The phrase "heart of darkness" has become familiar shorthand for conjuring an ominous sense of hidden or deeply rooted evil. How did these words become so evocative? The answer lies in the richness and acute insight of Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad's story based on his 1890 journey on the Congo River.

An ode to Put the Damn Guns Down, this is National Book Award finalist and New York Times bestseller Jason Reynolds’s fiercely stunning novel that takes place in sixty potent seconds—the time it takes a kid to decide whether or not he’s going to murder the guy who killed his brother.

A National Book Award Finalist for Young People’s Literature.

Ghost wants to be the fastest sprinter on his elite middle school track team, but his past is slowing him down in this first electrifying novel in a new series from Coretta Scott King/John Steptoe Award–winning author Jason Reynolds.

Beastgirl & Other Origin Myths is a collection of folkloric poems centered on the historical, mythological, gendered and geographic experiences of a first generation American woman. From the border in the Dominican Republic, to the bustling streets of New York City, Acevedo considers how some bodies must walk through the world as beastly beings. How these forgotten myths be both blessing and birthright.

The poet Raymond Patterson once asked “But who can conceive / Of cities lost in a blackman?” That’s what these poems are about: what does it mean to be nearly broken by something you love? Bastards of the Reagan Era is a challenge, a confrontation of the hard realities that frame America.

This volume presents two rare works by the modernist writer H.D.: Within the Walls, a collection of fourteen short stories, and What Do I Love?, a set of three long poems. Written during World War II in London, where H.D. chose to stay despite offers of refuge in the United States, the stories and poems recount her experiences during the Blitz. These texts capture the essence of war-torn London from the perspective of a woman with her boots on the ground.

Windows and Doors is a poetry handbook that places poststructuralist and postmodern ways of thinking alongside formalist modes, making explicit points of overlap and tension that are usually tacit. Each of Natasha Sajé’s nine essays addresses a topic of central concern to readers and writers of poetry while also making an argument about poetic language and ideology.

Kara Candito’s second poetry collection is anything but a comedy, although it ends happily. At the book’s center is the struggle of a U.S. citizen and a Mexican citizen to find a common space and language in their relationship while navigating the U.S. immigration system, a process that sometimes requires magical thinking just to endure. By employing a kind of documentary poetics that views the application process through different angles and perspectives, Candito crafts discourses around xenophobia, otherness, and national and ethnic identity.

    H.D. called By Avon River "the first book that really made me happy." In this annotated edition, Lara Vetter argues that the volume represented a turning point in H.D.’s career, a major shift from lyric poetry to the experimental forms of writing that would dominate her later works.

In Bed Stuy, New York, a small misunderstanding can escalate into having a price on your head—even if you’re totally clean. This gritty, triumphant debut captures the heart and the hardship of life for an urban teen.

A lot of the stuff that gives my neighborhood a bad name, I don’t really mess with. The guns and drugs and all that, not really my thing.

Julie R. Enszer's second collection mines the multiple meanings of sisterhood, exploring the burdens and joys of sisters, real and imagined. These poems ache with loss: of a sister, of friends from AIDS, of elder poets, of innocence, of exuberance and idealism in middle age. But at the same time, these poems affirm life: the desire of humans to live, to hold one another tightly, to build new ways of living amid fragile remains.

What if Romeo had stayed helplessly in love with Rosaline instead of Juliet? Or if Mercutio and Tybalt hadn't died...but had gotten together instead? In this Shakespearean take on the "Choose Your Own Ending" model, the audience casts votes throughout the performance to determine which course true love will take; ultimately deciding whether everybody lives or everybody dies. With eight dramatically different possible endings, this isn't the tale of star-crossed lovers that you read in high school. An irreverent, madcap reimagining of Shakespeare's most beloved romance.

Electric Literature’s [46]mission is to guide writers and readers through a rapidly evolving publishing landscape. By embracing new technologies and mixed media, collaborating with other publishers, and engaging the literary community online and in-person, Electric Literature aims to support writers while broadening the audience of literary fiction, and ensure that literature remains a vibrant presence in popular culture.

In The South Carolina Roots of African American Thought, each of the nineteen authors is introduced with a supplementary scholarly essay to illustrate the cultural and historical import of their works and to demonstrate how they draw on and distinguish themselves from one another. These connections exhibit a coherent legacy of engagement, brought on and nurtured by South Carolina traditions.

Meg Eden’s The Girl Who Came Back is a collection of narrative poems that circle  around a Mother’s love of an amusement park that has been destroyed by time and  urban sprawl.  The Mother’s recollections are shared with the daughter, until the  love of the past amusement park becomes a shared fantasy. Eden asks us to consider  the way experience shapes memory and the way memory shapes reality. It begs to  question the importance of shared narratives.

