West End Press

For one year after its arrival in the United States the dismantled Statue of Liberty sat in 214 unopened crates on Bedloe’s Island in New York Harbor. The poems in this book reflect the tension of this “pause” in many respects: the artist’s motives in constructing the pieces; the fluidity of the molten ore; the workers’ act of constructing, dismantling, and reassembling the statue; the anticipation embedded in the year on Bedloe’s Island; the vulnerability of a singular message as it travels across an ocean and over time; and the context into which the statue is finally unveiled.

Longtime writer and activist Douglas Valentine has compiled a collection of poets from America and around the world writing about the struggles of a world at war.

In his debut collection of hard-hitting poems, Albuquerque Poet Laureate Hakim Bellamy addresses the issues important to our day—politics, work, and art.

In Cutting Down the Last Tree on Easter Island, award-winning poet Lenore Weiss embodies the themes of loss, transformation and re-invention that are integral to life and to her work. Poems celebrate the author’s Jewish Hungarian upbringing. Survival, negotiation, and migration play a vital role in these poems about family and love.

In this award-winning debut, poet Jessica Helen Lopez ruminates on love and romance, motherhood, teaching, and the trials and tribulations of adulthood.

Departing from her mother’s Japanese name, One Thousand Cranes, these poems bring a message of trauma and recovery, war and reconciliation, and the passage from personal shame to self-regard. They are historical, political, and personal in the same breath: from the memories of Shigeko Sasamori, Hiroshima survivor, to the author’s quieter struggle for dignity and respect in Albuquerque, New Mexico, resurgent city of the Southwest.

Passionate and sensuous, American Book Award winner Sasha Pimentel Chacon addresses both the mind and body in her debut book of poetry. The young Filipina poet proceeds with a sure understanding of the power of images to confront the instability of the world around her. Family, growth and decay, the politics of liberation are reflected with intensity.