Rifqa is Mohammed El-Kurd’s debut collection of poetry, written in the tradition of Ghassan Kanfani’s Palestinian Resistance Literature.

The book narrates the author’s own experience of dispossession in Sheikh Jarrah—an infamous neighborhood in Jerusalem, Palestine, whose population of refugees continues to live on the brink of homelessness at the hands of the Israeli government and US-based settler organizations.

Named after the author’s late grandmother who was forced to flee from Haifa upon the genocidal establishment of Israel, the book makes the observation that home takeovers and demolitions across historical Palestine are not reminiscent of the 1948 Nakba, but are in fact a continuation of it: a legalized, ideologically-driven practice of ethnic cleansing.

Les Chants de Maldoror is a remarkable work, noted for its macabre beauty and its status as one of the earliest examples of Surrealist writing. This long narrative prose poem passionately celebrates the principle of Evil in an elaborate style, akin to religious fanaticism.

The enigmatic author, Isidore Ducasse, who styled himself as Comte de Lautréamont, was born in Montevideo, Uruguay in 1846 and died in Paris at the young age of twenty-four. Upon its initial publication in 1868-9, Maldoror went largely unnoticed. However, it was later hailed as a work of genius by eminent writers such as Huysmans, Léon Bloy, Maeterlinck, and Rémy de Gourmont. The Paris Surrealists eventually canonized Lautréamont as one of their principal "ancestors."

This edition, translated by Guy Wernham, includes a long introduction to a never-written, or now lost, volume of poetry, thus providing almost all the surviving literary work of Lautréamont.

Selected Poems (1923) is a collection of poems by American poet Robert Frost. Dedicated to Edward Thomas, a friend of Frost’s and an important English poet who died toward the end of the First World War, Selected Poems is a wonderful sampling of poems from Frost’s early collections, including A Boy’s Will and North of Boston. Known for his plainspoken language and dedication to the images and rhythms of rural New England, Robert Frost is one of America’s most iconic poets, a voice to whom generations of readers have turned in search of beauty, music, and life.

“Mowing” envisions the poet’s work through the prism of rural labor. “There was never a sound beside the wood but one / And that was my long scythe whispering to the ground. / What was it it whispered?” The speaker does not know, but continues his task, hypnotized by its rhythm and simple music. In “After Apple-Picking,” as fall gives over to winter, the poet remembers in dreams how the “Magnified apples appear and disappear, / Stem end and blossom end” as he climbs the ladder into the heart of the tree. Both a symbol for life and a metaphor for the poetic act, apple picking leaves the poet “overtired / Of the great harvest [he himself] desired”, awaiting sleep as he describes “its coming on,” wondering what, if anything, it will bring.

“The Road Not Taken,” perhaps Frost’s most famous poem, is a meditation on fate and free will that follows a traveler in an autumn landscape, unsure of which path to take, but certain he cannot stand still. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Robert Frost’s Selected Poems is a classic of American literature reimagined for modern readers.