Poetry

All that remain to us of Sappho's poems are fragments, some only a handful of words. Burn Lyrics incorporates these extant fragments into fully-fleshed poems in entirely contemporary voices, underscoring the flexibility of language and the ways we make compelling meanings out of our limited experiences of the world.

Burn Lyrics is an entirely original accomplishment. Benjamin Landry has reached into the past and its erasures, and brought into our time and place something new and strange. This collection transforms poetry into lived experience-full of atmosphere and physicality and mysterious specificity and music. Landry is a poet of uncommon gifts, one who has uncovered or discovered an entirely unexpected path for this art form. Burn Lyrics began as a remarkable urge, and it is now a spellbinding and transformative reading experience for the rest of us.
Laura Kasischke, author of Space, in Chains and The Infinitesimals

Benjamin Landry crafts an eco-lyric voice that celebrates everyday life yet remains "realistic about the future of the coastline." Throughout Burn Lyrics, the speaker walks barefoot amongst family and strangers, wolves and goats, hummingbirds and pigeons, greenswards and dandelions, storms and fires. At the end of this journey, the old lyric self sheds its skin and the book becomes a new self to call and return the body home.
Craig Santos Perez, author of from unincorporated territory

You might think that a poem housing a fragment of sacred text-Sappho's incandescent shards-would be a thing relatively inert in itself: at best a reliquary, at worst a golem. But Benjamin Landry splendidly shatters such preconceptions in this brilliant collection. The landscapes are so captivating, the perspectives so enticing, the emotional currents so swift and strong that you notice, only in passing, that a text you thought long dead has quickened, miraculously, into breathing, exuberant life.
Monica Youn, author of Ignatz and Blackacre

Benjamin Landry's Burn Lyrics both fleshes out the mystery of and satisfies the desires awakened by Sappho's fragments. We are sated at every turn. He is a master not only of the line but also of the heart. Landry offers a new lens through which to view the world; "it's the sort of thing that colors your personal heaven," and, as a reader, I'm left to wonder if this is possible, can the poem curate so much emotion in a world filled with so many distractions, but then I turn another page and realize, "Sometimes, it happens this way."
A. Van Jordan, author of The Cineaste and M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A

A piercing debut collection of poems exploring gender, race, and violence from a sensational new talent

In her arresting collection, urgently relevant for our times, poet Emily Jungmin Yoon confronts the histories of sexual violence against women, focusing in particular on Korean so-called "comfort women," women who were forced into sexual labor in Japanese-occupied territories during World War II.

In wrenching language, A Cruelty Special to Our Species unforgettably describes the brutalities of war and the fear and sorrow of those whose lives and bodies were swept up by a colonizing power, bringing powerful voice to an oppressed group of people whose histories have often been erased and overlooked. "What is a body in a stolen country," Yoon asks. "What is right in war."

Moving readers through time, space, and different cultures, and bringing vivid life to the testimonies and confessions of the victims, Yoon takes possession of a painful and shameful history even while unearthing moments of rare beauty in acts of resistance and resilience, and in the instinct to survive and bear witness.