The Captain Asks For A Show Of Hands

New poetry by the acclaimed writer Nick Flynn, author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City and The Ticking Is the Bomb electrocution, no—the boy stood in the hot-hot room stammering I did stammering I did stammering I did stammering I did stammering everything you say I did I did. —from "Fire" The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands is Nick Flynn's first new poetry collection in nearly a decade. What begins as a meditation on love and the body soon breaks down into a collage of voices culled from media reports, childhood memories, testimonies from Abu Ghraib detainees, passages from documentary films, overheard conversations, and scraps of poems and song, only to reassemble with a gathering sonic force. It's as if all the noise that fills our days were a storm, yet at the center is a quiet place, but to get there you must first pass through the storm, with eyes wide open, singing. Each poem becomes a hallucinatory, shifting experience, through jump cut, lyric persuasion, and deadpan utterance. This is an emotional, resilient response to some of the essential issues of our day by one of America's riskiest and most innovative writers.

Winner of a "Discovery"/The Nation Award Winner of the 1999 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry Some Ether is one of the more remarkable debut collections of poetry to appear in America in recent memory. As Mark Doty has noted, "these poems are more than testimony; in lyrics of ringing clarity and strange precision, Flynn conjures a will to survive, the buoyant motion toward love which is sometimes all that saves us. Some Ether resonates in the imagination long after the final poem; this is a startling, moving debut."

Descendants of Vietnam veterans and refugees confront the aftermath of war and, in verse and prose, deliver another kind of war story. Fifty years after the Vietnam War, this anthology by descendants of Vietnam veterans and refugees—American, Vietnamese, Vietnamese Diaspora, Hmong, Australian, and others—confronts war and its aftermath. What emerges is an affecting portrait of the effects of war and family—an intercultural, generational dialogue on silence, memory, landscape, imagination, Agent Orange, displacement, postwar trauma, and the severe realities that are carried home. Including such acclaimed voices as Viet Thanh Nguyen, Karen Russell, Terrance Hayes, Suzan-Lori Parks, Nick Flynn, and Ocean Vuong, Inheriting the War enriches the discourse of the Vietnam War and provides a collective conversation that attempts to transcend the recursion of history. “Each unique work in Inheriting the War embraces a collective that aims to engage through some daring and passionate truths calibrated by bravery.” —Yusef Komunyakaa, from the foreword

Learning to write starts with learning to do one big thing: pay attention to the world around you, even though just about everything in modern life makes this more difficult than it needs to be. Developing habits and practices of observing, and writing down what you notice, can be the first step away from the anxieties and doubts that can hold you back from your ultimate goal as a writer: discovering something to say and a voice to say it in. The Writer's Eye is an inspiring guide for writers at all stages of their writing lives. Drawing on new research into creative writers and their relationship with the physical world, Amy E. Weldon shows us how to become more attentive observers of the world and find inspiration in any environment. Including exercises, writing prompts and sample texts and spanning multiple genres from novels to nonfiction to poetry, this is the ideal starting point for anyone beginning to write seriously and offers refreshing perspectives for experienced writers seeking new inspiration.

THE HILLS ARE ALIVE...WITH THE SOUND OF SUCKING Maria von Trapp is sweet, innocent, and can sing like an angel. Oh, and she's also a bloodthirsty vampire. When Maria is kicked out of the zombie-infested abbey where she's been residing for the past 612 years, she's forced to take care of the family Von Trapp, a rowdy clan in need of some serious discipline... or vampirification. After Maria turns the Von Trapp children into children of the night and marries the Von Trapp patriarch, the family seems destined for eternal (really, really eternal) bliss. But the Nazi Undeath Squads are on the march, intent on ridding Europe of bloodsuckers. And Maria will have to do everything in her power—supernatural or otherwise—to save her vampire brood. Sixteen going on seventeen members of our legal team have instructed us to tell you, even though it should be obvious, that My Favorite Fangs was not prepared, authorized, licensed, approved, or endorsed by any person or entity involved in the creation or production of The Sound of Music film, or any version of the stage musical. That seventeenth wouldn't take our call because he was too busy drinking his tea—a drink with jam and bread—to weigh in.