The World at Large brings together the best of James McMichael's poetry and includes works that appear for the first time in this volume. With the publication of the new poems, McMichael surpasses even the formally daring and psychologically penetrating poetry that has characterized his work thus far.

Capacity, the extraordinary new collection from the award-winning poet James McMichael, deliberates an earth that supplies what people need to live. Land, water, sky, food, shelter, thought, talk, sex—each is addressed at the pace of someone dense with wonder’s resistance to take for granted even the smallest or most obvious parts of existence. Capacity is a 2006 National Book Award Finalist for Poetry.

In a voice somewhere between Cormac McCarthy and Kurt Cobain, John McManus explores young people living in extreme situations. Some are in the Tennessee Smoky Mountains, some in the Pacific Northwest, a few are in the Western deserts of Utah and Nevada, one is in England, and many are scattered throughout the Southern US. All are desperate for something beyond the ordinary lives that are given to them, and every one is absolutely unforgettable.

From Whiting Award-winning writer John McManus comes a debut novel of startling originality and mystery. The son of an unknown father and an ostracized mother, and the next of kin in a long line of bastard relatives, nine-year-old Loren Garland lives a life of subtle mystery beneath the shadow of an East Tennessee mountain. It is on his family's broken-down estate that Loren's imagination grows, and with it, the extraordinary voice of Bitter Milk, a young boy named Luther who may be Loren's imaginary friend, his conscience, or his evil twin. And yet outside the puzzle of Loren's brain, there are the darker goings-on of his family—his mother who wishes she were a man, his new uncle who plans to develop the Garland land into real estate, and his withered grandfather who holds the clan together through truculence and fear. When Loren's mother disappears, he must set out on a quest of his own devising, tossing aside the trappings of youth in order to discover the truth of the world.

This collection of short stories, by award-winning author Reginald McKnight, explores the rich and complex experience of the African-American middle class, from a small southern classroom to a mythical Africa to suburban streets. Outrageously inventive, disarmingly comic, and urgently disturbing, this collection brings a disparate cast of characters face to face with fault lines of identity and the limbo of living between cultures.

"In the deeply satisfying title story, which won an O. Henry Award, an insecure 12-year-old, son of an Air Force sergeant who's away in Vietnam, defeats the school bully. The young hero is black, his tormentor is white, and the story tackles institutionalized racism and the hollowness of Lyndon Johnson's 'Great Society' as experienced in Waco, Tex. Even more impressive is 'Roscoe in Hell,' a supernatural yet scathingly realistic fantasy about a crack addict looking back on his life from the vantage point of a free-for-all party in his new abode, hell. 'Soul Food' mirrors the soul of a homeless pickpocket/ex-male prostitute. In the raucous 'Peacetime,' set in East L.A. in 1973, a sensitive, flute-playing Marine almost loses his virginity under the tutelage of two scary dudes. The fable 'Homunculus,' centered on a lovesick poet, is a pool of wisdom about art as both mediator and cannibalizer of life. A master of narrative pacing, novelist McKnight (I Get on the Bus) evokes a quicksand world where survival is a victory." —Publishers Weekly

In this prize-winning author's most ambitious book to date, an African-American anthropologist trying to "find himself" in Senegal instead finds himself caught in a surreal web of deception and betrayal.

Bertrand, a young African-American anthropologist, has ostensibly come to Senegal to do field research. But in truth, he left his home in Denver to gain a fresh perspective on his troubled marriage. Struggling to fit in with his new Senegalese family—Alaine, his wife Kene, and their young daughter—Bertrand finds himself, for the first time in his life, haunted by surreal and increasingly violent dreams. His waking hours are no less sinister; unwittingly, it seems, Bertrand has become caught in the tension—sexual and otherwise—building between the married couple. His relations with the rest of the village community are also strained; he can't escape the sensation that he's being set up for a grand-scale betrayal. As his sense of isolation and alienation escalates, he comes to believe that not only his fragile sense of identity—but his very life—is at stake. A riveting tour de force, He Sleeps confirms Reginald McKnight's status as a writer of vivid imagination and exceptional talent.

Billy Lynch’s family and friends have gathered to comfort his widow, and to pay their respects to one of the last great romantics. As they trade tales of his famous humor, immense charm, and consuming sorrow, a complex portrait emerges of an enigmatic man, a loyal friend, a beloved husband, an incurable alcoholic. Alice McDermott’s striking novel, Charming Billy, is a study of the lies that bind and the weight of familial love, of the way good intentions can be as destructive as the truth they were meant to hide. Charming Billy is the winner of the 1998 National Book Award for Fiction.

On a wild, windy April day in Manhattan, when Mary first meets John Keane, she cannot know what lies ahead of her. A marriage, a fleeting season of romance, and the birth of four children will bring John and Mary to rest in the safe embrace of a traditional Catholic life in the suburbs. But neither Mary nor John, distracted by memories and longings, can feel the wind that is buffeting their children, leading them in directions beyond their parents’ control. Michael and his sister Annie are caught up in the sexual revolution. Jacob, brooding and frail, is drafted to Vietnam. And the youngest, Clare, commits a stunning transgression after a childhood spent pleasing her parents. As John and Mary struggle to hold on to their family and their faith, Alice McDermott weaves an elegant, unforgettable portrait of a world in flux—and of the secrets and sorrows, anger and love, that lie at the heart of every family.

Mule is highly lyrical, obsessively incantatory, audaciously formal, and actually a very personal, very autobiographical book. In it, the author addresses his at-the-time failing second marriage (which he is no longer in), his son's autism, his own racial identity, and some of his beliefs about God.

"Some books come down like gods dying to transform us out of our empty, shattered lives. Mule is such a book. Never shying away from sudden confusions of pain and beauty, Shane McCrae's questions are not why so much pain? why so much beauty? but, instead, how can they remake us? McCrae's is a living, breathing poetry made of wisdom and wrenching song." —Katie Ford.

The follow up to 2013's Blood (Coldfront's book of the year), Forgiveness Forgiveness is a visceral poetry collection that troubles the intersections of race, abuse, memory and history. Concerned with how the visibility of blackness can become an individual burden, Forgiveness Forgiveness traces the lingering fallout of an identity informed by traumatic artifacts and events—how the story of a story can be revised. Forgiveness Forgiveness complicates the idea of family as nurturer and destroyer. A physical and haunting work of cathartic healing.

"Shane McCrae's Forgiveness Forgiveness is song that writes wrongs until they ring with generosity. When the poet turns to trauma and difficulty for subject matter, he returns to us with an unflinching devotion to hope, to possibility—bearing wisdom, sustenance. McCrae has again transmuted a legacy of violence into one of love because 'the promise / is / New life.'" —Heidi Lynn Staples