Authors on Campus
Ghost Forest
by Kimiko Hahn
ON CAMPUS - February 5
Opening with forty-three new formally inventive poems and leading the reader back in time through selections from her ten previous volumes, The Ghost Forest offers a contemplative and haunting narrative of a writer's artistic journey through craft and form while illuminating her personal history. Exploring the mysteries of science, nature, and the experiences of contemporary womanhood, Hahn both reinvents classic Japanese forms and experiments with traditional Western ones. Braided into the poems and narrative thread, a series of photos transforms the new-and-selected into a hybrid autobiography. This arresting collection derives new beauty from long-gone remnants.
A Riotous Disorder
She mistakes one word for another--
Something her brain naturally concocts.
Her unruly gray matter and her heart
Mistake one word for an other--
Razor for river, cistern for sister.
Even cock for clock.
She mistakes one word for a mother--
A safe her brain naturally unlocks.--
Milk Blood Heat
by Dantiel W. Moniz
ON CAMPUS - February 26
SHORTLISTED FOR THE PEN/JEAN STEIN AND PEN/ROBERT W. BINGHAM AWARDS
A NATIONAL BOOK FOUNDATION 5 UNDER 35
"Electric."--TIME
"Enchanting."--Elle
"Thrilling."--Glamour
"Downright magical."--Boston Globe
"Not only be read but felt. Like Danielle Evans and Lauren Groff, Moniz is unafraid to expose the darkened corners of the Sunshine State, and of female desire."--O, The Oprah Magazine
A National Book Foundation "5 Under 35" Honoree and one of one of the most anticipated books of the year for Elle; Entertainment Weekly; BuzzFeed; O, The Oprah Magazine; Essence; and The Millions, among many others, Dantiel W. Moniz's Milk Blood Heat follows a cast of young girls, women, and men in Northern Florida who find themselves confronted by extraordinary moments of violent personal reckoning and the joys and pains of everyday life. This is an incendiary debut collection by an important new voice in literature.
"Stunning."--Tampa Bay Times
"In Moniz's collection, the ordinary experience of being female is laced with a kind of enchantment... Entire stories seem bathed in a warm radiance."--New York Times
"Outstanding."--Atlanta Journal Constitution
"Prose that is both nuanced and so lush you can taste it."--Shondaland
Inheritance
by Taylor Johnson
ON CAMPUS - February 26
Inheritance is a black sensorium, a chapel of color and sound that speaks to spaciousness, surveillance, identity, desire, and transcendence. Influenced by everyday moments of Washington, DC living, the poems live outside of the outside and beyond the language of categorical difference, inviting anyone listening to listen a bit closer. Inheritance is about the self's struggle with definition and assumption.
Lucky Ones
by Zara Chowdhary
ON CAMPUS - March 25
A moving memoir by a survivor of anti-Muslim violence in contemporary India that delicately weaves political and family histories in a tribute to her country's unique Islamic heritage--"a must-read in our warring world today" (NPR)
"A harrowing survivor's tale, an important history lesson, and a desperate warning from someone who has seen the tragic effects of ethnic violence."--Time
In 2002, Zara Chowdhary is sixteen years old and living with her family in Ahmedabad, one of India's fastest-growing cities, when a gruesome train fire claims the lives of sixty Hindu right-wing volunteers and upends the life of five million Muslims. Instead of taking her school exams that week, Zara is put under a three-month siege, with her family and thousands of others fearing for their lives as Hindu neighbors, friends, and members of civil society transform overnight into bloodthirsty mobs, hunting and massacring their fellow citizens. The chief minister of the state at the time, Narendra Modi, will later be accused of fomenting the massacre, and yet a decade later, will rise to become India's prime minister, sending the "world's largest democracy" hurtling toward cacophonous Hindu nationalism.
The Lucky Onestraces the past of a multigenerational Muslim family to India's brave but bloody origins, a segregated city's ancient past, and the lingering hurt causing bloodshed on the streets. Symphonic interludes offer glimpses into the precious, ordinary lives of Muslims, all locked together in a crumbling apartment building in the city's old quarters, with their ability to forgive and find laughter, to offer grace even as the world outside, and their place in it, falls apart.
The Lucky Ones entwines lost histories across a subcontinent, examines forgotten myths, prods a family's secrets, and gazes unflinchingly back at a country rushing to move past the biggest pogrom in its modern history. It is a warning thrown to the world by a young survivor, to democracies that fail to protect their vulnerable, and to homes that won't listen to their daughters. It is an ode to the rebellion of a young woman who insists she will belong to her land, family, and faith on her own terms.
Ward Toward
by Cindy Juyoung Ok
ON CAMPUS - April 2
Yale Younger Poet Cindy Juyoung Ok resolutely searches for hope in spaces of fragmentation
"Ok's métier in this lovely debut is an elegantly discursive, analytical style studded with ironies."--David Woo, Literary Hub
"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.
This Other Eden
by Paul Harding
ON CAMPUS - April 9
In 1792, formerly enslaved Benjamin Honey and his Irish wife, Patience, discover an island where they can make a life together. Over a century later, the Honeys' descendants and a diverse group of neighbors are desperately poor, isolated, and often hungry, but nevertheless protected from the hostility awaiting them on the mainland.
During the tumultuous summer of 1912, Matthew Diamond, a retired, idealistic but prejudiced schoolteacher-turned-missionary, disrupts the community's fragile balance through his efforts to educate its children. His presence attracts the attention of authorities on the mainland who, under the influence of the eugenics-thinking popular among progressives of the day, decide to forcibly evacuate the island, institutionalize its residents, and develop the island as a vacation destination. Beginning with a hurricane flood reminiscent of the story of Noah's Ark, the novel ends with yet another Ark.
In prose of breathtaking beauty and power, Paul Harding brings to life an unforgettable cast of characters: Iris and Violet McDermott, sisters raising three orphaned Penobscot children; Theophilus and Candace Larks and their brood of vagabond children; the prophetic Zachary Hand to God Proverbs, a Civil War veteran who lives in a hollow tree; and more. A spellbinding story of resistance and survival, This Other Eden is an enduring testament to the struggle to preserve human dignity in the face of intolerance and injustice.