"Cameraman, run to my twin twin zone. A girl's exile excels beyond excess. Essence excels exile. Something happens to the wanted girl. Nothing happens to the unwanted girl. The morning news is exciting." A debut volume from poet, translator, artist and activist Don Mee Choi. Here translation, aberration, mobility and movement corrupt the would-be verities of the world's hegemonic codes. 

Dan Chiasson, hailed as “one of the most gifted poets of his generation” upon the appearance of his first book, takes inspiration for his stunning new collection from the Historia Naturalis of Pliny the Elder. “What happens next, you won’t believe,” Chiasson writes in “From the Life of Gorky,” and it is fair warning. This collection suggests that a person is like a world, full of mysteries and wonders–and equally in need of an encyclopedia, a compendium of everything known. The long title sequence offers entries such as “The Sun” (“There is one mind in all of us, one soul, / who parches the soil in some nations / but in others hides perpetually behind a veil”), “The Elephant” (“How to explain my heroic courtesy?”), “The Pigeon” (“Once startled, you shall feel hours of weird sadness / afterwards”), and “Randall Jarrell” (“If language hurts you, make the damage real”). The mysteriously emotional individual poems coalesce as a group to suggest that our natural world is populated not just by fascinating creatures–who, in any case, are metaphors for the human as Chiasson considers them– but also by literature, by the ghosts of past poetries, by our personal ghosts. Toward the end of the sequence, one poem asks simply, “Which Species on Earth Is Saddest?” a question this book seems poised to answer. But Chiasson is not finally defeated by the sorrows and disappointments that maturity brings. Combining a classic, often heartbreaking musical line with a playful, fresh attack on the standard materials of poetry, he makes even our sadness beguiling and beautiful.

This is a singular collection of poems about boys and boyhood, historical cycles and personal history, memory and meaning. Bicentennial summons the world of Chiasson's seventies childhood in Vermont: early VCRs, snow, erections, pizza, snowmobiles, high-school cliques, and the Bicentennial celebration, but his book is also an elegy for his father, whom he never knew and who died in 2009.

Lilliet Berne is a sensation of the Paris Opera with every accolade except one: she has never created an original role, every singer’s chance at immortality. When she is approached with an offer to do just that, it comes with a caveat—the opera must be based on a secret from her past that she has thought long buried. Who has exposed her? In pursuit of answers she’s drawn back into her past. An orphan who left the American frontier in search of her mother’s family in Europe, Lilliet was swept up in the glitzy, gritty world of Paris at the height of Napoleon III’s rule. There she transformed herself from hippodrome rider to courtesan, from maid to Empress Eugenie to debut singer, weaving a complicated web of romance, obligation, and political intrigue. With endless twists, a cast of characters drawn from history, and a captivating, resourceful heroine, The Queen of the Night tells its story through the transformations of Lilliet as she sheds role after role, moving with every step closer to the spotlight of the Parisian stage—a spotlight that may reveal the secrets she has fought to keep.

Twelve-year-old Fee is a gifted Korean-American soprano in a boys' choir in Maine whose choir director reveals himself to be a serial pedophile. Fee and his friends are forced to bear grief, shame, and pain that endure long after the director is imprisoned. Fee survives even as his friends do not, but a deep-seated horror and dread accompany him through his self-destructive college days and after, until the day he meets a beautiful young student named Warden and is forced to confront the demons of his brutal past.

Joan Chase’s subtle story of three generations of women negotiating lifetimes of “joy and ruin” deserves its place alongside such achievements as Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping and Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women. The Queen of Persia is not an exotic figure but a fierce Ohio farmwife who presides over a household of daughters and granddaughters. The novel tells their stories through the eyes of the youngest members of the family, four cousins who spend summers on the farm, for them both a life-giving Eden and the source of terrible discoveries about desire and loss. The girls bicker and scrap, they whisper secrets at bedtime, and above all, they observe the kinds of women their mothers are and wonder what kind of women they will become. But always present is the family’s great trauma, the decline and eventual death from cancer of Gram’s daughter Grace. A powerful story about family ties and tensions, During the Reign of the Queen of Persia is also a book about place, charting the transformation of the old hardscrabble Midwest into the commercial wilderness of modern America.

A collection of stories features the tale of a divorced woman reminiscing with her ex, a husband consumed by home improvements, a woman's recollection of her odd bond with the school tomboy, and a small-town wife obsessed with a drifter.

How is a woman in her thirties, HIV-positive and fresh out of rehab, supposed to find love and work in contemporary, urban America, steering clear of self-pity and doctrinaire “happy-talk”? This linked short story collection shows how Glory goes and gets some.

Emily Carter’s impressive debut traces one woman’s journey from town houses on Park Avenue and apartments on the Lower East Side, to Minnesota’s recovery community of boarding-houses in blighted urban neighborhoods and well-funded treatment centers in bucolic pastures.

Glory Goes and Gets Some is a streetwise and sardonic look at sex, HIV, addiction, and recovery. From her patrician childhood on the Upper East Side, to her chemical addictions downtown, to her unlikely, tenuous, yet rewarding alliances with the full range of treatment mavens in the Midwest, Glory gives us an uncensored and irreverent account of her experiences in twelve-step recovery—a process that, for all its faults, ultimately works for her. “That first six months, there were an awful lot of people I met who talked the talk, all the time. Their faces seemed to glow, and they’d go on about so-and-so ‘getting it,’ ‘getting’ the program, having that much-touted aura of serenity about them. It was my experience that such persons usually relapsed and stole their roommate’s stereo equipment, or charged five thousand dollars worth of lingerie at Neiman Marcus.”

Hayden Carruth, one of the most acclaimed poets of our age, lives his music—finding the perfect low tones of terrible loss and high riffs of family and friendship.

Collected Shorter Poems presents hundreds of lyric, short narrative, comic, meditative, nature, and erotic poems spanning nearly half a century. Hayden Carruth's engagement with political radicalism, rural poverty, and cultural responsibility in the life of poetry is unique in our time. Celebrated for the breadth of his linguistic and formal resources, and influenced by jazz and blues, he has been called by Adrienne Rich "one of our country''s poetic treasures."