Winner, 2017 CantoMundo Poetry Prize. Paraiso, the first book in the new CantoMundo Poetry Series, which celebrates the work of Latino/a poets writing in English, is a pilgrimage against sorrow. Erupting from a mother's death, the poems follow the speaker as he tries to survive his grief. Catholicism, family, good rum . . . these help, but the real medicine happens when the speaker pushes into the cloud forest alone. In a Costa Rica far away from touristy beaches, we encounter bus trips over the cold mountains of the dead, drug dealers with beautiful dogs, and witches with cell phones. Science fuses with religion, witchcraft is joined with technology, and eventually grief transforms into belief. Throughout, Paraiso defies categorization, mixing its beautiful sonnets with playful games and magic cures for the reader. In the process, moments of pure life mingle with the aftermath of a death.

In the fascinating collection of poems, In the Absence of Clocks, poet Jacob Shores-Arguello takes readers on an illuminating voyage through Ukrainian life. Set during the turmoil of the 2004 Orange Revolution, when the country trembled in the wake of political corruption and public outrage, Shores-Arguello's lyrics of a revolution provide a glimpse into a world at once foreign and familiar. Throughout the collection are the iconic images and myriad juxtapositions of Ukrainian life. wolves howling in the snow and bakers pounding early-morning loaves of bread; farmlands and cities alike rocked by political transformation; gypsies and protesters; opulent images of Byzantium and the concrete ghosts of Chernobyl--all meet here at the crossroads of East and West, democracy and communism, reality and mythology. As the narrator travels across the Ukraine, he does much more than cross the distances between Horlivka and Odessa or Kiev and the Black Sea. As the tides of change swirl around him, they mirror his own search for a cultural identity and history.