Imagine a United States in which the First Amendment no longer exists. What would we say? What kind of poems would we read and write? In her seventh collection of poetry, American Samizdat, Jehanne Dubrow contemplates this possibility. Composed as series of terrified fragments, the book replicates the urgency of the Cold War-era, dissident writings once known as “samizdat,” underground publications that were forbidden by the state. Set in a world of 24-hour news coverage, social media, and alternative facts, American Samizdat wonders what we've become and where we're going.

This story begins with an unexpected phone call: a lawyer tells a writer that his father, with whom he has had no contact since age three and whom he has twice tried to find without success, has died. Keith Maillard thus begins to research his father’s life, resulting in a suspenseful work of historical reconstruction as well as a psychologically acute portrait of the impact of a father’s absence. Walking a tightrope between the known and the unknown, Keith Maillard has pulled off a book that only a novelist of his stature could write.

Poet-naturalist Elizabeth Bradfield’s fourth collection documents and queries her work as a guide on ships in Antarctica, offering an insider’s vision that challenges traditional tropes of The Last Continent. Inspired by haibun, a form the 17th-century poet Bashō invented to chronicle his journeys in remote Japan, Bradfield uses photographs, compressed prose, and short poems to examine our relationships to remoteness, discovery, expertise, awe, labor, temporary societies, tourism’s service economy, and “pure” landscapes. A complicated love letter, Toward Antarctica offers a unique view of one of the world’s most iconic wild places.