young teacher to Paris to uncover the sad history of Gertrude Stein's troubled nephew Allan. Having been fired from his job because of a sex scandal involving a student, the teacher travels to Paris under an assumed name—that of his best friend, Herbert. In Paris, "Herbert" becomes enchanted by Stephane, a fifteen-year-old boy. As he unravels the gilded but sad childhood of Allan Stein, "Herbert" is haunted by memories of his own boyhood, particularly his odd, flamboyant mother. Moving from the late twentieth century back to the 1900s, effortlessly blending fact and fiction, Allan Stein is a charged exploration of eroticism, obsession, and identity.

Spires's second collection, originally printed in 1985 and reissued in 1997.

Opening with a powerful sequence of poems about her mother's death, Elizabeth Spires writes about the life-and-death matters of midlife: the separation of parent from child, the loss of family and friends, the evolving nature of our closest friendships. These poems find hope in the seasonal and spiritual moment when "the green blade rises."

A collection of poetry that reminds us of the joys of life despite our century's problems and horrors.

With grace and style, Jason Sommer considers how to live in the wake of history among those who are indelibly marked by it. On the surface a book of poems composed in the shadow of the Holocaust, The Man Who Sleeps in My Office offers more than a poetic chronicle of suffering and loss. Instead, Sommer—the son of a survivor—has discovered a delicate balance that allows him to be in and of history without succumbing to it. In these works, both the seen and the unseen—the failed or rejected vision—alter the seer, as the limit of one thing becomes the verge of something else. Whether about the Holocaust, the dog he'll never own, or love between a husband and wife or parent and child, these poems savor the mysterious instant when alternatives of vision unfold. While these moments may also conjure loss, the losses are made good, as when, in "Legion," someone forgets why he has walked into a room but salvages from the lapse not the purpose of the errand but a sense of the ultimate worth of a life. These finely crafted narrative poems tell the story of these unanticipated perceptions, when the ordinary opens to the very human story of failed understanding and quiet epiphany.