In 1994 the worst episode of genocide since the Holocaust of the Second World War ravaged the Central African country of Rwanda. Derick Burleson lived there and taught at the National University during the two years leading up to the genocide. The poems in this collection explore the cataclysm in a variety of forms and voices through the culture, myths, and customs he absorbed during this time. Ejo, meaning "yesterday and tomorrow" in Kinyarwandan, celebrates in language both lyrical and austere the lives of the friends Burleson made in Rwanda, those who survived to tell their own stories, and those whose voices were silenced.

Autobiographical poetry from one of Kentucky’s rising Affrilachian literary stars.

Bernard Clay’s autobiographical poetry debut, English Lit, juxtaposes the roots of Black male identity against an urban and rural Kentucky landscape. Hailed as one of the most authentic voices of his generation, Clay artfully renders coming-of-age in the predominately Black West End of Louisville, Kentucky. Balancing the spirited grit of a farmer and the careful lyricism of a poet, English Lit is a triumph of new Affrilachian—African American and Appalachian—literature.

The world of William Trowbridge is one preoccupied with loss, with the fall from some possibility of grace that all who are born must bear. In the title poem of Trowbridge’s first full-length collection the poet calls our attention to movies, to Shane in particular. He asks us to identify, not with Shane, the lonely knight on a nameless quest, but with the much more lonely, and real, Jack Palance, the Prince of Darkness.

Trowbridge favors the villain, the outcast, the imperfect, the sinner, the alienated: King Kong, the Frog Prince, Frankenstein’s monster.

Winner, 2016 Miller Williams Poetry Prize, edited by Billy Collins

Randall Jarrell said that when you read a poem “you are entering a foreign country whose laws and language and life are a kind of translation of your own.” In [explicit lyrics], we are visitors to a world that is familiar as if the poems are occurring in our town, on the streets where we live. But the laws have changed, and what is normally important is no longer relevant. What was meaningless is now everything.

As the title indicates, these poems are lyrics—musings on the small decisions required by existence in the modern world. They contain the grand themes of art—life, love, and mortality—but not where you expect. The smallest and most mundane objects become the catalyst for reevaluating our roles in society and the world. This is not poetry as art. This is life as art, from a country where poetry is the only language.