Steven Schroeder

This bilingual collection gathers poems by twenty-seven contemporary poets from the southwestern United States and southwestern China – “two southwests,” two variations on an illusion of geographic precision behind which there are people who find themselves in both natural environments and political ones, who come to know in various ways that what we can and cannot see is as likely to depend on a map as a mountain, or when and where the river is dry enough to cross. What we say and what we don’t, as surely as what we see and what we can’t, are products of politics as well as location. But, politics and perspective aside, it is a matter of collision – and putting ourselves in places where we will collide can be an aid to vision. By bringing poets together in two places similarly named by virtue of their respective places on somebody else’s maps, we intend to facilitate a collision. In our southwests, there is space for silence – and the intersection of sky with earth on open plains can teach us to appreciate nothing whether the plateau beneath our feet is below Tibet or above the Caprock. Between the poems and between the lines, nothing that is there may make our being present a bit more possible. *

"There is an all at once quality to lyric poetry that makes it akin to mysticism. It knows there is more to vision than meets the eye. It takes the whole world in while knowing the whole of it is always known imperfectly, always here, always now. The here and now of the seventy-one poems in Steven Schroeder's new collection is most often Chicago, the Plains, or West Texas. The poems play on the imperfection of the eye, turning on the voice that can, with care, be heard over the noise at edges where silence slips into the "look!" or "listen!" trailing a flash of insight. These poems take place in time, as all embodied things must do, and place is precisely what the imperfection of the eye sings, celebrating "the sacrament / of a city of solitaries marking time," listening for a rainbow where "fragments fall / on silence broken."

"Donna Pucciani’s third book of poetry explores the relationship of the human to the divine through the lives of the saints, ranging from the legendary St. Christopher and the ancient martyrs Lucy and Sebastian to the more modern Father Damien, the Leper-Priest, to perennial favorites St. Patrick and St. Francis of Assisi, and three Teresas: Therese of Lisieux (“the little”), Teresa of Avila (“the great”) and Mother Teresa of Calcutta." *

Chinese Windmill is a book of poetry in English and Chinese by Li Sen.

Poems by Steven Schroeder.

A collection of poems by Paul Friedrich.