In Tongue Lyre, Tyler Mills weaves together fragments of myth and memory, summoning the works of Ovid, Homer, and James Joyce to spin a story of violence and the female body. Introducing the recurring lyre figure in the collection—a voice to counter the violence—is Ovid’s Philomena, who, while cruelly rendered speechless, nonetheless sets the reader on an eloquent voyage to discover the body through music, art, and language. Other legendary figures making appearances within—Telemachos, Nestor, Cyclops, Circe, and others—are held up as mirrors to reflect the human form as home.

Troubled young men and boys scarred by their gritty surroundings animate this careful sophomore effort from Hoch (A Parade of Hands), much of it focused on the city and the blue-collar suburbs of Philadelphia, where the poet grew up. The well-handled 22-part central poem, Bobby Almand, takes its name and subject from a gruesome murder case: the titular boy becomes both hoodlum and victim, a sacrificial representative for the tough teens who run through the rest of the book—Like wild dogs, we were raised/ in packs, by packs.

Centered on the adoption of a gay couple's first child, The Foundling Wheel employs apt imagery to create an emotional mosaic that explores the complicated bond between father and son. Beginning in a place where the desire to have a child has not yet been realized, this book is a journey, and while the poems certainly rejoice in fatherhood, they also grapple with the fears that accompany it.

From the publisher's website [61]:

Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890–1930 demonstrates that popular lynching plays were mechanisms through which African American communities survived actual and photographic mob violence. Often available in periodicals, lynching plays were read aloud or acted out by black church members, schoolchildren, and families.

"These poems describe the outside world with a luminous grasp of detail, clarity, connection. Soon enough in every poem it seems the external world is giving way to a subtle interior of feeling and nuance. What is surprising is the command of language and music in which this occurs, and the sheer precision of both. There are pleasures on every page here, making this one of the best debut collections I have read."—Eavan Boland

From the publisher's website [70]:

The poet Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) came on the literary scene in the 1910s as a young American expatriate living in England. Her early lyric poems, in Sea Garden, helped launch the free verse movement known as imagism. Her work as a whole, spanning five decades, includes long narrative poems, novels, memoirs, and translations. Her experience of the two world wars in Europe is felt throughout her oeuvre, much of which focuses on the power and destructiveness of war.

"Finding Gordon Lipschitz" is the story of one man's desperate search for his long-lost friend and high school valedictorian. At his twenty-five year high school reunion, Harris Greenberg realizes that his once promising life has turned into a depressing failure. When he discovers that Gordon Lipschitz hasn't been seen since graduation, Harris embarks on a desperate mission to find him. Enlisting the help of old friends, Gordon is found in the most unlikely place, a shell of his former self.

In this land of Milk & Honey, poems flow. Contemporary Jewish, lesbian poets address an array of experiences – relationships between and among women, family relationships, politics, solitude, ethical responsibilities, history, solidarity, and community. Milk & Honey features beloved poets like Ellen Bass, Robin Becker, Elana Dykewomon, Marilyn Hacker, Eleanor Lerman, Joan Nestle, Lesléa Newman and Ellen Orleans, as well as new and emerging voices.

From the publisher's website [81]:

In Mentor and Muse, a collection of twenty-nine insightful essays by some of today’s leading poetic minds, editors Blas Falconer, Beth Martinelli, and Helena Mesa have brought together an illuminating anthology that draws upon both established and emerging poets to create a one-of-a-kind resource and unlock the secrets of writing and revising poetry.

Judith Skillman's "The Sister," which I accepted for Seneca Review earlier this year, was striking for recasting Cain as sister and memorably arresting for the feral fierceness of the portrait. Her other poems in The Never are equally astute, unsentimental and unflinching; her identification with the icons and motions of mythology, the armature for so many of the poems here, derive from their visceral passions. These poems sizzle with elemental directness and judgment, linguistically sharp and probing.

In her first collection, Julie R. Enszer offers poems that are as unabashedly erotic as they are unabashedly feminist. Whether responding to queer cultural icons, fantasizing about sex, or mourning illness and loss, these poems are sweet and sultry, fierce and tender. From demonstrations on the streets to bedroom romps, these smart and sexy poems interweave narrative and lyrical moments with the political and the sensuous.

From the publisher's website [92]:

Biblical Women's Voices in Early Modern England documents the extent to which portrayals of women writers, rulers, and leaders in the Hebrew Bible scripted the lives of women in early modern England. Attending to a broad range of writing by Protestant men and women, including John Donne, Mary Sidney, John Milton, Rachel Speght, and Aemilia Lanyer, the author investigates how the cultural requirement for feminine silence informs early modern readings of biblical women's stories, and furthermore, how these biblical characters were used to counteract cultural constraints on women's speech.

