In this cool, manifold chronicle of motherhood, Nicole Cooley tackles the experience of creation, occupying a new vernacular of love within danger. Her poems-animate self-reflections of both merged bodies and violent separation-confront the turbulence of fear and safety.

Cooley’s poems are sharp in all the places it can hurt and soft in ways that comfort an aching soul. Layers of joy, pain, bliss, frustration—no emotion is off limits as these sensual yet valiant poems dig their heels and hold on for dear life as winds of uncertainty threaten to overcome.

Mother Water Ash, a wrenching new collection of poems by Nicole Cooley, explores the personal grief of a mother’s sudden death alongside the environmental crises of the storms, fires, and floods that now dominate our world. Examining the landscapes of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, these poems ponder what it means to mourn in the face of ecological catastrophe, and traipse the terrains left by loss.

In Breach, New Orleans native Nicole Cooley recalls Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath in gritty, poignant detail, bearing witness to the destruction of a region and to its recovery. Ranging from the urgent to the reflective, these poems speak not only to the horrors of the immediate disaster, but also to family dynamics in a time of crisis and to the social, political, and cultural realities that contextualized the storm and its wake. In the title poem, Cooley invokes the multiple meanin...

The Long Devotion is a collection of poems, essays, and writing prompts that celebrates motherhood and creates a space, as poet Molly Spencer has written, to “tell an unlovely truth about family life and not have to take it back.”The poets in this book represent and describe a wide range of experiences. They write about encountering the world anew through their children; intersections of parenting and race; single parenting; adoptive, foster, and step-parenting; life with ...

The poems in Girl after Girl after Girl celebrate the connections between mothers and daughters from generation to generation. Through an acknowledgment of mothers’ unconditional love, the memories evoked by physical objects, and the stories mothers pass down, these poems explore the common thread that stretches backward and forward, running through the lives of women and binding them together in an unbroken chain of years.

Jill Bialosky's first collection of poems is an exceptional one--moving, very accomplished, marked by an unflinching realism and a sharply observant eye combined with great technical skill. Childhood and adolescence shattered by a father's death and the struggles of a mother to raise her daughters are among its concerns. The poems have a dignity and magic that are quite distinctive.

Dynamic artistry celebrating the diverse lives and labors of hardscrabble SouthernersIn Working South, renowned watercolorist Mary Whyte captures in exquisite detail the essence of vanishing blue-collar professions from across ten states in the American South with sensitivity and reverence for her subjects. From the textile mill worker and tobacco farmer to the sponge diver and elevator operator, Whyte has sought out some of the last remnants of rural and ...

This Boston Globe–Horn Book Honor Book and ALA-ALSC Notable Children's Book provides a riveting brick-by-brick account of how one of the most amazing accomplishments in American architecture came to be. It’s 1930 and times are tough for Pop and his son. But look! On the corner of 34th Street and 5th Avenue, a building straight and simple as a pencil is being built in record time. Hundreds of men are leveling, shoveling, hauling. They’re hoisting 60,000 tons of steal, stacking 10 m...

Between Dee and Cathy they have 14 children; and have traveled throughout the country (and in various parts of the world) with their respective families, logging hundreds of thousands of miles. They like short trips, long trips, and pretty much any kinds of trips...Day trips, multi-week trips...They've traveled in mini vans, big vans, RVs, jeeps...They've camped, stayed with friends, and more...

Told in six parts, Things I Didn’t Do with This Bodysings in myriad voices and forms—ragged columns rich with syncopated internal rhyme, crisp formal sonnets, and the angular shapes of a stream-of-pill-induced-consciousness.Bedecked in Fenty and Shalimar, Amanda Gunn’s startling debut,Things I Didn’t Do with This Body, invites you to read with all of your senses and gives fresh meaning to the phrase a body of work. Told in six parts, this collecti...

The Diener investigates loss and healing, change and permanence, in a hospital trauma center and the eroding landscape of southern Louisiana. The diener himself, the morgue attendant who assists the dead in the interstice between the living world and the world beyond, is the person with whom Martha Serpas most identifies in this collection. As a part-time hospital chaplain, Serpas possesses keen insight into the despair and resolve of patients and their families and friends.Yet the...