Fiercely moving, the two long narrative poems of Martin & Meditations on the South Valley revolve around the semi-autobiographical figure of Martin, a mestizo or 'detribalized Apache.' Abandoned as a child and a long time on the hard path to building his own family, Martin at last finds his home in the stubborn and beautiful world of the barrio. Jimmy Santiago Baca 'writes with unconcealed passion, ' Denise Levertov states in her introduction, 'but...

"Drawing from his experience as a translator, Forrest Gander includes in the first, powerfully elegiac section a version of a poem by the Spanish mystical poet St. John of the Cross. He continues with a long multilingual poem examining the syncretic geological and cultural history of the U.S. border with Mexico. The poems of the third section--a moving transcription of Gander's efforts to address his mother dying of Alzheimer's--rise from the page...

"Boris Leonidovich, a North American professor who specializes in the history of prison architecture, has been invited to Buenos Aires for an academic conference. He's planning to present a paper on Moscow's feared Butyrka prison, but most of all he's looking forward to seeing his enigmatic, fiercely intelligent colleague (and sometime lover) Ana again. As soon as Boris arrives, however, he encounters obstacle after unlikely obstacle: he can't get...

In an unnamed Japanese city, three seemingly normal and unrelated characters find work at a sprawling industrial factory. They each focus intently on their specific jobs: one studies moss, one shreds paper, and the other proofreads incomprehensible documents. Life in the factory has its own logic and momentum, and, eventually, the factory slowly expands and begins to take over everything, enveloping these poor workers. The very margins of reality...

"Now a New Directions book, the legendary novel that is 'equal to the best of Virginia Woolf and Samuel Beckett' (New York Times Book Review) Malina invites the reader on a linguistic journey, into a world that stretches the very limits of language with Wittgensteinian zeal and Joycean inventiveness, where Ingeborg Bachmann ventriloquizes, and in the process demolishes Proust, Musil, and Balzac, and yet filters everything through her own utterly singular...

"Asa's husband is transferring jobs, and his new office is located near his family's home in the countryside. During an exceptionally hot summer, the young married couple move in, and Asa does her best to quickly adjust to their new rural lives, to their remoteness, to the constant presence of her in-laws and the incessant buzz of cicadas. While her husband is consumed with his job, Asa is left to explore her surroundings on her own: she makes trips...