In The Language Of My Captor

Winner of the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry (2017) Acclaimed poet Shane McCrae’s latest collection is a book about freedom told through stories of captivity. Historical persona poems and a prose memoir at the center of the book address the illusory freedom of both black and white Americans. In the book’s three sequences, McCrae explores the role mass entertainment plays in oppression, he confronts the myth that freedom can be based upon the power to dominate others, and, in poems about the mixed-race child adopted by Jefferson Davis in the last year of the Civil War, he interrogates the infrequently examined connections between racism and love. A reader’s companion is available at wesleyan.edu/wespress/readerscompanions.

Spanning religious, historical, and political themes, a new collection from the award-winning poet I think now more than half Of life is death but I can’t die Enough for all the life I see In Sometimes I Never Suffered, his seventh collection of poems, Shane McCrae remains “a shrewd composer of American stories” (Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker). Here, an angel, hastily thrown together by his fellow residents of Heaven, plummets to Earth in his first moments of consciousness. Jim Limber, the adopted mixed-race son of Jefferson Davis, wanders through the afterlife, reckoning with the nuances of America’s racial history, as well as his own. Sometimes I Never Suffered is a search for purpose and atonement, freedom and forgiveness, imagining eternity not as an escape from the past or present, but as a reverberating record and as the culmination of time’s manifold potential to mend.

An incisive new collection of poetry on political and contemporary themes I’m made of murderers I’m made Of nobodies and immigrants and the poor and a whole / Family the mother’s liver and her lungs In The Gilded Auction Block, the acclaimed poet Shane McCrae considers the present moment in America on its own terms as well as for what it says about the American project and Americans themselves. In the book’s four sections, McCrae alternately responds directly to Donald Trump and contextualizes him historically and personally, exploding the illusions of freedom of both black and white Americans. A moving, incisive, and frightening exploration of both the legacy and the current state of white supremacy in this country, The Gilded Auction Block is a book about the present that reaches into the past and stretches toward the future.

New York Times bestselling author Hannah Howell pens a sweeping romance set against the breathtaking Scottish Highlands, where a young woman holding a warrior hostage tries to resist his passionate seduction . . . Lady Sorcha Hay is devastated to learn that English soldiers are holding her young brother captive. Penniless, the only way she can pay for his freedom is by taking a hostage for ransom herself. Her captive—a wounded knight plucked from the battlefield—is furious to be imprisoned by a woman. But nothing will stop Sorcha from keeping Sir Ruari Kerr enslaved, even as the sight of his bronzed body sets her mind reeling and her senses afire . . . With her dark mane and soft curves, Sorcha is everything Ruari has ever desired in a woman. As she tends to his wounds, Ruari fights the intense attraction that ignites at her very touch. But he can’t afford to lose his heart to his tempting captor. For when he’s finally rescued by his men, Sorcha will pay dearly for her treachery—and loving her could put both their lives in peril . . .

The story of the French Jean Weidner, the head of a resistance group, who saved the lives of many Jews during the Nazi occupation of France, Belgium and the Netherlands.

A stunning debut novel with an intriguing literary hook: written in part as a letter from a victim to her abductor. Sensitive, sharp, captivating!Gemma, 16, is on layover at Bangkok Airport, en route with her parents to a vacation in Vietnam. She steps away for just a second, to get a cup of coffee. Ty--rugged, tan, too old, oddly familiar--pays for Gemma's drink. And drugs it. They talk. Their hands touch. And before Gemma knows what's happening, Ty takes her. Steals her away. The unknowing object of a long obsession, Gemma has been kidnapped by her stalker and brought to the desolate Australian Outback. STOLEN is her gripping story of survival, of how she has to come to terms with her living nightmare--or die trying to fight it.

Serad is the powerful, handsome pirate whose relentless plundering is the stuff of legend--but only few know that his true identity is Lord Alexander Wakefield. His kidnapping as a child by Barbary pirates changed the course of his life. Now Serad is master of the seas, accustomed to possessing whatever--or whomever--strikes his fancy. . .. He Stole Her Freedom. . . When Serad boards the vessel La Mouette to loot for treasure, he discovers a cargo more precious than any trinket: the heiress Victoria Lawrence. A raven-haired, emerald-eyed beauty, Victoria captivates Serad as no woman ever has before. But the fiery young lady doesn't seem to understand that she is now a captive, expected to honor her new master's wishes and desires without question. . . But He Must Win Her Heart When Victoria set sail from India, she expected the voyage to deliver her into the arms of her betrothed--not a heartless gang of pirates. Now captured, she refuses to bow to any man, even one as commanding as Serad. Sharing his cabin, Victoria can barely resist her overwhelming attraction for her captor. But if she gives in to her desires, Victoria knows Serad will accept nothing less than her total surrender. . .

A revelatory memoir about a young woman whose life was stolen when she was kidnapped in 1991 and remained an object of captivity for 18 years.

Proceeding from Hélène Cixous’s charge to “kill the false woman who is preventing the live one from breathing,” The Fix forges that woman’s reckoning with her violent past, with her sexuality, and with a future unmoored from the trappings of domestic life. These poems of lyric beauty and unflinching candor negotiate the terrain of contradictory desire—often to darkly comedic effect. In encounters with strangers in dive bars and on highway shoulders, and through ekphrastic engagement with visionaries like William Blake, José Clemente Orozco, and the Talking Heads, this book seeks the real beneath the dissembling surface. Here, nothing is fixed, but grace arrives by diving into the complicated past in order to find a way to live, now. “Woman Seated with Thighs Apart” Often I am permitted to return to this kitchen tipsy, pinned to the fridge, to the precise instant the kiss smashed in. When the jaws of night are grinding and the double bed is half asleep the snore beside me syncs to the traffic light, pulsing red, ragged up in the linen curtain. I leak such solicitous sighs to asphalt, slicked with black ice, high beams speed over my body whole while the drugstore weeps its remedy in strident neon throbs— I doubt I’ll make it out. It’s a cold country. It’s the sting of quarantine. It’s my own two hands working deep inside the sheets.

Poetry. California Interest. Latinx Studies. Winner of a 2020 American Book Award. HEART LIKE A WINDOW, MOUTH LIKE A CLIFF is a transgressive, yet surprisingly tender confrontation of what it means to want to flee the thing you need most. The speaker struggles through cultural assimilation and the pressure to act Mexican while dreaming of the privileges of whiteness. Borjas holds cultural traditions accountable for the gendered denial of Chicanas to individuate and love deeply without allowing one's love to consume the self. This is nothing new. This is colonization working through relationships within Chicanx families-how we learn love and perform it, how we filter it though alcohol abuse-how ultimately, we oppress the people we love most. This collection simultaneously reveres and destroys nostalgia, slips out of the story after a party where the reader can find God drunk and dreaming. Think golden oldiez meets the punk attitude of No Doubt. Think pochas sipping gin martinis in lowriders cruising down Who Gives a Fuck Boulevard.