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The\nspeaker of Stevenson’s poems grapples with uneasiness and isolation, even as\nshe endeavors to solve for these problems in her daily work. She attempts to\nharness control by eating clean, doing yoga, and searching for age-defying skin\ncare, though she dreams “about the department \/ that women get reassigned to\nafter they file \/ harassment complaints.” With sharp, lyrical intelligence, she\nimagines alternative realities where women exist not for the whims of men but\nfor their own—where they become literal skyscrapers, towering over a world that\nnever appreciated them.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eChilling and lucid, \u003ci\u003eHuman\nResources \u003c\/i\u003echallenges the minds programming our present and future to consider\nwhat serves the collective good. Something perhaps more thoughtful and human,\nStevenson writes: “I want to say \u003ci\u003ebetter\u003c\/i\u003e.”\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49743592947985,"sku":"NGR9781571315182","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51038399332625,"sku":"NIN9781571315182","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52341700395281,"sku":"NLS9781571315182","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":53117959405841,"sku":"CIN1571315187VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1571315187.jpg?v=1786442794"},{"product_id":"winter-stranger-book-jackson-holbert-9781639550418","title":"Winter Stranger","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eWinner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, Jackson Holbert’s \u003ci\u003eWinter Stranger\u003c\/i\u003e is a solemn record of addiction and the divided affections we hold for the landscapes that shape us.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn the cold, seminal countryside of eastern Washington, a boy puts a bullet through his skull in a high school parking lot. An uncle crushes oxycodone into “a thousand red granules.” Hawks wheel above a dark, indifferent river. “I left that town \/ forever,” Holbert writes, but its bruises appear everywhere, in dreams of violent men and small stars, the ghosts of friends and pills. These poems\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003eincite a complex emotional discourse on what it means \u003ci\u003eto leave\u003c\/i\u003e—if it’s ever actually possible, or if our roots only grow longer to accommodate the distance.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePunctuated by recollections of loved ones consumed by their addictions, \u003ci\u003eWinter Stranger\u003c\/i\u003e also questions the capricious nature of memory, and poetry’s power to tame it. “I can make it all sound so beautiful. \/ You’ll barely notice that underneath \/ this poem there is a body \/ decaying into the American ground.” Meanwhile, the precious realities vanish—“your hair, your ears, your hands.”—leaving behind “the fucked up \/ trees,” the “long, cold river.” In verse both bleak and wishful, Holbert strikes a fine balance between his poetic sensibilities and the endemic cynicism of modern life.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“It is clear now that there are no ends,” Holbert writes, “Just winters.” Though his poems bloom from hills heavy with springtime snow, his voice cuts through the cold, rich with dearly familiar longings: to not be alone, to honor our origins, to survive them.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eThe \u003ci\u003eWinter Stranger \u003c\/i\u003eaudiobook read by Jackson Holbert is available everywhere you listen to audiobooks. \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49744984506641,"sku":"NGR9781639550418","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49749056815377,"sku":"CIN1639550410G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50500332519697,"sku":"CIN1639550410VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50510964326673,"sku":"GOR013979096","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51042003386641,"sku":"NIN9781639550418","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52671916769553,"sku":"NLS9781639550418","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1639550410.jpg?v=1785933470"},{"product_id":"worldly-things-book-michael-kleber-diggs-9781639550753","title":"Worldly Things","description":"\"I am captivated, consoled, and bowled over by these poems, knifelike in their concision and oracular at their core.\" TRACY K. 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Two lines at a time, two vying souls \/ running up the wall.” The collection follows this speaker-poet through a childhood in post-Maoist China and an eventual move to the United States, laying bare cultural and linguistic tensions in both historical and modern settings. He cites Chinese laborers toiling in American factories—an echo of the brutalities endured by those who constructed the Transatlantic Railroad—and speaks to anxieties around belonging, assimilation, and identity. “If I forget one character a day,” he writes. “I will have forgotten Chinese \/ by the end of 2042.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn these attentive, imaginative poems, Weijia Pan questions the artist’s duty—his duty—as a chronicler of truth, especially through issues of displacement and global injustice. What can the poet do but observe? And yet, in unpacking ancestral traumas connected to Maoist China and modern-day bigotry exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, he still finds himself turning to art as a way to understand both the self and the world at large. Through elegant juxtapositions, Pan crafts an emotional world that is at once regional and universal—Li Bai and Du Fu sit alongside Glenn Gould and Sviatoslav Richter, pepper used to bless new roads is repurposed in the mace used against protesters, two languages compete on a single tongue. 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