graywolf press

GRAYWOLF PRESS

New Titles & Selected Backlist Fall 2015

Graywol f Press Visit our web site: www.graywolfpress.org

Our work is made possible by the book buyer, and by the generous support of individuals, corporations, founda-tions, and governmental agencies, to whom we offer heartfelt thanks. We encourage you to support Graywolf’s publishing efforts. For information, check our web site (listed above) or call us at (651) 641-0077.

G R AY WO L F S TA F F

Fiona McCrae, Director and Publisher Pat Marjoram, AccountantMarisa Atkinson, Marketing Manager Ethan Nosowsky, Editorial DirectorLucia Cowles, Editorial and Administrative Assistant Josh Ostergaard, Development AssociateKatie Dublinski, Associate Publisher Jeffrey Shotts, Executive EditorSarah Engelmann, Marketing Assistant Caitlin Warner, BookkeeperLeslie Johnson, Managing Director Steven Woodward, Associate EditorErin Kottke, Publicity and Marketing Director

B OA R D O F D I R E C TO R S

Ed McConaghay (chair), Catherine Allan, Trish F. Anderson, Carol Bemis, Mary Ebert, Lee Freeman, Chris Galloway, James Hoecker, Shirley Hughes, Tom Joyce, Will Kaul, Chris Kirwan, Ann MacDonald, Jim McCarthy, Allie Pohlad, Mary Polta, Bruno A. Quinson, Gail See, Roderic Southall, Judy Titcomb, Emily Anne Tuttle, Melinda Ward

B OA R D E M E R I T U S

Marilynn Alcott, Ann Bitter, Page Knudsen Cowles, Sally Dixon, Colin Hamilton, Betsy Hannaford, Diane Herman, Katherine Murphy, Mary Polta, Gail See, Kay Sexton, Margaret Telfer, Melinda Ward, John Wheelihan, Margaret Wurtele

N AT I O N A L C O U N C I L

James Hoecker (chair), James Alcott, Ann Bitter, Marion Brown, Mary Carswell, Edwin C. Cohen, Ellen Flamm, Vicki Ford, Lee Freeman, David Galligan, Betsy Gardella, Betsy Hannaford, Barbara Holmes, Mark Jensen, Sheela Lampietti, Chris LaVictoire Mahai, Kevin Martin, Dan McCarthy, Maura Rainey McCormack, Dan Moore, Elise Paschen, Bruno A. Quinson, Susan Ritz, Eunice Salton, Gail See, Stephanie Stebich, Kathryn B. Swintek, Diane Thormodsgard, Joanne Von Blon, Tappan Wilder

G R A N T AC K N OW L E D G M E N T S

This activity is made possible, in part, by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund, and through a grant from the Wells Fargo Foundation Minnesota.

Additional support has been provided by Amazon.com, the Elmer L. and Eleanor J. Andersen Foundation, the College of Saint Benedict, the General Mills Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Elizabeth C. Quinlan Foundation, and Target.

Cover design: Kyle G. Hunter

Cover image: © GeorgePeters, istockphoto.com

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TONY HOAGLAND is the author of four previous poetry collections, includ-ing Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty and What Narcissism Means to Me, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

ALSO AVAILABLE

Twenty Poems That Could Save America, Essays, Paperback (978-1-55597-694-1), $16.00

Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty, Poetry, Paperback (978-1-55597-549-4), $15.00

What Narcissism Means to Me, Poetry, Paperback (978-1-55597-386-5), $16.00

Poetry, 96 pages, 6 x 9Paperback, $16.00September978-1-55597-718-4Ebook Available

Brit., trans., audio, dram.: Graywolf Press

1st ser.: Author c/o Graywolf Press

The eagerly awaited, brilliant, and engaging new poems by Tony Hoagland, author of

What Narcissism Means to Me

A p p l i c a t i o n f o r R e l e a s e f r o m t h e D r e a m

P o e m s

T O N Y H O A G L A N D

Are we corrupt or innocent, fragmented or whole? Are responsibility and freedom irreconcilable? Do we value memory or succumb to our forget-fulness? Application for Release from the Dream, Tony Hoagland’s fifth collec-tion of poems, pursues these questions with the hobnailed abandon of one who needs to know how a citizen of twenty-first-century America can stay human. With whiplash nerve and tender curiosity, Hoagland both surveys the damage and finds the wonder that makes living worthwhile. Mirthful, fearless, and precise, these poems are full of judgment and mercy.

