General Books

"My grandparents taught me to write my sins on paper and cast them into the water. . . . They didn't expect an entire book," Hirsch says in the "prologue" to this glorious festival of knife-sharp observations. In microchapters--sometimes only a single scathing sentence long--with titles like "Call to Breakfast," "Pay Cash," "The Sorrow of Manly Sports," and "Aristotle on Lawrence Avenue," Eddie's gambling father, Ruby, son of a white metal smelter, schools him and his sister in blackjack; Eddie's mom bangs pots to wake the kids to a breakfast of cold cereal; Uncle Bob, in the collection business, is heard threatening people on the phone; and nobody suffers fools. In this household, Eddie learned to jab with his left and cross with his right, never to kid a kidder, and how to sneak out at night.
Affectionate, deadpan, and exuberant, steeped in Yiddishkeit and Midwestern practicality, Hirsch's laugh-and-cry performance animates a heartbreaking odyssey, from the cradle to the day he leaves home, armed with sorrow and a huge store of poetic wit.

Eggs are breakable. Hope is not.

When Natalie's science teacher suggests that she enter an egg drop competition, Natalie thinks that this might be the perfect solution to all of her problems. There's prize money, and if she and her friends wins, then she can fly her botanist mother to see the miraculous Cobalt Blue Orchids--flowers that survive against impossible odds. Natalie's mother has been suffering from depression, and Natalie is sure that the flowers' magic will inspire her mom to love life again. Which means it's time for Natalie's friends to step up and show her that talking about a problem is like taking a plant out of a dark cupboard and giving it light. With their help, Natalie begins an uplifting journey to discover the science of hope, love, and miracles.

A vibrant, loving debut about the coming-of-age moment when kids realize that parents are people, too. Think THE FOURTEENTH GOLDFISH meets THE THING ABOUT JELLYFISH.

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR * KIRKUS REVIEWS * THE CHICAGO PUBLIC LIBRARY *

"Natalie's Korean heritage is sensitively explored, as is the central issue of depression."
--Publishers Weekly

"A compassionate glimpse of mental illness accessible to a broad audience."
--Kirkus Reviews, STARRED REVIEW

"Holy moly!!! This book made me feel."
--Colby Sharp, editor of The Creativity Project, teacher, and cofounder of Nerdy Book Club

"Discerning and significant." --Poetry Foundation
"A sharp memoir in verse." --LitHub

This powerful and timely collection of autobiographical poems from Yale Young Poets Award Winner and Philadelphia's former Poet Laureate Airea D. Matthews about the economics of class is a brilliant intellectual and artistic contribution to the ongoing conversation about American inequality.

As a former student of economics, Airea D. Matthews was fascinated and disturbed by 18th-century Scottish economist Adam Smith's magnum opus The Wealth of Nations. Now, she presents a direct challenge to Smith's theory of the invisible hand, which claims self-interest is the key to optimal economic outcomes. By juxtaposing redacted texts by Smith and the French Marxist Guy Debord with autobiographical prose and poems, Bread and Circus personally offers how self-interest fails when it reduces people to commodity and spectacle.

A layered collection to be read and reread, with poems that range from tragic to humorous, in forms as varied and nuanced as the ideas the book considers, Bread and Circus asks what it is to have survived, indeed to have flourished, and at what cost. "Full of humane wisdom, this powerful volume forces readers to acknowledge systemic inequity" (Publishers Weekly, starred review) and is ideal for fans of Elizabeth Alexander, Natalie Diaz, Eve Ewing, and Gregory Pardlo.

Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize for Best First Book, 2024 - Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry, 2024

"There are places," Cindy Juyoung Ok writes, "where shaking is expected, loss is / assumed."

In the 118th volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets, Ok moves assuredly between spaces--from the psych ward to a prison cell, from divided countries to hospice wards. She plumbs these institutions of constraint, ward to ward, and the role of each reality's language, word to word, as she uncovers fractured private codes and shares them in argument, song, and prayer.

Using visual play in invented forms, Ok counters familiar narratives about mental illness, abuse, and death, positing that it is not a person's character or will that makes survival possible, but luck, and other people. The poems disrupt expectation with the comedy of institutionalized teens, nostalgia after the climate crisis, tenderness in a nursing home, and the wholeness of faltering Englishes. How do pagodas, Seinfeld, ransoms, swans, and copays each make or refuse meaning? Ok's resolute, energized debut shifts language's fissures to reassemble them into a new place of belonging.