In his poetry collection, Flatfish, Moon Tae-jun offers an aesthetic that emphasizes the author’s exploration of the inner self. At times sparse and allusive, his poems use blank space and other stylistic considerations to convey a voice and thought that ranges from the contemplative to the surreal and absurd. Moon’s poems suggest Buddhist ideologies, natural images, and Korean temples, as the collection explores individual experiences within the context of a search for understand...

In Consolations of the Forest, Sylvain Tesson explains how he found a radical solution to his need for freedom, one as ancient as the experiences of the hermits of old Russia: he decided to lock himself alone in a cabin in the middle taiga, on the shores of Baikal, for six months. From February to July 2010, he lived in silence, solitude, and cold. His cabin, built by Soviet geologists in the Brezhnev years, is a cube of logs three meters by three meters, heated by a cast iron ski...

Vivid new translations of Basho's popular haiku, in a selected format ideal for newcomers as well as fans long familiar with the Japanese master.Basho, the famously bohemian traveler through seventeenth-century Japan, is a poet attuned to the natural world as well as humble human doings; "Piles of quilts/ snow on distant mountains/ I watch both," he writes. His work captures both the profound loneliness of one observing mind and the broad-ranging joy he finds in ou...

Born and raised in northern Manchuria during the colonial period of Korea, Yun Dong-ju was a poet of the utmost purity, beauty, and sincerity. His posthumously published collection of poems under the title Sky, wind, stars, and poems is one of the all-time favorites of Korean readers. Wishing not to have so much as a speck of shame toward heaven until the day I die, I suffered, even when the wind stirred the leaves. (From Foreword) In simple diction and straightforward expressions, his poe...

Crushed Wild Mint is a collection of poems embodying land love and ancestral wisdom, deeply rooted to the poet’s motherland and their experience as a parent, herbalist and careful observer of the patterns and power of their territory. Jess Housty grapples with the natural and the supernatural, transformation and the hard work of living that our bodies are doing—held by mountains, by oceans, by ancestors and by the grief and love that come with communing.Housty’s poems are ...

**FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR POETRYWinner of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, selected by Juan Felipe Herrera***For years now, I’ve been using the wrong palette.Each year with its itchy blue, as the bruise of solitude reaches its expiration date.Planes and buses, guesthouse to guesthouse.I’ve gotten to where I am by dint of my poor eyesight,my overreactive motion sickness.9 p.m., Hanoi’s Old Quarter...

Driven by the desire to help her three-year-old daughter settle down into a peaceful night's sleep, Maureen Garth devised meditations that would help her daughter feel secure and cared for. Starbright is a collection of the stories Garth created as her child grew older. these innovative meditations are simple visualisations parents and teachers can read to their children to help them sleep, develop concentration, waken creativity, and learn to quiet themselves.

I want to get rid of Kanoko/I want to get rid of filthy little Kanoko/I want to get rid of or kill Kanoko who bites off my nipples.A landmark dual collection by one of the most important contemporary Japanese poets, in a "generous and beautifully rendered" translation.Now widely taught as a feminist classic, KILLING KANOKO is a defiantly autobiographical exploration of sexuality, community, and postpartum depression. Featuring some of her most famous poems, Ito wri...

Jane Hirshfield’s urgent new collection is a book of personal, ecological and political reckoning. Her poems inscribe a ledger personal and communal, a registry of our time's and lives’ dilemmas as well as a call to action on climate change, social justice and the plight of refugees. The poems of Ledger record riches, both abiding and squandered, and mourn our failures. They confirm, too, the continually renewing gift of the present moment, summoning our responsibility as moral beings to s...

A collection of meditations on poetry, art and life, taken from the creative writing lectures of one of South Korea’s most prominent living poets'Kick against words like you would kick back on a swing. You’ve got to feel as if the soles of your feet are touching the sky.'These 470 aphorisms, collected by his students, are evocative micropoems in their own right. Some express ideas at once familiar and breathtakingly new – truths we...

"Yoon unflinchingly illustrates the horrors suffered by Korean 'comfort women' and grapples with trauma both experienced and inherited." —The Paris ReviewIn her arresting debut collection, urgently relevant for our times, poet Emily Jungmin Yoon confronts the histories of sexual violence against women, focusing in particular on Korean so-called "comfort women," women who were forced into sexual labor in Japanese-occupied territories during World War II.In wre...

By any measure, Gary Snyder is one of the greatest poets in America in the last century. From his first book of poems to his latest collection of essays, his work and his example, standing between Tu Fu and Thoreau, have been influential all over the world. Riprap, his first book of poems, was published in Japan in 1959 by Origin Press, and it is the fiftieth anniversary of that groundbreaking book we celebrate with this edition. A small press reprint of that book included Snyder'...