Catalog

Ranging across a diverse contemporary society of night school courses and displaced “adult learners,” concrete apartment blocks full of exiles and poor economic migrants, to the Iraq War, Germany of the 1930s, Vilna of the 1920s, and medieval Girona, What Next, Old Knife? is a sobering encounter with class, culture, and history—personal and otherwise. Throughout this new collection of poems, David Axelrod struggles with how we learn and unlearn our humanity, imagining the ways in which individuals and whole societies live with and recover from moral catastrophe. The collection ends with a long choral poem, a visionary dialogue between the living and the dead who insist that language can resist nihilism, reclaim hope, and enact future accord.

“This book is intended for the reader and theater-goer who loves Shakespeare’s plays and enjoys contemplating them in their complexity: the richness of metaphorical language, the characters’ psychological depths and dimensions, the philosophical implications of the plays as organic dramatic entities that testify to the nature of human limitation and human freedom. I assume that…

Woman on the Cross is a novel that takes place near the end of the 18th century in a deforested Latin American country where the pre-Christian nature religion has been suppressed. The story tells of Sebastian Cristo Rey, the last actor in a family line of professional Christs who have made their living being crucified on…