These poems explore interlocking themes of sacrifice willing and forced and the sacred dimension of nature and the need for healing in the suffering world.

This book, which was selected by poet John Hodgen for the John Ciardi Prize for Poetry, ranges across rural Florida and Georgia as well as Los Angeles and New York City, include considerations of homesickness, memory, music, alcohol, love, and loss. With a voice at once inquisitive and prescient, Minor meditates on consumption, vice, homesickness, memory, family, and the landscape. Minor’s writing is unerringly lyric and blooming with elegant charm and keen description. This book is an alchemy of fortitude in the face of despair and all the transformative possibility that comes with the hope for a better future.
 

In these fifteen personal essays, Gary Gildner comes of age at a Catholic school learning Latin, how the girls crossed their legs in algebra, and football in the school’s bomb shelter by exchanging punches with his best friend. He goes to Communist Poland to teach American literature and, in medias res, teaches the Warsaw Sparks baseball team how to win. Living in Czechoslovakia when that country is splitting in half, he learns the meaning of “Where the Dog is Buried” and fathers a daughter. Gildner writes about his Polish-German family’s immigrant story and his friendships with poet Richard Hugo and Raymond Andrews, his college roommate and the author of Baby Sweet’s and other African American novels. He writes about 9/11, stealing, meeting a cougar up close, meeting Michele, felling his barn in Idaho’s Clearwater Mountains with a crowbar, and boxing with Chuck Davey, a fellow Michigan State Spartan and one-time challenger for the World Welterweight title.
 
Essays from this collection have appeared in such venues as the New York Times Magazine, The Southern Review, and New Letters.

This collection gathers major poems from Michelle Boisseau’s previous collections A Sunday in God Years, Trembling Air, Understory, No Private Life, and Indian Summer, as well as uncollected poems and interview excerpts from her three appearances on the nationally syndicagted public radio program New Letters on the Air.

Winner of the Byron Caldwell Smith Award for Kansas Authors

This debut collection of nine humorous stories, set in and around Kansas City from the 1950s to the 2000s, often depicts adults awkwardly mentoring talented young people, whether in a community garden, a library, or in one-on-one advice. Other characters feel like outsiders in their own neighborhoods or suddenly become outsiders when straying into unfamiliar places.
 

Red Silk by Missouri Poet Laureate Maryfrances Wagner is now back in print. Winner of the Thorpe Menn Award, Red Silk’s subjects draw upon her Italian-American immigrant family, personal reverberations of the Vietnam War, and coming of age in the Midwest.  
 

This Is Not Your Country by Amin Ahmad won the G. S. Sharat Chandra Prize from BkMk Press, selected by Stephanie Powell Watts. America has upended the lives of these Indian immigrants: a doctor addicted to the adrenaline rush of the ER, a genius computer programmer who always gets fired, a high-level bureaucrat outshone by his young wife, a teenage runaway, and a lonely livery driver who befriends a troupe of street acrobats. As they desperately seek solace in love, sex, and status, they discover that the journey to real belonging is much stranger than they had ever imagined.
 
Stories in This Is Not Your Country have appeared in such places as The Missouri Review, Slice, and Asian American Literary Review.
 

Weave: New and Selected Poems showcases poems from Barker’s long career that includes selections from her seven previous full-length collections, as well as new work. The collection features a wide range of subjects and themes, notable among them the poet’s perspectives as an educator (especially in the very real-world concerns of the urban English classroom), surprises and wonders in her family’s past and present, and the hope, fear, and trenchant wit with which she sees the world around us.