Bøger udgivet af Western Michigan University, New Issues Press

Poetry. African Studies. In BEFORE THE PALM COULD BLOOM, Patricia Jabbeh Wesley writes poems of the Liberian civil war and of the devastation it has wrought. And In poems ofvillage life and customs, the city life of Monrovia, the rites of childhoodand adolescence, Wesley records for the reader a world that has been foreverchanged. Wesley's poems incorporate many African voices, and range in tonefrom sorrow and longing, to humor and ironic wit.

Poetry. Steve Langan's brilliant first book is full of passion suffused with irony, poems cagily built to deconstruct sentimentality by using self-consciousness as a kind of comic foil. But for all the poet's clever feints and evasions, at the core of the work beats the heart of a romantic. Langan's methods are luminously impressionistic, and the poems percolate with image and materiality, inflection and the full-throated music of language. Freezing glitters with the distant light (or explosions of inner light) of a hundred small moments colliding where perception meets the self in the "unbeautiful city."

Winner of the AWP Prize for the Novel, this debut novel digs deep into the complexities of family history and relationships. When Etta's grandmother dies, she is compelled to travel to Myanmar to explore complicated adolescent memories of her grandmother's family and the violence she witnessed there. Full of rich detail and complex relationships, The Golden Land explores those personal narratives that might lie beneath the surface of historical accounts.