The parade for the slain police officer

goes past the bakery

and the smell of fresh bread

makes the mourners salivate against their will.

—from “Note to Reality”

Praise for Tony Hoagland

“Few [poets] deliver more pure pleasure. His erudite comic poems are backloaded with heartache and longing, and they function, emotionally, like improvised explosive devices.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times

“Tony Hoagland is a provocateur, a brash interventionist, a deeply engaged Whitmanian poet and critic who poses, like the master, as ‘one of the roughs.’” —Edward Hirsch

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O n e o f t h e B e s t B o o k s o f t h e Ye a r

National Book Critics Circle Award finalist * The New York Times Book Review (Top 10)

Entertainment Weekly (Top 10) * New York Magazine (Top 10) * Chicago Tribune (Top 10)

Publishers Weekly (Top 10) * Time Out New York (Top 10) * Los Angeles Times * Kirkus

Booklist * NPR’s Science Friday * Newsday * Slate * Refinery 29

“Deftly interweaving personal history, cultural analysis, science journalism, and literary criticism, On

Immunity investigates vaccinations from many angles—as the mechanism that protects us from disease,

a metaphor for our wish for invulnerability, and a class-based privilege. . . . [Biss] has been compared

to Joan Didion, and the reasons are obvious here. Like Didion she has a gift for coming at her subjects

from all sides, in unsentimental, lyrical prose.” —Bookforum

“Elegant and bracing. . . . On Immunity is remarkable for its scope. Biss’s reading of the political dimen-sions of vaccination, on the ways in which one’s own health and sickness are contingent on that of others, is particularly thoughtful and penetrating.” —Slate

“A welcome antidote—or ‘inoculation,’ as the subtitle suggests—against the toxic shouting match occurring between ‘anti-vaxxers’ and their opponents. . . . Biss leaps nimbly through a vertiginous range of subjects. . . . Brilliant and entertaining.” —The Boston Globe

“On Immunity casts a spell. . . . There’s a drama in watching this smart writer feel her way through this material. She’s a poet, an essayist, and a class spy. She digs honestly into her own psyche and into those of ‘people like me,’ and she reveals herself as believer and apostate, moth and flame.” —The New York Times

“A whirlwind 163-page spin through medical history, literature including Dracula and Candide, and musings on what it means to make individual decisions that affect the health of an entire community. . . . A coherent, eloquent plea for a sense beyond oneself.” —The Dallas Morning News

“[On Immunity] weaves metaphor and myth, science and sociology, philosophy and politics into a

tapestry rich with insight and intelligence.” —The New York Review of Books

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Nonfiction, 224 pages, 5! x 8"Paperback, $16.00September978-1-55597-720-7Ebook Available

Brit., trans., audio, dram.: Frances Goldin Literary Agency

This book is made possible through a partnership with the College of Saint Benedict, and honors the legacy of S. Mariella Gable, a distinguished teacher at the College. Support has been provided by the Manitou Fund as part of the Warner Reading Program.

ALSO AVAILABLE

Notes from No Man’s Land , Essays, Paperback (978-1-55597-518-0), $16.00

The Balloonists , Essays, Ebook (978-1-55597-919-5), $9.99

EULA BISS is the author of The Balloonists and Notes from No Man’s Land , which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism. She teaches at Northwestern University.

