Books in the Free Verse Editions series

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.

Transversing the territory between the pastoral and the elegiac, F. Daniel Rzicznek's Settlers inhabits the hidden, wild places of the American Midwestern landscape. The idea of "settling"-that a landscape can be tamed, that a human consciousness can fall back into immobility-is one these poems grapple with and resist, all the while charting the cathartic effects of the natural world on a collective imagination dually wounded by the madness of the post-industrial era and the multiplication of tragedy via media saturation. Within the "settled" landscape, it becomes clear that nothing, in fact, can be settled. Love, compassion, forgiveness, and transcendence all turn out to be moving targets and Settlers offers glimpse after glimpse of an unstable world in whirling, mesmerizing motion. Where the exterior landscape of weather, light and water skirts the interior wilderness of dream, vision, and prayer, these poems go out walking with their feet in the marsh and their hats in the infinite clouds, hoping to find what exactly it means to be human in a world imperiled by humans, and the all the fascinating and frustrating complexities contained therein.What People Are Saying"Reading F. Daniel Rzicznek's Settlers is like putting on a pair of X-ray goggles and suddenly seeing our surroundings-lake, snow, buttermilk, car, dog-in a radically different light. By telescoping multiple time scales onto the same place, whether an imagined world without humans, a past of Civil War soldiers, or today's acts of gun violence, these poems expand what is possible in landscape poetry and offer a deeply-felt ethical stance. "Every where is a ceaseless center-," Rzicznek writes, and so poetry, this splendid book tells us, must be a ceaseless act of inclusiveness." -Tung-Hui Hu"Reading Settlers is a tactile experience, lush with precise knowledge of the abundance of the natural world. Rzicznek conjures up rural mysteries and the residue of disasters, creating a sense of déjà vu, of things carefully noticed long ago and then forgotten, now resurrected in these poems. In "Houses, Drifting," "A man wrestles / a wheelbarrow from the river's fluid din," an image that suggests what relics lurk beneath surfaces in this collection-surprising, wondrous, and, in fact, unsettling." -Mary Quade

"Over the past few years, Elizabeth Jacobson has become one of my favorite American poets. Her work is original, deep, serious, and sensuous in ways that surprise me repeatedly. In the way of true inquiry, Jacobson's poems unearth genuinely new feelings and knowledge in a clean, mature and fully achieved style. These poems carry heavy water, fetched from deep nature, in human hands. I love this book." -Tony Hoagland"This wild, remarkable book begins in painstaking definition, via what isn't-to strange and dazzling discoveries of the natural world, to instinct and melancholia and surprise. This poet wanders through a range of poetic architecture-an eight-sectioned poem which begins with a woman removing her body parts, epistolary poems, prose poems, small strange lyrics of love and bewilderment. Genuine curiosity fuels this book and (can we bear it?) a true savoring of the world. Elizabeth Jacobson starts in clarity and ends in mystery, two points of imaginative departure. Beware and rejoice: this is how a very original brain thinks itself into poems." -Marianne Boruch"Snakes, birds, insects, and all manner of strange encounters: Elizabeth Jacobson is a true observer immersed in the natural world. These poems arise out of a deep questioning; they are puzzles, tangled road maps we can't help but follow. It takes some wisdom to abide, as Jacobson's work does, so effortlessly in paradox. I am moved to wonder, to breathe and slow down, experiencing how, as she says-the whole world is in me. Through her love of the particular a great expanse opens within us. These are the poems we need and long for right now." -Anne Marie MacariNot into the Blossoms and Not into the Air is a collection of poems wealthy with the speaker's intimacy with nature and with the philosophical and spiritual insights that emerge from a deep practice of close observation. In a manner that is wonderfully relaxed and conversational, Jacobson's poems enter into the most venerable and perennial of our human questions.

In her early career, Kang Eun-Gyo marked nihilism as the departure of her poetic imagination. In response to the turmoil of the world and modern Korean history full of violence and violations of human rights, the poet struggled to build her poetry in a house of nothingness. With Bari's Love Song, Kang Eun-Gyo echoes the voice of a sorceress, a female shaman who treats the sadness, suffering, loss, and pain of all people. From the private losses of the poet to the universal songs of losses and love, Bari's Love Song portrays the modern history of Korea in the forms of songs and recollections of Bari, the princess from Korean folk literature who walked the land in search of hope.Kang Eun-Gyo made her literary debut with the publication of Night of the Pilgrims, which earned her the 1968 New Writer Prize by the journal Sasanggye (World of Thoughts). Her most significant poetry collections are House of Nothingness, Diary of a Pauper, House of Noises, Red Rivers, Song of the Wind, and Letter in the Wall. Kang was also the recipient of the Korean Writers Prize and the Contemporary Literature Award.About the TranslatorChung Eun-Gwi is Professor in the Department of English Literature at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, Seoul. Her publications include Ah, Mouthless Things (2017), Fifteen Seconds without Sorrow (2016), The Colors of Dawn: Twentieth Century Korean Poetry (2016), and When the Wind Blows (2019) Her articles and translations have appeared in a wide variety of journals.This book is published with the support of the Literature Translation Institute of Korea (LTI Korea)