In Kara Candito’s prize-winning debut collection a “garish/human theatre” comes to life against richly textured geographic and psychic landscapes. These poems are high-speed meditations on a world where Walter Benjamin meets the “glitzy chain-link of Chanel scarves” and Puccini’s Tosca meets the din of the Times Square subway station. Ferociously witty and intensely lyrical, Taste of Cherry speaks to us in a language that is simultaneously private and public, sensual and cerebral.

Taije Silverman's debut collection chronicles her family's devotion and dissolution through the death of her mother. Ranging in style from measured narratives to fragmented lyrics that convey the ambiguity of loss, these poems both arc into the past and question the possibility of the future, exploring the ways in which memory at once sustains and fails love.

Imagine you step into a vintage clothing store in a new city. You see: the usual mix of leather jackets, crinoline, motorcycle t-shirts, a yellow sundress, a poison ring. Only all of these clothes belong to Alison Stine, and she's there, saying, "Try this-- it'll fit you better" or "This shirt I've never even worn." As you stand in front of the full-length mirror, tags dangling from your sleeves, you start to see, slowly, what Stine sees: A bullied girl in a science classroom; a sleight-of-hand trick in a dark auditorium; a teenager running in snow from a party.

This work explores Edith Wharton's career-long concern with a 19th-century visual culture that limited female artistic agency and expression. Wharton repeatedly invoked the visual arts--especially painting&#151as a medium for revealing the ways that women's bodies have been represented (as passive, sexualized, infantalized, sickly, dead). Well-versed in the Italian masters, Wharton made special use of the art of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, particularly its penchant for producing not portraits of individual women but instead icons onto whose bodies male desire is superimposed.

Like the softened edge of a lit moon, Adele Steiner's poems reflect back the poet's sense of mystery and connection found in the world that surrounds her, from her own circle of family and friends, to the larger sphere where, in a Mexican cavern, Side to side/rock masses shifted to love one another/bone dry.

From the 1790s to the 1840s, the fear that Britain had become too effeminate to protect itself against the anarchic forces unleashed by the French Revolution produced in many British writers of the period a desire to portray strong leaders who could control the democratic and commercial forces of modernization.

This second collection, a follow-up to Patrick Phillips's award-winning debut, navigates the course of the male experience, and particularly young fatherhood. Like Virgil's Aeneas, the book's central figure is in the middle time of life, a grown man with an aging father on his shoulders and a young son at his hand. Phillips's plainspoken and moving lyrics add an important voice to the poetry of home as he struggles to reconcile fatherhood and boyhood, present and past, and the ache of loving what must be lost.

This book argues that in the course of grappling with skepticism, Shakespeare and Donne revolutionize the art of memory and discover an art of doubt.  Topics important to students of Renaissance literature—such as mimesis, exemplarity, pastoral and typology—become transformed, seen now as a set of vital responses to the incursion of skeptical doubt. By discussing the aesthetics of memorialization, the representation of collective memory, and ideas of women as countermonuments, the book investigates how Donne and Shakespeare respond to epistemological uncertainty.

This collection covers varied perspectives on both canonical and lesser-known Catholic women writers, all focusing on unruliness in what is commonly thought of as a restrictive site of writing for women: Catholicism. This volume is comprised of fourteen selected essays divided into three main sections by chronology:  (1) medieval through the seventeenth centuries; (2) eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; and (3) the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

"In Constituents of Matter, Anna Leahy looks hard and long at the `solid things' of the world and discovers that they are both reflected and refracted by time. The matter that constitutes her experience occupies a space that is `immense' with `emptiness' but is also `buoyant' with `joy.' Like the moose she looks at and who catches her looking (`Moose, Looking'), I find that I'm contained by a `large life' that's revealed in intervals of repose and stillness."--Michael Collier

For several decades a brutal army of rebels has been raiding villages in northern Uganda, kidnapping children and turning them into soldiers or wives of commanders. More than 30,000 children have been abducted over the last twenty years and forced to commit unspeakable crimes.

Routes and Roots is the first comparative study of Caribbean and Pacific Island literatures and the first work to bring indigenous and diaspora literary studies together in a sustained dialogue. Taking the "tidalectic" between land and sea as a dynamic starting point, Elizabeth DeLoughrey foregrounds geography and history in her exploration of how island writers inscribe the complex relation between routes and roots.

In her fiction debut, Doreen Baingana follows a Ugandan girl as she navigates the uncertain terrain of adolescence. Set mostly in pastoral Entebbe with stops in the cities Kampala and Los Angeles, Tropical Fish depicts the reality of life for Christine Mugisha and her family after Idi Amin’s dictatorship.

