Winner of the 2008 Blue Lynx Prize for Poetry.

Boys Whistling like Canaries is a mesmerizing journey through the political cruelty of the twentieth century. The connecting threads are the relationship between parent and child and the complexity of basic survival in the face of the annihilation wrought by inhuman disregard. Sweeping through a landscape framed by religion and literature, the poems argue that history has consistently failed to inoculate us against war and oppression—against the tyranny of governments who turn on their people, people who turn on their neighbors—even as the voice behind those poems refuses to lose hope for the eventuality of Lincoln's “better angels of our nature.”

In this stunning fourth collection, Kathy Fagan expands her ongoing engagement with voice and persona across the borders of both traditional and experimental poetic lines. In Lip, a book of monologues, portraits, and arias, Fagan directs our attention to the sometimes literal ropes and pulleys of the human stage, those operating just out of sight and earshot: the understructure and the undervoice. Her speakers—historical, anonymous, and often subversively female—variously hold forth, hold back, enfold, and unleash in forms as multiply textured as their experience. Always, hovering at the mouth of the vessel, in the margin of speech, is lip: anatomical and botanical, sexual and slang, servile and insolent.

“Here’s the first thing you should know . . .”

From the opening line of Brenda Miller’s second collection of award-winning essays, the reader is drawn into a conversation on topics ranging from new dogs to old stained glass, from a walk in Portland’s Japanese Garden to a sojourn in Jerusalem, from model airplanes to Magic 8 Balls. In the title essay, her impulse to bring her new puppy to a Unitarian church that is offering to bless animals coincides with her father’s heart surgery.

Winner of the 2007 Spokane Prize for Short Fiction.

Forgetting English explores the indelible imprint of home upon identity and the ways in which new frontiers both defy and confirm it. From a biologist navigating the icy moonscape of Antarctica to a businesswoman seeking refuge in the South Pacific, the characters who inhabit these stories travel for business and for pleasure, out of duty and in search of freedom, and each comes face-to-face with the unexpected.

Brandon Schrand was awarded a Pushcart Prize for “Eleven Ways to Consider Air,” his contribution to this collection.

The Greeks divided the world into four constituent elements: water, fire, air, and earth. The third in a series of essays by Idaho writers, Borne on Air joins company with Forged in Fire ( University of Oklahoma Press, 2006) and Written on Water ( University of Idaho Press, 2003) to remind us what can happen when the craft of fine writing meets the wild beauty of nature. For Borne on Air, some of Idaho’s best-loved writers were challenged to describe their personal relationship with the element that surrounds and sustains us.