The North American debut of Tuệ Sỹ—poet, monk, scholar, dissident, and one of the great cultural figures of modern Vietnam—and a new bilingual edition to the Seedbank series. In addition to being a preeminent scholar of world philosophy and a Zen master, Tuệ Sỹ is one of Vietnam’s most celebrated poets. He is a survivor of sixteen years of imprisonment and an eloquent witness to the tumult, tragedy, and resilience of his country over the last sixty years—and a full-length translation of his work into English is long overdue. Assembled and co-translated by Vietnamese poet and essayist Nguyen Ba Chung and acclaimed American poet Martha Collins, Dreaming the Mountain reflects a lifetime of creation, crisis, and commitment. With poems presented on facing pages in Vietnamese and English, this volume includes the early imagism of Tuệ Sỹ’s Zen studies as a scholar and critic, midlife work that represents his attempted retreat from the devastation of war and subsequent years of imprisonment, and late, elliptical poems that give intensely lyrical expression to a lifetime of profound experience. From the “fleeting dream of red blood at dusk� to the quiet determination of one who sets out to “repaint the dawn,� these poems reflect the journey of an artist who speaks for his country, who captures its darkness and its light. At once personal and universal, coolly observant and deeply compassionate, the poems of Tuệ Sỹ bring singular attention to a fleeting, painfully beautiful world.

Stylistically innovative, deeply moving, carefully researched, Martha Collins's eleventh volume of poetry combines her well-known attention to social issues with the elegiac mode of her previous book. She focuses here on race, gun violence, recent wars, and, in an extended sequence, the history of coal - first as her ancestors mined it, then from its geological origins to our ecologically threatened present. Casualty Reports is both indictment and lament, a work that speaks forcefully to our troubled history and our present times.

Simultaneously occupying past, present, and future, Black Stars escapes the confines of time and space, suffusing image with memory, abstraction with meaning, and darkness with abundant light. In these masterful translations, the poems sing out with the kind of wisdom that comes to those who have lived through war, traveled far, and seen a great deal. While the past may evoke village life and the present a postmodern urban world, the poems often exhibit a dual consciousness that allows the poet to reside in both at once. From the universe to the self, we see Lap's landscapes grow wider before they focus: black stars receding to dark stairways, infinity giving way to now. Lap's universe is boundless, yes, but also "just big enough / To have four directions / With just enough wind, rain, and trouble to last."

Though she published only five volumes of poetry over the course of her career, Jane Cooper (1924-2007) was deeply admired by her contemporaries, and teaching at Sarah Lawrence College for nearly forty years, she served as a mentor to many aspiring poets. Her elegant, honest, and emotionally and formally precise poems, often addressing the challenges of women's lives-especially the lives of women in the arts-continue to resonate with a new generation of readers. In Jane Cooper: A Radiance of Attention, Martha Collins and Celia Bland bring together several decades' worth of essential writing on Cooper's poetry. While some pieces offer close examination of Cooper's process or thoughtful consideration of the craft of a single poem, the volume features reviews of her collections, including a previously unpublished piece on her first book, The Weather of Six Mornings (1969), by James Wright, a lifelong champion of her work. Marie Howe, Jan Heller Levi, and Thomas Lux, among others, share personal remembrances of Cooper as a teacher, colleague, and inspiration. L. R. Berger's moving tribute to Cooper's final days closes the volume. Jane Cooper: A Radiance of Attention will be a welcome addition to the collection of anyone who has already come to love Cooper's work and will attract new readers, especially among younger poets, to her enduring poems.

Sara Eliza Johnson's stunning, deeply visceral first collection, "Bone Map" (2013 National Poetry Series Winner), pulls shards of tenderness from a world on the verge of collapse, where violence and terror infuse the body, the landscape, and dreams: a handful of blackberries offered from bloodied arms, bee stings likened to pulses of sunlight, a honeycomb of marrow exposed. "All moments will shine if you cut them open. / Will glisten like entrails in the sun." With figurative language that makes long, associative leaps, and with metaphors and images that continually resurrect themselves across poems, the collection builds and transforms its world through a locomotive echo--a regenerative force--that comes to parallel the psychic quest for redemption that unfolds in its second half. The result is a deeply affecting composition that will establish the already decorated young author as an important and vital new voice in American poetry.

Praise for Martha Collins: "A dazzling poet whose poetry is poised at the juncture between the lyric and ethics, Martha Collins has addressed some of the most traumatic social issues of the twentieth century . . . in supple and complex poems. . . .[N]o subject is off limits for her piercing intellect." —Cynthia Hogue, AWP Chronicle

Because What Else Could I Do is a sequence of fifty-five untitled short poems, almost all of them addressed to the poet's husband during the six months following his sudden and shocking death. Perhaps best known for her historical explorations of sociopolitical issues, Martha Collins did not originally intend to publish these poems. But while they are intensely personal, they make use of all of her poetic attention and skills. Spare, fragmented, musical even in their most heartbreaking moments, the poems allow the reader to share both an intimate expression the poet's grief and a moving record of her attempt to comprehend the events surrounding her loss.