Huu Tri was a young lieutenant serving in the South Vietnamese army when Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese in 1975. As an employee of the “Old Government,” he and others like him were viewed as a threat to the incoming communist... Read More

Not short on words for even the smallest of things, the sparks in this collection are the many bits of language that flare out from the subject, ranging from the death of a father, to loves and intimacies, to figures from history. In... Read More

“No one can better teach us about sexual pleasure than poets,” writes the editor. Maltz critiques contemporary American culture for its commercialization and trivialization of sex, offering old and new poems by various authors as the... Read More

By beginning her poetry collection with Oscar Wilde’s adage: “One’s real life is so often the life that one does not lead,” Budy prepares the reader for the disjuncture that follows. Life as it is, gives way to the alternative... Read More

“The year was 1959 and I was on my way to Capetown, South Africa, for an adventure that would change my life.” In the language of a tale told many years after the fact, Turner describes the outline of a 11,000 mile trip that took him... Read More

“Sensitive people feel intense emotions, are aware of others’ feelings, are deeply impacted by others’ emotions, and can’t shake off painful feelings because all these things are directly due to empathy.” From this standpoint,... Read More

Setting off on her journey with T.S. Eliot’s quote, “intolerable shirt of flame / Which human power cannot remove,” this author goes, and stays where the heat is hottest. Immediately, certain geographical coordinates are... Read More

For many, to be a poet is to love Emily Dickinson. There is an inevitability to this affair, and her influence on American poetry elicits a form of worship in the poems written to, for, and because of her. This slim, but weighty... Read More