Red Mud is elemental: earth, water, blood. Its poems are both lyrical and direct, engaging the reader in a journey through terrain inhabited by distant men and cautious women, guided by the deer, mouse, bird, and fox. The poet, like the moose, "who, given mud, makes pleasure of it."

Judith Valente's poems are deeply rooted in the everyday world, and yet transport us to a place in the soul, a place that C.S. Lewis once described as "the real, real world." She is a poet concerned with those moments that telescope the sacred in the ordinary, offer a clarifying vision of what it means to be human, and remind us we are part of something larger than ourselves. These are love poems...

Lust, greed, avarice, gluttony....all are present in the poems of The Year the Pears Bloomed Twice. From the small ache at her center, the poet celebrates and quarrels with the beauty and grief of this world, her hungers of spirit and flesh. The language of her full humanity--her embarrassing longings and unreasonable passions--both seduces and challenges the reader.

Pluck a Lotus for Pleasure provides the English reader with a comprehensive collection (in Chinese and English) of works of more than thirty five women poets of the Song Dynasty (960-1279 C.E). Along with little known authors of the period, some of the most famous are represented here by works previously little translated. Included are Lady Wei, Zhun Yuniang, Sun Daoxuan, Zhu Shuzhen and Li...

The poems and translations in Harmony in Babel entertain one paradox of life today. Paul Friedrich guides us through a Babel of words, and worlds of the imagination ranging from his translations from five languages(notably the Russian of his literary studies) to the poetry of the Indian Mexico of his anthropological field work to America writ large -- super highways, a Vermont farm, father and...

Xin Qiji (1140-1207) was a Song Dynasty poet who wrote in a range of genres and is famous for the more than six hundred ci poems he composed to one hundred and one different tunes. Kit (Christopher) Kelen and Agnes Vong have worked through around a quarter of Xin Qiji's surviving oeuvre in order to present the reader with this collection of translations, adaptations and responses to the work of...

"Poetry's ultimate goal," Li Nan writes, "is to keep oneself in equilibrium with good. It shines a beam of beauty, love, and kindness on people. It has a powerful spirit that transcends nation, race, and religion; it makes it possible for us to embrace in the darkness. Poetry takes place in time. I offer it in time as a witness to all that is." Small is a collection of ordinary images floating on...

Inara Cedrins brings a painter's eye to her poetry. In this collection a still life blooms into narrative, narrative freezes for a moment into portrait and metaphor becomes a bowl of fruit waiting for the perfect light. As Cedrins says, "fences sprawl dizzy between chloroform and clarity." These are also the poems of a world traveler, a searcher both at home and not at home in places as diverse...