This poet writes like a woman with a mission. Her collection resounds with an honesty that is at once brutal and determined. “You will not go hungry into a strange soil,” she writes to her jaundiced infant. A stirring proclamation,... Read More

Born in 1929 in the former Yugoslav Kingdom, this Slovenian author speaks from the rubble of World War II and Communism. Zajc lost two brothers to the Nazis, landed in jail as a “verbal delinquent,” and spent two forced years in the... Read More

Much of the literary iconography of Northern Michigan has been drawn in the masculine tradition of Hemingway and Jim Harrison. Hard drinking and blood sports predominate; the legends and characters that inhabit literature from this... Read More

What began as a lighthearted lunchtime counterpoint, for a friend who was using John Gray’s Mars/Venus ideas to guide a relationship, became a gentle corrective to those generalizations that espouse how men are, what women want, and... Read More

“Mosca no entra en boca cerrada.” (Flies don’t enter a closed mouth.) Everyone who grows up in Spain starts out conscious life with a collection of such dichos (sayings)-pithy aphorisms that make use of a kind of mild irony to... Read More

These lively poems press deeply into their places and the meanings of place. The first section, shadowed by the mile-long piles of culm extracted from coal mines and the harsh realities of life in coal towns like Taylor, Pennsylvania,... Read More

The more one reads world mythologies, the more one recognizes that although cultural differences influence language and symbol, there are still common themes about the story of being human: creation, the relationship of gods to mortals,... Read More

Unattainable women… travel to exotic places… convicts in prison… the subjects in this collection of short stories evoke a medley of sensations, yet a theme runs through the book: elusive or ruined happiness. From brief pieces like... Read More