Nick Daggett, a Vietnam veteran in his early forties, has returned to Snow Island to live year-round and run a pirate radio station from the abandoned mansion. Nora Venable, a lesbian in her seventies and owner of the decaying mansion, comes to the island after a fifty-year absence and decides to stay. Ruth Lambert, a photographer from New York, arrives to see what is left of the old Snow Inn, which she has inherited from her aunt. This unlikely trio finds their lives unexpectedly linked after a fire sweeps through the old mansion. Set in the fall of 1990, as the United States prepares to go to war in the Persian Gulf, the final volume of the Snow Island trilogy (after Snow Island and Evening Ferry) brings together characters from the previous volumes with new arrivals in a moving conclusion that completes the saga of island life. This taut tale of love and perseverance evokes the isolation and connection at the heart of every community.

Literary Nonfiction. Poetry. Editors Ilya Kaminsky and Katherine Towler have gathered conversations with nineteen of America's leading poets, reflecting upon their diverse experiences with spirituality and the craft of writing. Bringing together poets who are Christian, Buddhist, Jewish, Muslim, Pagan, Native American, Wiccan, agnostic, and otherwise, this book offers frank and thoughtful consideration of themes too often polarized and politicized in our society. Participants include Li-Young Lee, Jane Hirshfield, Carolyn Forche, Gerald Stern, Christian Wiman, Joy Harjo, and Gregory Orr, and others, all wrestling with difficult questions of human existence and the sources of art.

The Penny Poet of Portsmouth is a memoir of the author's friendship with Robert Dunn, a brilliant poet who spent most of his life off the grid in downtown Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The book is as well an elegy for a time and place--the New England seaport city of the early 1990s that has been lost to development and gentrification, capturing the life Robert was able to make in a place rougher around the edges than it is today. It is a meditation on what writing asks of those who practice it and on the nature of solitude in a culture filled with noise and clutter.

Funny and diabolical, these short, linked, prose poems describe a girl's need to escape from a world of lust and lawnmowers into a dream world. From child to adult, the poet imagines her life as a new Houdini.

"Full of nouveau folklore, quirky unrequited narratives, and mock dream analysis, Nin Andrews' work is always surprising, sharp, and wild."-Denise Duhamel

"Pepper Facts

"It's true what they say. A certain kind of spice can get under a woman's skin. Once ingested, she will taste it in the air and on her sheets; she might feel as if she were living in a Mexican restaurant. For a while a woman might think it's the man she's sleeping with, that he's gotten inside her clothes and every cell she is. Chilies are potent, no doubt about it; some contain antibiotic properties, inspiring a fire to rise in the blood, replicating the sensation and biochemistry of romance. A woman will lie awake, tossing and stirring, unable to sleep. She will eat bowl after bowl of ice cream beneath a full moon. But in the end, she will discover it's nothing a little baking soda in her wash and toothpaste can't cure. And what a relief she will feel then! She might howl at the stars. Or dance nude in a snow storm, her arms flung wide to the wind and singing cold, happy at last to be listening to her own thoughts that promise her, never again. Never again.