Slow Dance With Sasquatch

Slow Dance with Sasquatch is an invitation into a private ballroom, a banquet hall in the middle of the woods. Here, you will sit and feast and waltz with your monsters. Here, you will harvest imagination from loneliness and longing. Here, you will coax laughter from the beasts’ mouths. Here, the table is always fully loaded. Here, the cake is always warm, and no matter how much of it you eat, you will never stop being beautiful.

This is an account of an ethnically and racially diverse classroom of funny, endearing, and often poignant six-year-olds in a Seattle inner-city elementary school. The author, their volunteer literary coach, describes the classroom, their heroic teacher, a number of clever teaching modules, and the evolution of this school toward excellence. The children’s confidences, essays, and poetry sparkle with humor, and the unexpected viewpoints of childhood. Eight captivating students are profiled and featured for us in line drawing illustrations. In the final chapters some startling school district data is introduced as well as three common-sense recommendations to give all kids a fair chance in school. Having learned so much about the realities of public elementary education in her five years in the classroom, the author wanted to share the good news of what is possible with others who might otherwise view this as a grim subject.

A Choir of Honest Killers, Buddy Wakefield's first new book of prose and poetry in eight years, is an episodic novel exploring his creative climb out of the gritty underbelly of anger and shame, into the dissolution of tragedy addiction and the unmistakable clearing ahead. Having toured the world performing poetry for the last eighteen years, navigating the blunt loneliness of life on the road and a rotating cast of unlikely antagonists, Buddy keenly unpacks topics like the intense overcompensation of his masculinity, growing up terribly queer in the south, the detriments of public shame, a toxic fear of intimacy and the devastation of a failed major relationship. Wakefield revs up for his relay race to the light with refreshing humor and insight by finding meditation as the love of his life, accepting bliss and learning to let go. While the poetry in A Choir of Honest Killers undeniably throws plenty of insightful punches, it's the through-story about moving from devastation to frequent serendipity that gives the book pace. But it's worth noting, as Wakefield writes, “Perfect probably isn't what you think it is.” Wakefield is ultimately catapulted through collective misery, landing in a sustainably joyful life governed by awareness, equanimity and a constant thorough understanding of impermanence. A Choir of Honest Killers is the result of a lifetime of intense work, fervent seeking and largely takes aim at an exodus from tragedy addiction, into the transmutation of his self-admitted density.

MultiVerse does for superheroes what Rob Sturma's first anthology Aim For The Head did for zombies: It tackles what could be dismissed as a genre novelty and through the words of page and stage poets, finds the heart, pathos, and humor involved in the otherworld of those with superhuman abilities. Welcome to an examination of the many facets of what it means to be a hero.

A Constellation of Half-Lives is a collection of poems that attempt to reconcile the crisis of living on a collapsing planet with the unreasonable joy of loving and the pleasure of being alive. With careful precision and an exquisite eye for detail, poet Seema Reza examines what it means to be a mother, a daughter, and an American in a time of war. Through second-person poems she questions whether the beauty of this world outweighs its fragility and risk.

More than 800 years after its invention in medieval France, the sestina survives and thrives in English. A fixed 39-line poetic form with of six stanzas of six lines each, followed by a three- line stanza known as an envoi, tornada, or tercet, the sestina is the one form of poetry that poets from all camps agree can exist in a free verse world. Formalists and avant-gardes love sestinas for their ornate, maddeningly complicated rules of word repetition. For The Incredible Sestinas Anthology, editor Daniel Nester has gathered more than 100 writers—from John Ashbery to David Lehman to Matt Madden and Patricia Smith—to show the sestina in its many incarnations: prose and comic sestinas, collaborative and double sestinas, from masters of the form to brilliant one-off attempts, all to show its evolution and the possibilities of this dynamic form.

In her electrifying debut, Franny Choi leads readers through the complex landscapes of absence, memory, and identity. Beginning in loss and ending in reflective elation, Floating, Brilliant, Gone explores life as a brief impossibility, “infinite / until it isn’t.” Punctuated with haunting illustrations by Jess X. Chen, Choi’s poems read like lucid dreams that jolt awake at the most unexpected moments.