A New York Times Book Review Top Ten Book of the Year, now in paperback

O n I m m u n i t y A n I n o c u l a t i o n

E U L A B I S S

In this bold, fascinating book, Eula Biss addresses our fear of the govern-ment, the medical establishment, and what may be in our children’s air, food, mattresses, medicines, and vaccines. Refl ecting on her own experi-ence as a new mother, she suggests that we cannot immunize our children, or ourselves, against the world. As she explores the metaphors surrounding immunity, Biss extends her conversations with other mothers to meditations on the myth of Achilles, Voltaire’s Candide , Bram Stoker’s Dracula , Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring , Susan Sontag’s AIDS and Its Metaphors , and beyond. On

Immunity is an inoculation against our fear and a moving account of how we are all interconnected—our bodies and our fates.

Praise for On Immunity

“Subtle, spellbinding. . . . Sontag said she wrote Illness as Metaphor to ‘calm the imagination, not to incite it,’ and On Immunity also seeks to cool and console. But where Sontag was imperious, Biss is stealthy. She advances from all sides, like a chess player, drawing on science, myth, literature to herd us to the only logical end, to vaccinate.” — The New York Times Book Review

“By exploring the anxieties about what’s lurking inside our fl u shots, the air, and ourselves, [Biss] drives home the message that we are all responsible for one another. On Immunity will make you consider that idea on a fairly profound level.” — Entertainment Weekly , Grade: A

“[An] elegant, intelligent and very beautiful book, which occupies a space between research and refl ection, investigating our attitudes toward immu-nity and inoculation through a personal and cultural lens.” — Los Angeles Times

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A n E xc e r p t f r o m C h a n g i n g t h e S u b j e c t

It gets ever harder to stay free of the electronic grid and its dual dynamic, which shatters old supporting

structures while at the same time fostering the new model of disengaged engagement. Our love affair

with e-mail offers an excellent instance. The basic electronic transmission is one thing. It offers ease and

a real-time immediacy that the conventional written letter can’t hope to match, and our communica-

tions have proliferated accordingly. But it’s a trade-off. For one thing, to send and receive e-mail is also

to move into the system of e-mail, to become implicated in the network. As a user I get both the friction-

less burst of the contact—the immediate breaching of the space/time divide—and also the sensation,

slippery but real, of taking a half step back from myself.

When I enter the network, I feel there is something different in my peripheral vision—maybe in my

life itself. Focused though I am on a single communication, I am also distractingly aware of the perpetual

possibility of other communications. The portal to the whole world is theoretically open. This is one of the

features of being inside a network mesh: incessant peripherality, an awareness of the larger world at every

moment a click away. And because of this I occupy a different gravity field; I’m lighter, more porous. The

difference between old and new modes is not purely imaginary. The writing of the paper letter presumes

the fact of physical transmission—real time, real space, and literally tangible message. The subliminal conti-

nuity corroborates my sense of being in the world, just as writing and receiving e-mail puts me inside a kind

of parenthesis—at a level of remove.

To use the new modes of communication, as I do—as we pretty much all do—is to accept the laws of

the new system, both the changed sense of facility and access, and the subtle inner self-division, and, yes,

a growing difficulty with the former ways. Now if I write, fold, address, stamp, and post a letter, it almost

feels like an imposition, like I’m pushing against the grain. But sometimes it is only by pushing that we dis-

cover that there is a grain.

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ALSO AVAILABLE

The Other Walk, Essays, Paperback (978-1-55597-593-7), $15.00

The Art of Time in Memoir, Reference, Paperback (978-1-55597-489-3), $12.00

Nonfiction, 272 pages, 5! x 8" Paperback, $16.00October978-1-55597-721-4Ebook Available

Brit., trans., 1st ser., audio, dram.: Graywolf Press

SVEN BIRKERTS is the author of nine previous books, including The Other Walk, The Gutenberg Elegies, The Art of Time in Memoir, and My Sky Blue Trades. Director of the Bennington Writing Seminars, he also edits the journal AGNI based at Boston University. Birkerts lives in Arlington, Massachusetts.

Trenchant, expansive essays on the cultural consequences of ongoing, all-permeating

technological innovation

C h a n g i n g t h e S u b j e c tA r t a n d A t t e n t i o n i n t h e I n t e r n e t A g e

S V E N B I R K E R T S

In 1994, Sven Birkerts published The Gutenberg Elegies, his celebrated rally-ing cry to resist the oncoming digital advances, especially those that might affect the way we read literature and experience art—the very cultural activities that make us human.

