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From its headwaters in Calabasas to the tidal mouth in San Pedro, the Los Angeles River is many things-an open air art gallery, a wildlife corridor, a history lesson, a storm drain, and a metaphor for missed chances balanced against the hope of future possibilities. Once integrated into one of the largest estuary and floodplain systems in California, the L.A. River now waits for rediscovery and renewal. Many people do not know it is there at all, and few can accurately recall its history. Río de Dios changes that, blending science, history, art, and poetry to explore the complex and contradictory worlds of the Los Angeles River. A fresh, vivid synthesis of the culture and biology of the river, this book investigates its pockets of still-wild habitat, honors its losses, and celebrates its evolving future.

The Islands Project: Poems For Sappho is a book-length collection of poems intended as a conversation with and investigation of the life of Sappho as can be imagined from her work and historical circumstances. The poems attempt a meeting between a contemporary woman poet and one from antiquity, both of them adrift in time. What can a lesbian poet know of her supposed progenitor? If Sappho is only fragments, is not a lesbian tradition in poetry the same, or does it only feel that way? The Islands Project investigates these questions and deals, at the same time, with the death of the poet¿s mother.

Avocations collects the best of Sam Hamill's prose on poetry over the last 18 years, presenting insightful readings of Kenneth Rexroth, Denise Levertov, Odysseas Elytis, Matsuo Basho, Kobayashi Issa, John Logan and many others together with critical commentary on poetry in translation and the practice of poetry in general.

Sparrows. Migration. Borders. Bodies. Blurring languages and metamorphosizing landscapes. In Histories of Bodies, Mariko Nagai traces the memory of loss, grief, death and family, seeking to define love in its multifaceted manifestations, each definition shifting, taking flight, then landing, only to be exiled out of the origin. From New York to Amsterdam to Boston to Tokyo, each landscape, whether temporal or imaginary, is rendered out of memory, then wrought into unsettling language of sorrow. In these poems, the world is consistently shifting, and what remains, at the end, is temporary migration of a sparrow, suddenly landing, then disappearing into the urban landscape.

Through a collection of beautifully moving and honest poetry, More Daring Escapes expresses life in America and the stories of hard workers and dreamers alike. From tales of hope and homecoming to accounts of perseverance and fortitude, More Daring Escapes captures the essence of what drives us all.

Freefalling from a scandal of her own making, reporter Frances Treadwell only thinks she has hit bottom when she finds herself alone and out of work in her ancestral farmhouse in Maine. Soon after she arrives, a meteorite crashes to earth in the woods behind her house, igniting a firestorm of malicious chatter among locals who suspect Frances is somehow connected to a larger, more sinister phenomenon. Caught between a petty criminal she can't resist and a pair of unlikely suitors, Frances watches in horror as the events turn from near farce to life-shattering, irreversible tragedy. Sweetly sexy, miserably funny, and a little scary, View From a Burning Bridge is an enthralling debut novel from a natural heir to Flannery O'Connor and Shirley Jackson.

In Otherwise Obedient, Carol Potter weaves together beautifully striking language and a distinct sense of humor to tell her series of captivating poems about human experience. From an Elvis impersonator to what she refers to as "The Blended Family," Potter shifts perspective in a way that is both witty and insightful.

With The Highwayman's Wife, Lynnell Edwards's fierce and brazen poems breathe new life into well-known myths and tales, giving a new, bold voice to characters such as Medusa and Helen of Troy. Equal parts graceful and audacious, Edwards's poems capture her genuine love of language while maintaining a charming style all their own.

The poems in Future Ship are largely autobiographical in the sense that they are based on personal experiences from childhood and adolescence when the personality is still in a molten form and being shaped by events and experiences that leave a lasting mark on the adult sensibility. The term "autobiographical" is slightly misleading, as any poet knows personal material exists to be molded and transformed according to the needs of the poem. So imagination is the midwife of the past, and whatever actually happened is colored by time, memory, and the exigencies of art. In order to access material which is essentially narrative in nature, and produce poetry rather than short fiction, it was necessary to adopt a form that allowed for flexibility both spacious enough to allow the narrative to develop, yet controlled enough to create some tension in the lines. So the form of alternating long lines with short lines was adopted to answer this requirement. The short lines are lines themselves, and not indented phrases clipped off the ends of the longer lines in order to fit into the marginal format of the page. After allowing the narrative to stretch out in the longer lines, the short lines are meant to act as pivots, or fulcrums, that propel the reader on to the each next long line. They are also meant to supply pauses, breathing spaces, in the extended narrative carried by the longer lines. Other poems in Future Ship are more traditional in lineation, but all the poems, in one way or another, are meant to serve the main theme of how the past informs the present, which then points directly toward the future the trope being a ship that arrives finally to voyage away containing all the accumulated facts, events, and characters that have marked a life. So the self is imagined as a kind of ark, bearing a lifetime's experiences into the future. One hopes, of course, that the closer one gets to personal experience if it is real and honestly felt the more it will become universal and represent, in some way, the experience of others.

In Island, Jeanette Clough invites readers to explore several beautiful and illustrious lands—from Los Angeles to Southeast Asia—while inspiring wonder and emotion through her rich use of language. Her poems capture not only the splendor of natural landscapes, but the passions and desires that run through us all.