In this charming, wry look at sisterhood . . . the love, misunderstandings, anger and complexity of sister relationships are brought out . . . . Well-written, humorous, and emotional.
--Romantic Times Book Club Magazine

This epic retelling of the legendary Carthaginian military leader’s assault on the Roman empire begins in Ancient Spain, where Hannibal Barca sets out with tens of thousands of soldiers and 30 elephants. After conquering the Roman city of Saguntum, Hannibal wages his campaign through the outposts of the empire, shrewdly befriending peoples disillusioned by Rome and, with dazzling tactics, outwitting the opponents who believe the land route he has chosen is impossible.

Power and Identity In the Creative Writing Classroom remaps theories and practices for teaching creative writing at university and college level. This collection critiques well-established approaches for teaching creative writing in all genres and builds a comprehensive and adaptable pedagogy based on issues of authority, power, and identity. A long-needed reflection, this book shapes creative writing pedagogy for the 21st century.

This work examines the interplay of gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, and sexuality through the lens of Catholicism in a wide range of works by women writers, forging interdisciplinary connections among women's studies, religion, and late twentieth-century literature.

Rose Solari’s second full-length collection of poems is made up of two compellingly different yet intertwining strands. In one, Solari explores a variety of myths, climbing beneath the skin of classical heroes and villains to offer contemporary perspectives on these characters and their tales. The other strand consists of poems of celebration and farewell, written for the author’s late parents, as well as in honor of relationships, illusions, and old selves that have passed on.

How do new dads teach their daughters how brave baby girls can be...and how smart...and how athletic? Why by lifting them into the air and flying them around the room, turning them into the intrepid Pink Flash!

When he learns that his pregnant wife has been spirited off to a distant city, William responds as any man might—he drops everything to pursue her. But as a fugitive slave in Antebellum America, he must run a terrifying gauntlet, eluding the many who would re-enslave him while learning to trust the few who dare to aid him on his quest.

"James Hoch's poems contain an eerie and clarifying power that reminds that reminds me of Chardin's still lifes. Lake Chardin, Hoch celebrates the beauty and fragility of life by fixing on the luminous details of mortality. He does so through a dense but elegant syntx. Unlike most first books, experience drives Hoch's poems. A PARADE OF HANDS is so sure of itslef that raders will think of James Hoch's achievement and accomplishment rather than of his promise and potential"--Michael Collier.

“Rich with imagery, with longing, memory, and self-assertion.”
--Hubbub

Mary Fred Anderson, raised in an isolated fundamentalist sect whose primary obsessions seem to involve an imminent Apocalypse and the propagation of the name "Fred," is hardly your average fifteen-year-old. She has never watched TV, been to a supermarket, or even read much of anything beyond the inscrutable dogma laid out by the prophet Fred.

When Gabriel Lynch moves with his mother and brother from a brownstone in Baltimore to a dirt-floor hovel on a homestead in Kansas, he is not pleased. He does not dislike his new stepfather, a former slave, but he has no desire to submit to a life of drudgery and toil on the untamed prairie. So he joins up with a motley crew headed for Texas only to be sucked into an ever-westward wandering replete with a mindless violence he can neither abet nor avoid–a terrifying trek he penitently fears may never allow for a safe return.

Out of print.

"Alison Stine's best poems here are confessional and meditative sequences, but are shadowed by the tradition of dramatic narrative; they propose types of redemptive performance....Their white spaces are crucial to this ironic self appraisal, in which a lost, outcast belated family is assembled by invocation."--Robert Hill Long

In a changing society, Christians and Jews have looked to the Bible to find values and models. But the Hebrew Bible does not offer just a single model for family behavior or relationships. This volume explores the positive and negative aspects of family life in ancient Israel as portrayed in the Bible. Rashkow examines the relationships between husbands and wives, parents and children, and siblings, looking at the variety of conflicts that emerged: incest, rape, abuse, murder, and hatred.

The Water Between Us is a poetic examination of cultural fragmentation, and the exile's struggle to reconcile the disparate and often conflicting influences of the homeland and the adopted country. The book also centers on other kinds of physical and emotional distances: those between mothers and daughters, those created by being of mixed racial descent, and those between colonizers and the colonized. Despite these distances, or perhaps because of them, the poems affirm the need for a multilayered and cohesive sense of self. McCallum's language is precise and graceful.

As the mother of seven boys, Mag Singer fears she will never have the career she dreams of. But she begins to re-evaluate her priorities after she learns that her troubled middle son is missing after the terrorist bombing of his Marine barracks in Beirut. For three days, as the family awaits word of his fate, they are forced to come to terms with themselves and each other, and to rediscover the deep reservoir of love they once shared.