Ordering

collection of poems and more a visceral collaboration of history, culture, fairy tale reimagining, and ethnography that track Abraham’s mapping of human existence.”

—Indigo Moor, Poet Laureate of Sacramento, CA

“Lisa Dominguez Abraham’s collection of poems, Coyote Logic, moves the reader from familiar place to place without seams. The movement of each line to the next mimics the movement of different people, especially women, especially descendants of brown immigrants – where the conjunction of one idea or location must find its dependent end, but like the stories from women and brown bodies: there are few maps. Abraham’s lines, “We who descend from refugees — / quick moves and no money,” are indicative of the kind of evasions our bodies are forced into, while her lines signal her privilege to look back and work towards creating new pathways to our collective story.”

—Rachelle Linda Escamilla, Author of Imaginary Animal

less

whose radiant language and natural eloquence has given us the dark and light of his heartscape. For this, we offer admiration in return. We hold these poems close and know to remain hopeful.”

—Der Vang, Afterland, 2016 winner of the Walt Whitman Award

“To read Pos Moua’s poems is to be transformed. At their heart is a timeless wisdom and graceful clarity that poets rarely embody, but he does, poem after poem, from mountains to rivers, from Southeast Asia to California, from love to radiation, from this life to the next. With a personal essay by the poet and contributions from the vital and necessary Hmong American Writers’ Circle, this open-hearted book and the first collected poems from a Hmong American poet is a revelation that every person should read. Karst Mountains Will Bloom is a landmark achievement: ascendant, transcendent, visionary. This poet is a treasure and a light.”

—Lee Herrick, Fresno Poet Laureate, author of Scars and Flowers (2018)

less

quests into America’s wildernesses.

The tale is both humorous and heart breaking. Imagine Odysseus returned from WWII to teach his son the subtle art of bone breaking before sharing hot cocoa and opera. This is a family as at ease with nurturing abandoned wild animals as around a campfire rapt to ancestral stories of cannibalism. Throughout the book there is an occasional photographic relic, or Neolithic scrawl to memorialize the breadth of this human story. There are echoes here too, like the ”transparencies” of the title, of mythology and tall tales, an oral tradition transcendent of the printed page. Blood Transparencies is a stunningly fresh glance back, far back, from whence we’ve all come.

less

In this truly elegant book, the remnant of our language negotiates a shadow world⁠—that space between life and death⁠—which is life on this earth. ‘Inside sword we find word,’ indeed. A truly courageous book.”

⁠—Claudia Keelan, author of Missing Her

less

valuable advice from his English professor: “Write about your people. That story has not been told. If you don’t, who will?”  How Do I Begin? is the struggleto preserve on paper the Hmong American experience. In this anthology, readers will find elaborate soul-calling ceremonies, a woman questioning the seeming tyranny of her parents and future in-laws, the temptation of gangs and drugs, and the shame and embarrassment of being different in a culture that obsessively values homogeneity. Some pieces revisit the ghosts of war. Others lament the loss of a country. Many offer glimpses into intergenerational tensions exacerbated by the differences in Hmong and American culture.

How Do I Begin? signifies a turning point for the Hmong community, a group of people who have persevered through war, persecution, and exile. Transcending ethnic and geographic boundaries, it poignantly speaks of survival instead of defeat.

less

Joshua McKinney’s belief in innocence never wavers. At the same time, he gives dignity to boyhood’s time and place, and those who inhabit it…THE NOVICE MOURNER is an achievement in that it truly demonstrates how grief can give way to a celebration of life.”

⁠—Judith Minty

less

playfulness with oppositions is evidenced in lines like: “an opening / a cello scales / some stairs. Risen, / a thought falls.” McKinney’s awareness of the complex resonance of literary history and current issues of language comes through in his dedication to making the appearance of language, not just its sound or its relative meaning, an integral aspect of his poems. Meanwhile, the subject matter is often surprisingly mythic and mysterious, championing absolute freedom and wildness. His intricate verse is sincere in its observations while turning inward on itself, sauntering in designed indirection.

less