Stealing tropes from militancy to minstrelsy, Fear,some broadcasts from the slippery moments when personal, national, racial and aesthetic anxieties overlap. These poems seek to pressurize content ("At the Pink Teacup"), language ("Atomic Buckdance") and form (the Blaxploitation epic-remix, "(dig) Bloom is Boom, Sucka!") until they evoke suspicion, tension, fear and the laughter that rattles after the horrifyingly ridiculous.

"Ryan Van Cleave¿s explosive riffs roll over the American pop culture landscape like a caffeined-up emcee from the dark side. Trying to keep up with his quick wit and dizzying leaps may leave you out of breath, but gasping with surprise and wonder, marveling at how¿beneath the glitz¿Van Cleave has found the sick, twisted soul of this country."¿Jim Daniels, author of Show and Tell

This stunning first collection of funny, strange, aphoristic , indissoluble poems reveals Larry Bridges to be as talented a poet as he is a filmmaker. Full of verve and revelation, these poems are a storehouse of sadness and awakened consciousness.

In May of 2004, a wildfire swept through the Temecula Valley in Southern California, destroying in its path Dorland Mountain Colony, the place where the poems in Ordinary Wisdom were written. Dorland was unique among artists¿ retreats in an electronic age in that there was no electricity or phones in the cabins. Adjusting to the rhythms of light and darkness was the first task in settling in to work. It was the perfect setting for a project that meant to deal with daily life¿its most ordinary manifestations and its most significant messages.

In Oh, Don't Ask Why, Dennis Must's dark humor and use of jarringly raw language confront a number of anxieties and complexities with which his characters grapple. From overwhelming sorrow to suicidal reflection, this compilation of stories reaches deep into the internal and touches readers to the core.

"We've tamed too much of our world, too much of our mind, too much of our soul. Doug Thorpe helps us understand what Thoreau really meant when he said that in wildness is the preservation of the world."-Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature"Doug Thorpe has thought deeply-as he has trekked deeply-into the terra incognita where lies the intersection of the phenomenal and the supposed pre-phenomenal, understanding that language itself is the surest tool whereby the pilgrim might discover those traces joining what is visible and what is not, a disposition more likely than most for apprehending revelation." -Scott Cairns, author of Short Trip to the Edge; Where Earth Meets Heaven-A Pilgrimage"Throughout Rapture of the Deep Doug Thorpe pursues, and is pursued by, one question: 'What will we do with the wild truth?' [...] Thorpe's quest-narrative is further enhanced by the authentic and insightful way in which he interweaves the writers he loves, including Dante and Wordsworth, Jung, Pullman and LeGuin. I feel personally grateful as a reader, writer, teacher and householder for this illuminating book."-John Elder

In this poignant collection of poems, Richard Beban conveys the world around him in a brilliantly real and lyrically beautiful light. He writes of different perspectives and relationships, doing so with humor and warmth, leaving a memorable impression long after the final page has been turned."

This debut collection of forty-five poems explores a range of subjects, including the 1998 dragging death of James Byrd, Jr., former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic, September 11, the war in Iraq, and the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. The collection also contains poems about the 2001 massacre of Nepal's royal family, people living with AIDS, the Confederate Flag issue in South Carolina, and the influence of Gwendolyn Brooks and James Baldwin.

Death of a Circus tells the story of the Bringlebright Circus, a small fictional troupe traveling the United States in the early twentieth century, an era when circuses are falling out of favor and only the largest shows are enduring. Initially, the book follows Lor Cole, a young African American man from Connecticut who dreams of leaving behind his provincial past and making a name for himself as a high wire walker. Upon joining Bringlebright, however, Lor quickly learns that the characters who join him under the Big Top have their own stories to tell.Closest to Lor is Cirella Flannery, a beautiful and startlingly devious fire-eater who has struggled for survival since her spirited days in a juvenile detention facility. Ranju, Bringlebright's reclusive chief animal trainer, hides a history of magic and trickery that may be his undoing. Stalwart, Ranju's young protege, finds solace in his journal even as he grapples with a mysterious connection to Lor. Presiding over the show is Mr. Barnacle, the Ringmaster, a charlatan who constantly concocts new stratagems to keep Bringlebright afloat. Together, these performers create a colorful ensemble that illuminates the twin sides of the show: one rapturously razzle-dazzle, the other rough-and-tumble.Death of a Circus is a novel of multiple narrative lines. It captures the rapid pacing of an adventure story, but it is ultimately much more. Chock full of circus allusions, Big Top lingo, folklore and historical detail, it is a far-reaching fairy tale that speaks to the foibles of the human heart and what happens when life is lived both within and outside the center ring spotlight.

The Proving Grounds unfolds a narrative not of strict chronology, but rather the way each poem functions as a moment that gathers the thematic clusters of the struggle for identity in a consumer culture that has no sense of intrinsic value and that struggle's manifestation in the world of athletic performance and the way these general trends interact with individual experience. The poems trace the female body as a primal proving ground where the distance between history and experience form a paradox: the idea that the female body is limited and weak is particularly strange for a narrator who grew up in the generation post-Title IX, when girls were assumed to have the same competencies as men, and who has been called upon to physically shield her mother from her father from the time she was seven. Similarly strange but compelling is the paradox of the deep love for and identification with her father that arises from this first proving ground to shape the rest of her life.

Charles Harper Webb's eccentric and distinct writing style makes this collection of poetry a funny and charmingly memorable read. A melting pot of pop culture, historical references, and everyday life, Webb's poems are refreshingly candid and straightforward.