After two decades of rampant change, Birkerts has allowed a degree of everyday digital technology into his life. He refuses to use a smartphone, but communicates via email and spends some time reading online. In Changing the Subject, he examines the changes that he observes in himself and others—the distraction when reading on the screen; the loss of per-sonal agency through reliance on GPS and one-stop information resources; an increasing acceptance of “hive” behaviors. “An unprecedented shift is underway,” he argues, and “this transformation is dramatically accelerated and more psychologically formative than any previous technological inno-vation.” He finds solace in engagement with art, particularly literature, and he brilliantly describes the countering energy available to us through acts of sustained attention, even as he worries that our increasingly mediated existences are not conducive to creativity.

It is impossible to read Changing the Subject without coming away with a renewed sense of what is lost by our wholesale acceptance of digital innova-tion and what is regained when we immerse ourselves in a good book.

Praise for Sven Birkerts

“One of America’s most distinguished, eloquent servants of the poetry and fiction that matter.” —Susan Sontag

“Birkerts on reading fiction is like M. F. K. Fisher on eating or Norman Maclean on fly casting. He makes you want to go do it.” —Jonathan Franzen, The New Yorker

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ALSO AVAILABLE

Glyph, Fiction, Paperback (978-1-55597-667-5), $15.00

Percival Everett by Virgil Russell, Fiction, Paperback (978-1-55597-634-7), $15.00

Erasure, Fiction, Paperback (978-1-55597-599-9), $16.00

Assumption, Fiction, Paperback (978-1-55597-598-2), $15.00

Fiction, 176 pages, 5! x 8"Paperback, $16.00September978-1-55597-719-1Ebook Available

Brit.: Graywolf PressTrans., 1st ser., audio, dram.:

Melanie Jackson Agency

PERCIVAL EVERETT is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California and the author of nearly thirty books. He has fly-fished the West for over thirty years. He lives in Los Angeles.

A new collection of stories set in the West from “one of the most gifted and versatile of

contemporary writers” (NPR)

H a l f a n I n c h o f Wa t e rS t o r i e s

P E R C I V A L E V E R E T T

Percival Everett’s long-awaited new collection of stories, his first since 2004’s Damned If I Do, finds him traversing the West with characteristic restlessness. A deaf Native American girl wanders off into the desert and is found untouched in a den of rattlesnakes. A young boy copes with the death of his sister by angling for an unnaturally large trout in the creek where she drowned. An old woman rides her horse into a mountain snowstorm and sees a beloved dog that had died years before.

For the plainspoken men and women of these stories—fathers and daughters, sheriffs and veterinarians—small events trigger sudden shifts in which the ordinary becomes unfamiliar. A harmless comment about how to ride a horse changes the course of a relationship, a snakebite gives rise to hallucinations, and the hunt for a missing man reveals his uncanny resemblance to an actor. Half an Inch of Water tears through the fabric of the everyday to examine what lies beneath the surface of these lives. In the hands of master storyteller Percival Everett, the act of questioning leads to vistas more strange and unsettling than could ever have been expected.

Praise for Percival Everett by Virgil Russell

“[A] stark, shattering novel. . . . Deeply moving.” —The Wall Street Journal

“Percival Everett numbers among his very best.” —Lydia Millet, Los Angeles Times

“Funny, insightful, and unpredictable. . . . Everett is a master of his trade.” —Time Out Chicago

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ALSO AVAILABLE

Almost Never, Fiction, Paperback (978-1-55597-609-5), $16.00

Fiction, 88 pages, 5 x 8Paperback, $14.00November978-1-55597-724-5Ebook Available

Brit., 1st ser., audio: Graywolf PressTrans., dram.: Tusquets Editores

DANIEL SADA was born in Mexicali, Mexico, in 1953, and died in 2011, in Mexico City. Considered by many as the boldest and most innovative writer in Spanish of his generation, he published eight volumes of short stories, nine novels, and three volumes of poetry.

