Journalist Dom Phillips traveled deep into the Amazon rainforest searching for solutions to the problem of deforestation, a threat to the local ecosystem, native tribes, and the global climate. When he was murdered in the Javari Valley by a group of environmental criminals, a cohort of journalists and activists took up his work to finish his book and share his important message.

During the dark days of the Bolsonaro administration, British journalist Dom Phillips set out to accomplish an ambitious goal: through research, interviews, and site visits deep in the rainforest, he would emerge with a book answering the question—how can we save the Amazon? Traveling with his companion Indigenous expert Bruno Pereira, Dom’s adventure includes trekking through Amazonia to see where ranching, fires, illegal fishing, mining, the drug trade, and urbanization have deforested and degraded millions of acres of important forest, degraded ecosystems, and created dangerous conditions for the Indigenous tribes who have called the Amazon home for thousands of years.

When asked why she writes, Lydia Davis confesses that the question makes her uncomfortable. Maybe she would rather not know. Instead, Davis considers how she writes her stories, how other writers write, and what insights the how might provide into the why.

In this free-ranging exploration, Davis discovers that one reason she writes is for pleasure: the pleasure of encountering something that demands to be treated in language, of handling and manipulating the language into the form it ought to take, and, finally, of seeing a story exist where it didn’t exist before. As she observes the processes of some of the authors who interest her the most, she finds that there seem to be as many reasons to write as there are writers: to relive an experience, to share an experience, to articulate something one has not quite comprehended.

Reflecting on an eclectic mix of thinkers, including James Baldwin, Kate Briggs, Walter Raleigh, Christina Sharpe, Knut Hamsun, Grace Paley, Josep Pla, John Ashbery, and John Clare, Davis undertakes a clear-eyed, patient inquiry into the manifold reasons we choose to put pen to paper and begin something new.

When Rickey Laurentiis debuted in 2015 with Boy with Thorn, the poetry world heralded the arrival of an astonishing new lyric talent. “Call Rickey Laurentiis’ stylistic range virtuosity or call it correctly, necessity,” Terrance Hayes wrote. In the past decade, as Laurentiis has transitioned, her ideas of the lyric and poetry have transformed, as has the America in which she lives. This staggering, irreverent, gentle, and erotic book is a record of that ten-year journey. It draws on, expands, and then fractures the many poetic traditions which informed Laurentiis’s poetics—from Greek odes and early Black Spirituals to the work of Whitman and Dickinson and the mid-century cinematic icon The Lady Chablis. 

In a world where what one is, and how one looks, or even just the idea of a person can get one killed, this is transformative work. This collection does not stump for its humanity, nor does it compromise its art in order to speak in its own voice. Sprung to its own sound, celebratory without apology, this is a book which reclaims the act of poetry itself, too, for the way it can reshape the writer, the mind, the body, the story we choose, and the images the world can imprint on us. (Can poetry do that?) Approaching from every angle and expanding in every direction as we read, Death of the First Idea probes every aspect of transformation. Celebratory, interrogatory, reclamatory, full of rage and range, these are poems for the storms of our time.

In Elements of Los Angeles: Earth, Water, Fire, Air, D.J. Waldie continues his singular meditation on Los Angeles: a place of contradictions, dreams, and disquiet. With uncommon clarity and emotional depth, Waldie considers Los Angeles as a place of both promise and disillusionment, of civic memory and strategic forgetting, of natural beauty and environmental fragility. Each of the four classical elements forms the basis for a profound and poetic reassessment of the city’s image, exploring topics as diverse and resonant as the unlikely history of the Hass avocado, the St. Francis Dam disaster, an endurance contest that saw a young woman buried alive, and the sound of Vin Scully’s voice carried across the summer air.

Grounded in the physical and emotional geography of Los Angeles—its earth, its water, its fires, its air—this collection is a portrait of a city always in flux, and of those who try to make a life within it. For anyone who has ever lived in Los Angeles, or simply wondered what lies beneath its glittering surface, Elements of Los Angeles is a guide to seeing the city anew.

The short fictions in Room on the Sea deal with the heart-wrenching vicissitudes of amorous ambivalence, in André Aciman's inimitably nostalgic, lyric style.

"The Gentleman from Peru" tells the story of the life-changing encounter of a group of friends with an enigmatic solitary guest in a hotel on the Amalfi Coast. "Room on the Sea" is a dialogue between a man and a woman who meet on jury duty and embark on a complex relationship. "Mariana" is a modern retelling of a famous seventeenth-century novel about a love affair between a nun and a swashbuckling, unreliable aristocrat.

Spanning four decades of writing—and including never-before-seen poems—The Essential C.D. Wright carries the reverence and wisecracking lyricism of poems that reshaped American poetry.
The Essential C.D. Wright gathers rare selections across the famed poet’s entire oeuvre—from the first book, Alla Breve Loving (1976), through to ShallCross, which was in production at the time of her unexpected death in 2016. Tracing a writing life that spans more than four decades, this essential collection illuminates works that remain empowered by an unrelenting independence, a reverence for mentors, and wry, wisecracking lyricism. With a moving introduction by Forrest Gander, this volume cements C.D. Wright’s place in the literary canon.

The most comprehensive collection of modern Chinese poetry in English translation available today

This volume—a completely overhauled and updated version of Michelle Yeh’s 1992 classic Anthology of Modern Chinese Poetry—brings together modern poetry from the Chinese-speaking world dating from the 1910s to the 2010s. Featuring the work of 85 poets from mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Singapore, it contains more than 280 poems that span the entire history of modern Chinese poetry. Poets include those regarded as canonical as well as some who have been newly “discovered” or reevaluated in recent years, each selected for their distinctive voice and inimitable style. Also, for the first time, contemporary song lyrics are included as poetry. This diversity of perspectives, along with its geographic reach and expansive timeframe, make the anthology a much-needed contribution to the study of Chinese poetry and world literature. With short biographies of the poets, a select bibliography, and a comprehensive introduction, A Century of Modern Chinese Poetry is a critical resource for students, scholars, and general readers alike.

Still at Large chronicles the voices of ordinary people who encounter first hand the mysteries of war, suffering, and courage. Concise yet lyrical, these poems reveal epiphanies about human nature that only individuals who experience terrifying realities are able to disclose. Nonetheless, they are relentlessly bound together by a haunting, unsentimental simplicity, transcending the nightmares of the human condition.

Drawing on new archival material, original research, and interviews, this spellbinding book is the first major biography of James Baldwin in three decades, revealing how profoundly his personal relationships shaped his life and work.

Baldwin: A Love Story tells the overlapping stories of Baldwin’s most sustaining intimate and artistic relationships: with his mentor, the Black American painter Beauford Delaney; with his lover and muse, the Swiss painter Lucien Happersberger; and with his collaborators, the famed Turkish actor Engin Cezzar and the iconoclastic French artist Yoran Cazac.