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In the autumn of 1928, herbalist and healer Callie Beecham makes a living treating patients with plant-based medicines and therapies in her small South Carolina town. When a young man urgently knocks on her door one morning, Callie finds her world turned upside down. He begs Callie to come to the freed-slave settlement of Liberia, nestled against the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains, to save his wife, struggling in childbirth. On the back of a mule, Callie follows the man to Liberia and discovers a world previously unknown to her.

The Postmaster’s Daughter is a 1930s murder mystery set in Appalachia. When a marriage proposal brings together two families in East Tennessee, the wealthy and powerful Cantrells and the hardworking and respected Putnams, everyone is shocked by a sudden murder that halts the union.

Through elegiac verse that honors her mother and tells of her own fraught childhood, Natasha Trethewey confronts the racial legacy of her native Deep South—where one of the first black regiments, The Louisiana Native Guards, was called into service during the Civil War.

Set in 1790, a chilling tempest rages through the North Carolina wilderness as seasoned investigator Levi Adams wrestles with a mysterious case in the dead of night. What should’ve been a routine strangulation bears eerie signs—signs Levi has seen before. But nothing can prepare him for the knock that shatters the stillness: a messenger from Raven Cove, a cursed town Levi vowed never to return to.

Chaos. The disrupotor of the plans of our lives. It can destroy us, only to rebuild us into something else. In the Chaos of Me, Patrick S. Smith explains, in verse, the events that have shaped his life and his philosophy. From the highs of adopting a child, celebrating events, and the pain of September 11, 2001, he puts his feelings into words. Mixed in are his self-reflections and his wit, which can be chaotic.

Custis—a gifted, Black, ten-year-old boy orphaned and left for dead—is discovered by a young White girl. Sarah Tennison hasn’t spoken a word since her mother died. Nursed back to health and raised by Sarah’s widowed father, Custis is sheltered from community biases and anti-literacy laws. In the safety of the Tennison home, his bright mind has room to flourish and he strives to advance to his potential. Along the way, Custis' curiosity and quiet compassion help Sarah find her voice. Sarah and Custis develop an unbreakable bond, but intolerance and bigotry prohibit marriage.

Ocean Yoon has never felt very Korean, even if she is descended from a long line of haenyeo, Jeju Island’s beloved female divers. She doesn’t like soju, constantly misses cultural references, and despite her love of the game, people still say that she doesn’t play Hwatu like a Korean. Ocean’s also persona non grata at the Alliance, Korea’s solar system–dominating space agency, since a mission went awry and she earned a reputation for being a little too quick with her gun.

In A Quitter’s Paradise, the darkly humorous debut by bold, new voice Elysha Chang, a young woman does everything she can to ignore her mother’s death, even as unearthed family secrets become increasingly inextricable from her own.

Former poet laureate of Belfast, Maine, Afrofuturist/Oro-shamanic poet and bass clarinetist Toussaint St. Negritude dazzles with this debut collection of poems, featuring an ensemble of cosmic tones the late Pulitzer Prize winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks once called “full of sweet sounds and surprises.”

It’s the year 1774, and the American Revolution is just beginning to break out in faraway Massachusetts. Seeking adventure and an escape from an oppressive family life, Caleb Anders leaves home and heads south into the wilderness of the American frontier, west of the Blue Ridge Mountains. He meets Nate Daniels along the way, and they become fast friends and business partners.

1950. It’s the coldest winter in decades, and twenty-eight-year-old Chinese American journalist Ellie Chang has hitched a ride on a military flight to cover a battle in the mountains of North Korea when her plane is shot down in enemy territory, stranding her there. Hwa-Ja, who introduces herself as “Emma,” has been searching for her own daughter since the last war ended. When she rescues Ellie from local soldiers, she sees a girl whose mother must be worrying somewhere, and so convinces the family she is sheltering with—The Paks—to take Ellie in.

John Anthony Ciardi (June 24, 1916-March 30, 1986) was an American poet, translator, and etymologist. While primarily known as a poet, Ciardi pursued etymology, contributed to the Saturday Review as a columnist and long-time poetry editor, directed the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in Vermont, and recorded commentaries for National Public Radio. In the following recordings, Ciardi reads "And They Lived Happily Ever After For Awhile," “To Judith, I,” “Happiness,” and “The Lamb.”

William Morris Meredith Jr. (January 9, 1919-May 30, 2007), born in New York City, was an American poet and educator. He was Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1978 to 1980, and the recipient of the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. In the following recordings Mederdith reads his poems "The Wreck of the Thresher," "Parents From The Cheer," "The Illiterate," and "Crossing Over."

Lawrence Monsanto Ferlinghetti, born in Yonkers, NY, was an American poet, painter, social activist, and co-founder of City Lights Booksellers & Publishers. An author of poetry, translations, fiction, theatre, art criticism, and film narration, Ferlinghetti was best known for his second collection of poems, A Coney Island of the Mind (1958), which has been translated into nine languages and sold over a million copies. The following recording includes Ferlinghetti reading the poems, Baseball Canto, Travels in America Deserta, See It Was Like This When, and Underwear.

The Poetry of Law is a collection of 25 narrative poems about the human experience of an international lawyer. In a general sense, such a practice deals with laws applying to the movement of people and goods and services across national boundaries. The title seems an apparent oxymoron, but the poetry is in the people. The poetry is in the author’s journey from a wilderness log cabin beginning as the Northernmost lawyer in Michigan at the dawn of the Internet and ending with a practice in Manhattan.

Crystal has worked as a Registered Nurse in the city for more than 30 years, caring for many of the homeless during her career. She has written this collection of small poems to share in snippets, the complexities and consequences of homelessness.

This marvelous collection opens with the practical wisdom and unforgettable wit of the poet’s grandmother, who said (among other things) “Turmeric can heal anything / but a broken heart” and “Read that to me at / my funeral, boy, right now my show is on.” From the foundation of the matriarchal, Majmudar turns to the impact of women as lovers and partners, exploring the contours of passionate, romantic, and married love; he and his wife are “two fireflies/ scooped out of the same evening” to meet in the jar where their constancy contains and sustains them.

A decade into the Depression, Millicent Green is a 25-year-old "old maid" living with her marriage-obsessed mother and domineering older brother in the stiflingly small Jewish community of New Bern, North Carolina. Smart and prickly, she’s struggling to find her place in the world following the loss of her beloved younger brother, and with him, her dreams for the future. One humid August day, Millie is sent to run an errand and discovers a young woman unconscious on the ground. This mystery woman, mute and without identification, will upend Millie’s life.

Elizabeth Zhang is well aware of her place in the world. She’s in the tenth percentile for likability, the seventieth percentile for attractiveness, and the ninety-ninth percentile for academics. While she’s never been the most beautiful or the most liked, she knows she has the intelligence and ambition to achieve her greatest dream: Harvard Law School. But when Harvard rejects Elizabeth for not standing out enough—which she knows means she's just another boring Asian female—her carefully constructed life falls apart.

Though most of the virtues that interest Carl Dennis in Earthly Virtues have traditional names, they are provided with contexts that give them fresh implications, moving us in two directions at once, toward a recognition of limits and a recognition of possibilities. On one hand, they confront what it means to lack the knowledge and power we need to make our lives as consequential as we may want them to be. On the other, they reach out to widen the circle of our concern, suggesting a kinship of the local with the distant, enlarging the passing moment with history and prophecy.