Academic : Literature : American literature : Individual authors : 2001-

This lush romantic drama depicts a family of cigar makers whose loves and lives are played out against the backdrop of America in the midst of the Depression. Set in Ybor City (Tampa) in 1930, Cruz imagines the catalytic effect the arrival of a new "lector" (who reads Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina to the workers as they toil in the cigar factory) has on a CubanAmerican family. Cruz celebrates the search for identity in a new land. more...

Price: $13.95

A stunning debut from the winner of the National Poetry Series. In his debut collection, chosen by Mary Karr as a winner of the 2005 National Poetry Series, Tryfon Tolides weaves together poems that speak of desire, loss, and small joys. Tolides was born in a tiny village in Greece and his work is rooted in the mountains and wind and the deep interior of that place; his poems express a longing and a searching for peace, for home, for beauty, for escape. These poems constitute a lament, whether they concern themselves with the difficulties of assimilation or the question of whether it is possible for people to live with one another in a spirit of true understanding. They prove that the physical and the metaphysical can share residence, can even be one and the same. more...

Price: $16.00

'Life is like a poem; sometimes it rhymes and sometimes it does not.'. - from the Introduction. Wendy Lawson's well-known poetry reflects the many aspects of a life lived with Asperger's Syndrome. In this illustrated collection of poems and short prose pieces, including some from her childhood and teenage years, Wendy engages with her past and present, writing frankly about childhood, self-discovery, adulthood and friendship. Her poetry also conveys the day-to-day challenges presented by divorce, bereavement, emigration, disclosing homosexuality and Asperger's Syndrome. Both reflective and life affirming, these poems offer evocative glimpses of the Asperger experience and will enrich readers' understanding of autism spectrum disorders. more...

Price: $14.95

The wholly original story of a woman's life told from her wardrobe's point of view, in the wardrobe's own savvy, vibrant voice--a feat of the imagination as emotionally subtle and stirring as it is dazzlingly particular. We first meet B., the wardrobe's owner, as a child in the buttoned-up Midwest of the 1950s, when "a vision of a saddle shoe" comes into her head and she discovers the urgency of all clothing dreams. more...

Price: $15.00

From The Sky Inside the Shaking TreeWhat you feelreveals you. Watchfor the sustenanceinclined to a source, enamored of singularity,quickly here and quickly gone, shadow from whichthe body's courage comes. Firefliesapparently stumbling. I slapped one on my leg.Its blood glowed. Blessings for the Hands follows various speakers—often disabled speakers, who never once figure themselves as objects of complaint or self-pity—through the haunted dreamscape of “normalcy.” Indeed, dreams are continuous presences in this unusually subtle and elegant debut collection that juxtaposes physical circumstances with the vast interior life of the imagination. The subjects of Blessings for the Hands are real and imagined confrontations—and reconciliations—between family members, friends, strangers, and animals. Matthew Schwartz’s quasi-autobiographical verse complicates and clarifies the emotions waiting just underneath the patterns and expectations of the speakers’ daylight lives, where anger, joy, corporeality, and mortality all seem to collide. For Schwartz, poetry is a sleight of hand that keeps the reader guessing through nearly imperceptible shifts between present vision and absent reality. Blessings for the Hands is a lyric reckoning of the tension between the life we are given and the life we are determined to lead. “Blessings for the Hands is emotionally strong and imaginatively wild, distinctive, deeply moving, without an ort of self-pity, and pervaded by ‘compassion down to your fingertips’ (which Chekhov said is ‘the only method’ both to write and to live). This angle of vision is sharp enough to unify much disparate material. The poems are clear and musical and consequently a pleasure to read and reread despite their gravity. I think this may be lasting work.”—Michael Ryan more...

Price: $14.00