Wave Books

The contents of the future are the contents of a cloud.So begins translator David Larsen?s introduction for the Book of Rain by ancient Arabic linguist and hadith narrator Abu Zayd Sa''id ibn Aws al-A? ri. While far from a definitive list, The Book of Rain is the earliest known catalogue of Arabic weather-words. In Larsen''s translation, Abu Zayd''s lexicography of rain is simultaneously an academic, archival, and poetic pursuit.These rich, extensive lists provide detailed descriptions of ?The Dribble,? ?The Discharge,? ?The Flat,? ?The Beetle-Brow,? and ?The Nebuline??all specific types of rain?as well as words for frosts, dews, thunder, lightning, clouds, and, of course, the various and plentiful words for waters. Coupled with Larsen?s introduction, The Book of Rain is a source of endless interdisciplinary inquiry which is sure to fascinate readers for years (if not centuries) to come.

Following her acclaimed Grief Sequence, Prageeta Sharma''s newest collection, Onement Won, is at once a contemplation and a sharp critique. Having been twice widowed to cancer, Sharma questions the various relationships—familial, social, romantic, religious—that have shaped her identity. Inspired by Barnett Newman''s Onement series as well as many texts including the Upanishads, The Bhagavad Gita, Goethe''s Faust, and Audre Lorde''s The Cancer Journals, these poems explore the concept of oneness in Hinduism, Abstract Expressionism, and selfhood in an attempt at “onement with lyric certainty,” a way through ideas of prosody to a clearer sense of what is needed in freedom, suffering, and art-making. The result is a stunning work that invokes ancient wisdom into an understanding of self-care that is fiercely anticolonial and anticapitalist, while holding space for suffering as a site of transformation for us individually and collectively.

Lisa Fishman’s latest collection, One Big Time, is a stunning articulation of the author’s “journey-in-place” in the environs around a one-room cabin in Northeastern Ontario over a period of fourteen days in quarantine.Here is the author at her most exacting and exploratory, in poems that hew with lyric precision to the immediate physical and geologic environment. At the same time, language is an alert, mobile life-form in active investigation of what one thinks one understands, and of where one thinks one is. While the poet quests daily for a passageway from one body of water into another, words live in other words (“the hemlock / is a he / today”), and acrostics are illuminations: s-w-i-m is “sleek widening instant’s magnet.” Surprised by joy, these biocentric poems offer a way of being in the world with wonder and rigor––attentive enough to be lost, unknowing enough to be changed.