KATHERINE SILVER is an award-winning translator.

“A literary titan of his time, one of the most innovative novelists in contemporary

Latin American letters.” —The Washington Post

O n e O u t o f TwoA N o v e l

D A N I E L S A D AT R A N S L A T E D F R O M T H E S P A N I S H B Y K A T H E R I N E S I L V E R

The most distinctive thing about the Gamal sisters is that they are, essen-tially, indistinguishable (except for a modest mole). The twin spinsters spend their time trying to mask any perceptible differences they have while working hard at their thriving tailoring business in a small town in rural northern Mexico. When? Thirty years ago? Fifty years ago? Who can say—the world seems not to intrude on Ocampo over much.

Gloria and Constitución take an almost perverse delight in confusing people about which one is which. But then a suitor enters the picture, and one of the sisters decides that she doesn’t want to live a life without romance and all the good things that come with it. The ensuing competition between the sisters brings their relationship to the breaking point until they come up with an ingenious solution that carries this buoyant farce to its tender and even liberating conclusion.

Suffused with the tension between our desire for union and our desire for independence, One Out of Two is a giddy and comic fable by one of the giants of contemporary Latin American literature.

Praise for Daniel Sada

“It’s impossible not to be swept along by Sada’s manic language, his Cervantean plot twists.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Sada’s works were a polyphonic parade of voices, a Mexican cacophony.” —The Paris Review

“Of my generation I most admire Daniel Sada, whose writing project seems to me the most daring.” —Roberto Bolaño

F r o m “A N o t e o n L a n g u a g e ”

The language of this novel evolved as I wrote it over a period of three years, often seeming to do so beyond my control. Eventually, in an attempt to prevent things getting entirely out of hand, I tried to hem it in with some rules.

The first and most important rule was that I wanted to use only words which originated in Old English. The vast majority of the vocabulary of this novel consists of words that, in one form or another, existed in English one thousand years ago. The exceptions are cases where words did not exist for what I wanted to say, or where those that did were so obscure today, or hard to pronounce or read, that they would have detracted excessively from the flow of the tale.

The second rule was that I did not use letters which did not exist in Old English. The OE alphabet was more limited than ours. There was, for example, no letter “k”—it is replaced by “c,” which is always pro-nounced like the modern “k,” never like the modern “s.” There was no “v” either; “f” takes its place in words like “seofon” (seven). “J” and “q” were similarly absent. . . .

Choosing OE, or pseudo-OE, forms for the novel’s vocabulary means that the reader has to initially wrestle with OE pronunciation. This can be tricky to compute at first, but once grasped it becomes, I hope, second nature. So “sc,” for example, is pronounced “sh”—as in biscop. “Cg” makes a “dg” sound in words like bricg (bridge). “G” can be pronounced both as a hard letter, as in mergen (morning), or as a soft equiva-lent of “y” when it appears in words like daeg. “Hw” sounds like “w” in words like hwit (white). . . .

The early English did not see the world as we do, and their language reflects this. They spoke their truth, as we speak ours. I wanted to be able to convey, not only in my descriptions of events and places but through the words of the characters, the sheer alienness of Old England.

F r o m t h e o p e n i n g o f T h e Wa ke

the night was clere though i slept i seen it. though i slept i seen the calm hierde naht only the still. when i gan down to sleep all was clere in the land and my dreams was full of stillness but my dreams did not cepe me still

when i woc in the mergen all was blaec though the night had gan and all wolde be blaec after and for all time. a great wind had cum in the night and all was blown then and broc. none had thought a wind lic this colde cum for all was blithe lifan as they always had and who will hiere the gleoman* when the tales he tells is blaec who locs at the heofon if it brings him regn who locs in the mere when there seems no end to its deopness

none will loc but the wind will cum. the wind cares not for the hopes of menthe times after will be for them who seen the cumanthe times after will be for the waecend

* traveling storyteller, poet and newsbringer

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Fiction, 384 pages, 5! x 8"Paperback, $16.00September978-1-55597-717-7Ebook Available

Brit.: Unbound1st ser., audio: Graywolf PressTrans., dram.: The Marsh Agency

PAUL KINGSNORTH is a former journalist and deputy editor of the Ecologist maga-zine and has won several awards for his poetry and essays. He is also the author of two works of nonfiction. In 2009, he cofounded the Dark Mountain Project, an international network of writers, artists, and thinkers in search of new stories for troubled times. The Wake is his first novel.

