Books in the Free Verse Editions series

Ana Cristina Cesar (1952-1983) has posthumously become one of Brazil's best known avant-garde poets. After her suicide in 1983, her innovative, mythic, and dreamlike poetry has greatly influenced subsequent generations of writers. At Your Feet was originally published as a poetic sequence and later became part of a longer hybrid work-- sometimes prose, sometimes verse--documenting the life and mind of a forcefully active literary woman. Cesar, who also worked internationally as a journalist and translator, often found inspiration in the writings of other poets, among them Emily Dickinson, Armando Freitas Filho, and Gertrude Stein. Her innovative writing has been featured in Sun and Moon's classic anthology Nothing the Sun Could Not Explain--20 Contemporary Brazilian Poets (2000). Poet Brenda Hillman and her mother Helen Hillman (a native speaker of Portuguese) worked with Brazilian poet SebastiÃo Edson Macedo and translator/editor Katrina Dodson to render as faithfully as possible the intricately layered poems of this legendary writer. At Your Feet includes both the English translation and original Portuguese.

In his single-poem sequence, Dear Reader, Bruce Bond explores the metaphysics of reading as central to the way we negotiate a world-the evasions of our gods and monsters; our Los Angeles in flames; the daily chatter of our small, sweet, and philosophical beasts. In light of an imagined listener and the world taken as a whole, Bond sees the summons of the self in the other, and in the way the other in the self informs our sacrifices and reckoning, our speechless hesitations, our jokes and our rituals of loss. Every moment of personal and political life, interpretation holds the page of the human face, not far but far enough, and all the while, beneath our gaze, the subtext that is no text at all, where the old argument between universals and particulars breaks down, exhausted, and the real in the imagined is, by necessity, renewed.What People Are SayingDear Reader is that essential intimate epistle that comes to us in an hour of great need. It offers no answers but rather reminds us of our fundamental questions. Meticulous and measured, richly working a system of resonant recurring tropes, this sequence of sonnets give us the voice of one particular sensibility-in turns tender, earnest, honest, intelligent, witty, and wry-as it reaches out across a divide it knows cannot be crossed by language and reason alone. In a time when we confront daily the frenetic, desensitizing maelstrom of political rhetoric and a ubiquitous flood of mass media, Bruce Bond reminds us in Dear Reader of the quiet but urgent philosophical and spiritual inquiries, sometimes monstrous and animal, that define and affirm our humanity. -Kathleen GraberBruce Bond's powerful book-length poem Dear Reader arrives with the "shush of oceans, page after page," buoying forward a meditation on how we read and how we are read by others. Each reader is a choir, a city, a book "the world leafs through." Bond reckons with "inner lives / so enormous I could barely see them," chronicling the longing, cruelty, and generosity those encounters elicit. And he recognizes how one's own inner life casts a ghost-face "across the glass between us." Composed of fifty blank-verse sonnets, the book is stunning in its range and quickness, urgent and penetrating in confronting the "call of freedoms other than our own" that remain achingly near and impossibly far away. -Corey MarksAbout the AuthorBruce Bond is the author of twenty books including, most recently, Immanent Distance: Poetry and the Metaphysics of the Near at Hand (U of MI, 2015), Black Anthem (Tampa Review Prize, U of Tampa, 2016), Gold Bee (Helen C. Smith Award, Crab Orchard Award, Southern Illinois University Press, 2016), Sacrum (Four Way Books, 2017), and Blackout Starlight: New and Selected Poems 1997-2015 (E. Phillabaum Award, LSU, 2017). Four books are forthcoming. Presently he is a Regents Professor of English at University of North Texas.

The Miraculous Courageous is a fractured epic, a sequence which seeks not to explain but to evoke the mind of one boy and his experience with autism. In the tradition of Carson's Autobiography of Red, Booton constructs a landscape both familiar and uncanny, a territory where our inner workings burn with the luminosity of jellyfish and "darkness turns the lighthouse on." These poems are agile, slippery, glancing at the camera then quickly away, skewing the boundaries between lyric and monologue, vignette and scene. These poems are a bridge. And through their deft conflation of inner and outer worlds, the self and the other, The Miraculous Courageous marks a rich and startling immersion in the mind of autism.What People Are SayingIn this stunning sequence of sixty short monologues, Josh Booton sets a clock in motion, a minute hand that keeps lyric time, moving back and forth, outwards and inwards. The voice at its center belongs to a boy on the spectrum whose preoccupations with seahorses and Jacques Cousteau offer us glimpses of that "secret blue little aqualung" we call poetic wonder. Each perfect rectangle of verse becomes a porthole for the reader. A clear narrative progression extends its plumb-line into the dark glamour of those depths, into which the poet plunges to return with "the whole day in one hand the night another." -Carolina EbeidIf, as Socrates asserts, philosophy begins in wonder, and if, as Emily Dickinson recommends, we do well to "Tell all the truth but tell it slant," then the autistic speaker in Josh Booton's new collection The Miraculous Courageous is equal parts philosopher and poet, wondering at such mysteries as the contrast between seemingly empty ocean and "all / that life crowded so close" around a reef, and slanting us such truths as that happiness "smells exactly like tangerines" and that one need not be lonely in a world astir "with the rough of starfish / and rain on garbage can lids." -H. L. HixAbout the AuthorJosh Booton's first book, The Union of Geometry & Ash, was awarded the Dorothy Brunsman Poetry Prize. His work has been supported by grants from The University of Texas at Austin, the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Foundation and the Elizabeth George Foundation. He lives in Boise, Idaho, where he works with children and teens with autism spectrum disorder as a pediatric speech therapist.