No Return Address is a vivid memoir of a life in exile and a poignant meditation on pleasure and loss, repression and transgression, and the complexities of love under harsh human conditions. In recounting her life's journey from Romania to Paris and Brussels, then on to the United States, Anca Vlasopolos writes movingly of the peculiar attributes of displacement in the contemporary world--the hyphenated, ambiguous identities; the purgatory in which immigrants await transfer to another country; the mysterious nostalgia for places and events dimly recalled. Throughout, she describes the...

Anca Vlasopolos' magnificent collection of poetry is a meditation on map-making and on migration, which pays homage to two scientists, Gerardus Mercator and Nathaniel Bowditch, whose work was enormously useful but unwittingly helped lead to conquest, decimation, and in some cases extinction of native habitats, peoples, and non-human life. These poems celebrate life that often passes unnoticed (intertidal creatures, migrating and "common" birds, amphibians, reptiles, non-charismatic mammals, and disregarded humans), advocate for its worth, habitats, and right to existence.

Anca Vlasopolos' magnificent collection of poetry is a meditation on map-making and on migration, which pays homage to two scientists, Gerardus Mercator and Nathaniel Bowditch, whose work was enormously useful but unwittingly helped lead to conquest, decimation, and in some cases extinction of native habitats, peoples, and non-human life. These poems celebrate life that often passes unnoticed (intertidal creatures, migrating and "common" birds, amphibians, reptiles, non-charismatic mammals, and disregarded humans), advocate for its worth, habitats, and right to existence.

No traveler in the nineteenth century became a greater catalyst of change than Manjiro Nakahama, a man revered in Japan and virtually unknown in the U. S. The New Bedford Samurai began his adventures as a runaway, illiterate boy from an island nation locked tight against the world, ruled by a strict caste system, and by and large ignorant of six hundred years of progress. By the end of his life, Manjiro had circumnavigated the globe five times, saw (and helped) his country change from the feudal Shogunate to a nation committed to playing a major role in global affairs, and imported from the...

Anca Vlasopolos' poems are a battle cry-bracing, powerful and luminous. With spare eloquence, she evokes a world that's turned cruel and unforgiving. Her poetry is as distinct as her fingerprints. --Patricia Abbott, author of Monkey Justice and Other Stories Walking Toward Solstice captures a restless naturalist's and poet's eye that scans the landscape of Southeast Michigan, whether urban, suburban, or its patches of isolated wilderness, for the signs of life and struggle that often are bracing reminders of our own mortality. Vlasopolos has a relentless, fierce vision, without...