In 1936, teenager MacNolia Cox became the first African American finalist in the National Spelling Bee Competition. Supposedly prevented from winning, the precocious child who dreamed of becoming a doctor was changed irrevocably. Her story, told in a poignant nonlinear narrative, illustrates the power of a pivotal moment in a life.

In this superb and eagerly anticipated debut collection by the young African American poet A. Van Jordan, the energy and music of Jordan's language, his honesty of feeling and of truth telling, are matched by his freshness and power. "His stuff shines, sweat pours off it", says Joy Harjo. And there is a kind of solidity and reality in Jordan's poems that display varieties of experience and depths of meditation too rarely found in contemporary American poetry.

This ambitious collection explores the intersection of the infinite world of physics with the perplexities of the human condition. Employing both narrative and cinematic structure, Jordan re-creates the lives of Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, and comic book superheroes--the Green Lantern, the Atom--and also reveals himself in poems of recollection and loss.

Tula a ruined Toltec capital; a Russian city known for its accordions; Tagalog for poem.
Prismatic, startling, rich with meaning yet sparely composed, Chris Santiago s debut collection of poems begins with one word and transforms it, in a dazzling sleight of hand, into a multivalent symbol for the immigrant experience.Tula Santiago reveals to readers a distant land devastated by war.Tula its music beckons in rhythms, time signatures, and lullabies. Tula can the poem, he seems to ask, build an imaginative bridge back to a family lost to geography, history, and a...

In this astonishing volume of poems and lyric prose, Whiting Award–winner A. Van Jordan draws comparisons to Black characters in Shakespearean plays—Caliban and Sycorax from?The Tempest, Aaron the Moor from?Titus Andronicus, and the eponymous antihero of?Othello—to mourn the deaths of Black people, particularly Black children, at the hands of police officers. What do these characters, and the ways they are defined by the white figures who surround them, have in common with Tamir Rice, Trayvon Martin, and other Black people killed in the twenty-first century? Balancing anger and grief...