Series: American Poets Continuum

Finalist for the 2018 Paterson Poetry Prize Christine Kitano's second poetry collection elicits a sense of hunger — an intense longing for home and an ache for human connection. Channeling both real and imagined immigration experiences of her own family — her grandmothers, who fled Korea and Japan; and her father, a Japanese American who was incarcerated during WWII —...

Her travelling poetics are striking in the way that she defies the borders of "narrative" and "lyric"; she combines the two seamlessly, an enviable gift. --Sacramento News & Review These poems move through love and death, sadness and euphoria, and across European and American landscapes, encountering lovers, strangers, and beloved ghosts. They arrive, finally, in a place of beauty, mystery,...

Like the movie of the same name, the poems in Rancho Notorious are peopled with a colourful cast of characters, all born of the fertile imagination of Richard Garcia. Through narratives, lyric poems and dramatic monologues, Garcia's characters demonstrate that the idea of self is fluid, one identity easily swapped for another. These are poems with heart, poems that believe...

In his tenth book, renowned prose poet Ray Gonzalez proclaims he is "at the crossroads in [his] throat where he looks both ways." Gonzalez is as quirky as ever, matching the didactic tone and jargon of a scientist with the sensibilities of artists like Kenneth Rexroth, Hart Crane, and Picasso, among others, who walk in and out of the poems....

In You and Yours, Naomi Shihab Nye continues her conversation with ordinary people whose lives become, through her empathetic use of poetic language, extraordinary. Nye writes of local life in her inner-city Texas neighbourhood, about rural schools and urban communities she's visited in this country, as well as the daily rituals of Jews and Palestinians who live in the war-torn...