“A work that is as disturbing as it is empathetic, as beautiful as it is riveting.”

—Eimear McBride, New Statesman

T h e Wa k eA N o v e l

P A U L K I N G S N O R T H

In the aftermath of the Norman Invasion of 1066, William the Conqueror was uncompromising and brutal. English society was broken apart, its sys-tems turned on their head. What is little known is that a fractured network of guerrilla fighters took up arms against the French occupiers.

In The Wake, a postapocalyptic novel set one thousand years in the past, Paul Kingsnorth brings this dire scenario back to us through the eyes of the unforgettable Buccmaster, a proud landowner bearing witness to the end of his world. Accompanied by a band of like-minded men, Buccmaster is determined to seek revenge on the invaders. But as the men travel across the scorched English landscape, Buccmaster becomes increasingly unhinged by the immensity of his loss, and their path forward becomes increasingly unclear.

Written in what the author describes as “a shadow tongue”—a version of Old English updated so as to be understandable to the modern reader—The

Wake renders the inner life of an Anglo-Saxon man with an accuracy and immediacy rare in historical fiction. To enter Buccmaster’s world is to feel powerfully the sheer strangeness of the past. A tale of lost gods and haunted visions, The Wake is both a sensational, gripping story and a major literary achievement.

Praise for The Wake

“Extraordinary.” —Philip Pullman

“Reading [The Wake] is to be immersed in the past and in a story in a way that I haven’t really felt since childhood. . . . The most glorious experience I’ve had with a book in years.” —Lucy Mangan, The Guardian

“My top book of the year so far. Just superb.” —Eleanor Catton, winner of the 2013 Man Booker Prize

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ALSO AVAILABLE

June Fourth Elegies by Liu Xiaobo, Poetry, Hardcover (978-1-55597-610-1), $26.00

Poetry, 224 pages, 6 x 9Paperback, $20.00November978-1-55597-725-2Ebook Available


1st ser.: Bernstein Literary Agency

A Lannan Translation Selection

LIU XIA is a Chinese poet and artist. She has been living under strict house arrest since her husband, poet and activist Liu Xiaobo, was imprisoned in 2009 for “inciting subversion of state power” and then received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010.

The first publication of the poetry of Liu Xia, wife of the imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize

recipient Liu Xiaobo

E m p t y C h a i r sS e l e c t e d P o e m s

L I U X I AT R A N S L A T E D F R O M T H E C H I N E S E B Y M I N G D I

A N D J E N N I F E R S T E R N

I N T R O D U C T I O N B Y L I A O Y I W U

F O R E W O R D B Y H E R T A M Ü L L E R

Selected from thirty years of Liu Xia’s poetry, and including some of her haunting photography, this book creates a portrait of a life lived under duress, a voice in danger of being silenced. These poems are felt and insightful, colored through with political constraints even as they seep beyond those constraints and toward love.

I didn’t have a chance

to say a word before you became

a character in the news,

everyone looking up to you

as I was worn down

at the edge of the crowd

just smoking

and watching the sky.

A new myth, maybe, was forming

there, but the sun was so bright

I couldn’t see it.

—from “June 2nd, 1989 (for Xiaobo)”

“Liu Xia’s nature is to be an unrestrained bird. . . . Instead, she became a tree. She can’t move her own nest—Liu Xiaobo can’t move, so she can’t either as a result. She’s turned from a bird into a tree, her feathers becoming white and withered. But as a tree she still sings the songs of birds. When a bird is dying, her singing is sorrowful. These are the only songs, the dying songs, of Chinese poetry since June 4th, 1989. Escape, Liu Xia, I know you can.” —Liao Yiwu

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Poetry, 88 pages, 7 x 9Paperback, $16.00October978-1-55597-722-1Ebook Available


1st ser.: Author c/o Graywolf Press

DIANE SEUSS is the author of two previous poetry col-lections, It Blows You Hollow and Wolf Lake, White Gown Blown Open, winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry. Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry 2014, the Georgia Review, New Orleans Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. She is writer-in-residence at Kalamazoo College and lives in Michigan.

