Let’s take a trip to a place where “the people are warm and friendly [and] the landscape ranges from snow-capped mountains and dense forests to the wide-open steppe and the sandy soils of the Gobi,” noted author/illustrators Ted... Read More

In "The Joyful Dark", Michael Miller confronts the traditional role of nature poet. The very first image is of a praying mantis biting off the head of her mate, a reminder of the violent undercurrents ever present in the natural. This... Read More

Is it possible to make yogurt—that bland, colorless, jiggling bowl of prosaic foodstuff— into a substance that’s not only creepy, but slightly macabre? If so, novelist and poet Jim Krusoe manages nicely. In his first book, Iceland,... Read More

Pura Belpré was the first Puerto Rican librarian in New York. She was also a storyteller, author, and advocate for the Puerto Rican community. The Storyteller’s Candle tells how that community was welcomed into the library through... Read More

A sign in Knox’s study might well read, “Beware: Poet at Play.” At her best, Knox’s poetry flirts and teases, creating tensions between words that are a mere letter’s breath away from being the same. It is the nearness of... Read More

"Glory River" is David Huddle’s most eccentric and interesting collection yet. Always gentle and wry, often strange, his narrative poems here turn dark. “River,” in the first half of the book, takes a look at what can happen to... Read More

Talk about a cold case! Here’s a fictional one that dates back to the early days of the American Civil War. Naturally—or, more accurately, supernaturally—the only witnesses to the original crime are ghosts. In 1957, Korean War... Read More

Francesca Lia Block’s "Quakeland" tells the story of a Los Angeles woman named Katrina who struggles to understand her personal loss against the backdrop of the catastrophic events of the turn of the twenty-first century: the bombing... Read More