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  Afterlife as Trash

  Rushika Wick

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  Rushika Wick's poems are works of great imaginative power, both formally and in terms of their contents. In the exuberant opening poem of this collection, 'Diaries Of An Artist In Hiding', she is by turns the president, Matisse, a love letter, the weather, a badger; 'the experiment is boundless / like the imagination of a new subspecies /of giant squid / immeasurable and brilliant, / its owner perceived as a delicacy.' It is a poem that seems to stand as a sort of manifesto for the whole book, which feels like poetry that contains such energy it has started to wriggle free from the usual constraints of subject and form. But unlike so much experimental poetry, the reader is brought along for the ride and encouraged to feel the wind in their hair. Characters appear - Camille Claudel, Michael Knight, Lady Chatterley - only to vanish again in a single line once their work is done. Poetic forms are introduced only to be blown apart, words scattering across the page like paint-spatter, letters vanishing to reveal deeper truths. These poems are so full of life even as they acknowledge the stark realities that are a risk to life - also the very real presence of death. And everything is here. And trash is everywhere. And the wind is blowing it and us. It is exhilarating!
  'The poems in Rushika Wick's debut collection are like little time bombs, packed with shocking and beautiful truths about how we live, what and who we love, how we die. They often feel as if they've been translated from a mysterious language or passed on in whispers – their imagery is so rich and strange and compressed – but always in the moment and pushing against conventional lyric and form. She approaches her subjects with a forensic eye and a deft scalpel, getting to the heart of what's vital.'
  – Tamar Yoseloff

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  Baby Dolls (NHB Modern Plays)

  Tamara von Werthern

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  A futuristic comedy about conception, state control and rebellion.
  Three women meet at a baby shower. But darker things than cupcakes and babygrows are on their mind.

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  The Fact of the Matter - Poems

  Sally Keith

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  “Part-epic, part-elegy” this collection presents “a wonderfully involuted tableau where ancient Greek myth . . . strip malls, and natural history swirl together” (Kenyon Review). 
   
  In this intricately crafted poetry collection, Sally Keith shows the self as a crucible of force—that which compels us to exert ourselves upon the world, and meanwhile renders us vulnerable to it. Moving from the mundane to the profound, these poems re-imagine things great and small, constantly reorienting our relationship to matter, science, mythology, our internal selves. 
   
  With poems remarkable in their clarity and captivating in their matter-of-factness, Keith examines the impossible and inevitable privacy of being a person in the world. As we seek to put everything in its place, we must also negotiate the inexorable pull toward the places we call home—one we alternately try and fail to resist.

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  As the Sky Begins to Change

  Kim Stafford

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  In his third poetry collection from Red Hen Press, Kim Stafford gathers poems that sing with empathy, humor, witness, and story. Poems in this book have been set to music, quoted in the New York Times, posted online in the Academy of American Poets poem-a-day series, gathered in a chapbook sold to benefit Ukrainian refugees, posted online in response to Supreme Court decisions, composed for a painter’s gallery opening, and in other ways engaged a world at war with itself, testifying for the human project hungry for kinship, exiled from bounty, and otherwise thirsting for the oxygen of healing song.

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  Machinal (NHB Classic Plays)

  Sophie Treadwell

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  A powerful expressionist drama from the 1920s about the dependent status of women in an increasingly mechanised society, based on the true story of Ruth Snyder.
  Sophie Treadwell was a campaigning journalist in America between the wars. Among her assignments was the sensational murder involving Snyder, who with her lover, Judd Gray, had murdered her husband and gone to the electric chair.
  'This is a play written in anger. In the dead wasteland of male society - it seems to ask - isn't it necessary for certain women, at least, to resort to murder?' - Nicholas Wright
  With an introduction by Judith E. Barlow.
  'gripping... doesn't loosen its hold on the senses until its shattering climax' Independent
  'stingingly fresh and provocative' Time Out New York
  '[a work of] rare and disturbing beauty' New York Times

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  Works and Days

  Hesiod

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  ‘The Works and Days’ is a didactic poem of some 800 lines composed by the ancient Greek poet Hesiod. The poem deals with daily life and work, interwoven with allegory, fable and personal history. It also serves as a farmer's almanac, through which Hesiod instructs his brother Perses in the agricultural arts, and as a compendium of advice for life as a farmer. As such it opens a window on archaic Greek society, ethics, and superstition. ‘The Works and Days’ contains two mythological etiologies for the pain and trouble of the human condition, the earliest versions of the tale of Prometheus and Pandora, and of the Ages of Man.

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