“Diane Seuss writes with the intensity of a soothsayer.”

—Laura Kasischke

F o u r - L e g g e d G i r lP o e m s

D I A N E S E U S S

In Diane Seuss’s Four-Legged Girl, her audacious, hothouse language swerves into pain and rapture, as she recounts a life lived at the edges of contain-ment. Ghostly, sexy, and plaintive, these poems skip to the tune of a jump rope, fill a wishing well with desire and other trinkets, and they remember past lush lives in New York City, in rural Michigan, and in love. In the final poem, she sings of the four-legged girl, the body made strange to itself and to others. This collection establishes Seuss’s poetic voice as rich and emo-tional as any in contemporary poetry.

For, having imagined your body one way I found it to be another way,

it was yielding,

but only as the Destroying Angel mushroom yields, its softness allied

with its poison, and your legs were not petals or tendrils as I’d believed,

but brazen, the deviant tentacles beneath the underskirt of a secret

queen

—from “Oh four-legged girl, it’s either you or the ossuary”

Praise for Four-Legged Girl

“A great passion issues from the pages of Four-Legged Girl. . . . This book is a wise, wild, continuous gift. It will make you lean in and listen; it will make you this poet’s devotee. These poems are tremendous in every way. Diane Seuss: holy smoke!” —Terrance Hayes

“Seuss blazes up into the dark and dirty corners of youthful folly, in poems that are visually sharp and linguistically alive; her voice is lucid, earthy, mordant, and funny. No pity, no quarter, for the old self: ‘Some of us claw our way to the bottom,’ Seuss writes, ‘transcend downward. There at the hub / of the drain we swirl.’” —Dana Levin

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Fiction, 576 pages, 6 x 9Paperback, $18.00October978-1-55597-723-8Ebook Available

Brit., audio: Graywolf Press1st ser., trans., dram.: Cynthia

Cannell Literary Agency

ALSO AVAILABLE

Holding Pattern, Fiction, Paperback (978-1-55597-509-8), $15.00

Song of the Shank, Fiction, Paperback (978-1-55597-680-4), $18.00

JEFFERY RENARD ALLEN is the author of two poetry collections, two novels, and a story collection. Born in Chicago, he holds a PhD in English from the University of Illinois at Chicago and is a professor of English at Queens College, as well as an instructor in the writing program at New School University and at New York University. He is also the fic-tion director at the Norman Mailer Center Writers Colony.

“Will put Allen in the company of writers such as James Joyce, August Wilson, and Ralph Ellison.”

—The Philadelphia Inquirer

R a i l s U n d e r M y B a c kA N o v e l

J E F F E R Y R E N A R D A L L E NW I T H A N E W I N T R O D U C T I O N B Y C H A R L E S J O H N S O N

When it was first published fifteen years ago, Jeffery Renard Allen’s debut novel, Rails Under My Back, earned its author comparisons to some of the giants of twentieth-century modernism. The publication of Allen’s equally ambitious second novel, Song of the Shank, cemented those lofty claims. Now, the book that established his reputation is being restored to print in its first Graywolf Press edition. Together, the two novels stand as signifi-cant achievements of twenty-first-century literature.

Rails Under My Back is an epic that tracks the interwoven lives of two brothers, Lucius and John Jones, who are married to two sisters, Gracie and Sheila McShan. For them, their parents, and their children, life is full of departures; someone is always fleeing town and leaving the remaining family to suffer the often dramatic, sometimes tragic consequences. The multiple effects of the comings and goings are devastating: these are the almost mythic expression of the African American experience in the half century that followed the Second World War.

