Distinguished American poet Peter Everwine became interested in Aztec culture some four decades ago, while living in Mexico, where he heard modern dialects of classical Náhautl spoken around him in village streets. He soon began producing English versions of Aztec poems, but, until now, these exquisite translations have been collected only in letterpress editions limited to a few hundred copies. With the publication of Working the Song Fields, Everwine’s work becomes available to poetry lovers everywhere.

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.

Midge Raymond stretches the boundaries of place as she explores the indelible imprint of home upon the self and the ways in which new frontiers both defy and confirm who we are. The women who inhabit these stories travel for business or for pleasure, sometimes out of duty and sometimes in search of freedom, and each encounters the unexpected. From a biologist navigating the stark, icy moonscape of Antarctica to a businesswoman seeking refuge in the lonely islands of the South Pacific, the characters in these stories abandon their native landscapes—only to find that, once separated from the ordinary, they must confront new interpretations of who they really are, and who they’re meant to be.

Sascha Feinstein’s passion for the creative arts and his memories of the heartbreaking loss of his mother entwined to become the book Black Pearls. In the spirit of jazz improvisation these essays are governed by theme and variation more than by strict chronology, each essay repositioning riffs and choruses of personal experience within the wider cultural landscapes of literature, painting, and music. The project began as an exploration into the archeological nature of memory, but it matured into a far more complex evocation of personal identity.

Long a magnificent symbol of the wild, grizzly bears are perhaps the most controversial species in North America. In Grizzly Wars, David Knibb explores the policy and political issues involved in managing and attempting to save any species, especially one that can pose a grave danger to human beings. The author looks at the grizzly bear recovery areas on both sides of the border, from the North Cascades to the Northern Rockies. Writing with remarkable evenhandedness, Knibb examines the key issues in each region, including the heated debate over the decision to remove Yellowstone’s grizzlies from the list of threatened species and the question of whether the bears in each area can responsibly be regarded as a distinct population.