The story ranges, as the characters do, from the City, which is somewhat like both New York and Chicago, to Memphis, to the West, and to many “inner” and “outer” locales. Rails Under My Back is a multifaceted, brilliantly colored, intensely musical novel that pulses with urgency and originality.

Praise for Rails Under My Back

“A tour de force.” —Chicago Tribune

“Besides Joyce and Faulkner, other 20th-century novelists whose work Allen’s calls to mind are Dos Passos, Ellison and Henry Roth—an indication of the remarkable literary company in which this novel may be seen to move.” —The New York Times Book Review

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I RefuseA NovelP E R P E T T E R S O NT R A N S L AT E D F R O M T H E N O R W E G I A N B Y D O N B A R T L E T T

Fiction, 288 pages, Hardcover

(978-1-55597-699-6), $25.00

Ebook Available

Ashes in My Mouth, Sand in My ShoesStoriesP E R P E T T E R S O NT R A N S L AT E D F R O M T H E N O R W E G I A N B Y D O N B A R T L E T T

Fiction, 128 pages, Paperback

(978-1-55597-700-9), $14.00

Ebook Available

Tesla: A Portrait with MasksA NovelV L A D I M I R P I S TA L OT R A N S L AT E D F R O M T H E S E R B I A N B Y B O G D A N R A K I C A N D J O H N J E F F R I E S


(978-1-55597-697-2), $18.00

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The InfernalA NovelM A R K D O T E N


(978-1-55597-701-6), $18.00

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Dark Lies the IslandStoriesK E V I N B A R R Y


(978-1-55597-688-0), $16.00

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All Who Go Do Not ReturnA MemoirS H U L E M D E E N

Nonfiction, 288 pages, Paperback

(978-1-55597-705-4), $16.00

Ebook Available

The PinchA NovelS T E V E S T E R N

Fiction, 368 pages, Hardcover

(978-1-55597-715-3), $26.00

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A Woman LovedA NovelA N D R E Ï M A K I N ET R A N S L AT E D F R O M T H E F R E N C H B Y G E O F F R E Y S T R A C H A N


(978-1-55597-711-5), $16.00

Ebook Available

Brief Loves That Live ForeverA NovelA N D R E Ï M A K I N ET R A N S L AT E D F R O M T H E F R E N C H B Y G E O F F R E Y S T R A C H A N


(978-1-55597-712-2), $16.00

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Letter to a Future LoverMarginalia, Errata, Secrets, Inscriptions, and Other Ephemera Found in LibrariesA N D E R M O N S O N

Nonfiction, 176 pages, Hardcover

(978-1-55597-706-1), $22.00

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Leaving OrbitNotes from the Last Days of American SpaceflightM A R G A R E T L A Z A R U S D E A N


(978-1-55597-709-2), $16.00

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The ArgonautsM A G G I E N E L S O N


(978-1-55597-707-8), $23.00

Ebook Available

OngoingnessThe End of a DiaryS A R A H M A N G U S O


(978-1-55597-703-0), $20.00

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3 SectionsPoemsV I J AY S E S H A D R I

Poetry, 88 pages, Paperback

(978-1-55597-716-0), $16.00

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The Last Two SecondsPoemsM A R Y J O B A N G


(978-1-55597-704-7), $16.00

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Station ZedPoemsT O M S L E I G H


(978-1-55597-698-9), $16.00

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My FeelingsPoemsN I C K F LY N N


(978-1-55597-710-8), $16.00

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CitizenAn American LyricC L A U D I A R A N K I N E

Poetry/Nonfiction, 160 pages, Paperback

(978-1-55597-690-3), $20.00

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The Empathy ExamsEssaysL E S L I E J A M I S O N


(978-1-55597-671-2), $15.00

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SelfishPoemsA L B E R T G O L D B A R T H


(978-1-55597-708-5), $18.00

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The OverhaulPoemsK AT H L E E N J A M I E


(978-1-55597-702-3), $16.00

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Black Cat BonePoemsJ O H N B U R N S I D E


(978-1-55597-714-6), $16.00

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Turning into DwellingPoemsC H R I S T O P H E R G I L B E R T


(978-1-55597-713-9), $16.00

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