Book Description
Using long-lined, imaginative leaps to connect the everyday with the miraculous, the intimate with the visionary, Barbara Ras’s poems surge across the page like waves crashing on a beach. She crafts the forty-one new poems in this collection with a zany and spacious cunning that reaches from family to community, from what’s cherished to what’s lost, from culture to nature. ... Read more

Book Description
An anthology of poetry featuring established and upcoming poets, including Harry Brody, Lucille Clifton, Dionisio Martinez, Maude Meehan, Ruth Stone, Anna Rabinowitz, Martin Tucker and others. ... Read more

Book Description
Winner of the 1997 Walt Whitman Award of The Academy of American Poets, Given in Memory of Eric Mathieu King "This is a splendid book, morally serious, poetically authentic, spiritually discerning."-C. K. Williams, from his judge's citation for the 1997 Walt Whitman Award Barbara Ras, a poet exquisitely heedful of nuance both physical and visceral, cinches deserved renown with this prize-winning debut collection. Bite Every Sorrow invites the reader to embrace beauty, loss, outrage, and the world in all its particular heartbreaks and hilarities, because, as Ras asks, "What's life without the details?"Her ability to tap the ordinary and draw forth profundity is brilliantly displayed in "You Can't Have It All:" But you can have the fig tree and its fat leaves like clown hands gloved with green. You can have the touch of a single eleven-year-old finger on your cheek, waking you at one a.m. to say the hamster is back. You can have the purr of the cat and the soulful look of the black dog, the look that says, If I could I would bite every sorrow until it fledWhether honoring a dead friend or reveling in the lustful music of insects, Ras's poems poke into unlikely nooks and invented crannies, uncovering questions that matter to everyone-how to laugh, how to hope, how to love. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

"I used to dream souls, puffed up and sighing"
BITE EVERY SORROW is a multihued book full of both a strange sadness and the glowing wonder of laughter."If there are oceans to saddle/ if you could get there, catch the horse/ if you are holy, long enough/ the suger will be taken from your right hand." Ras writes.She provides the saddle, and if you are holy enough, it will certainly give you an exhilarating ride through the lush scenery of her soul.

wonderful!
Ras discribes everyday life as if it were all genuine feelings. Wonderful discriptive language that paints many bright colored pictures. ... Read more

Amazon.com
Costa Rica: A Traveler's Literary Companion has been compiled in an attempt to provide tourists with a different perspective on the country. Each of the twenty-six remarkable stories in this collection has been selected to reflect the geographical area in which it is set. (Though Costa Rica is only about half the size of Ireland, it is wonderfully diverse.) Story settings range from the high valleys of the central plateau to the flatlands of the Caribbean coast to the plains of Guanacaste. A typical guidebook will instruct visitors on the politics, history, culture, economy, and ethnicity of a country, but only fiction can portray its soul. After reading the stories contained in this literary companion, travelers to Costa Rica will no doubt view this Central American nation with whole new eyes.Book Description

Customer Reviews (5)

Visiting Costa Rica
A good read whenvisitingthe country. I enjoyed/understood the stories much more when I visited Costa Rica andtherefore the context in which they were written albeit that many of the stories were written in the earier part ofthe 20th century. Short stories were a good idea when travelling around

Open up the country.....
The two most invaluable books I read prior to vactioning in Costa Rica were this one, and a social history with magnificent photos called, "Costa Rica: The Last Country the Gods Made."

The funny thing is that they compliment each other almost exactly in their selection of the geographical areas in Costa Rica that they both choseto explore;so you can read the essay, "Travels from the Interior" in "Last Country" then read the corresponding short story set in the highlands of the central plateau in"Literary Companion"!

I read both books alternating back andforth like that....talk about opening up the country before your eyes!

A Fleeting Impression
BEFORE TRAVELLING overseas, I always try and read some literature from the places I'm visiting, so I certainly applaud the spirit of the "Traveler's Literary Companion" series. As there doesn't seem to be much in the way of Costa Rican literature available in translation, this anthology is invaluable. However, I'm afraid I didn't find it as illuminating as the reviewers below. While the idea of grouping the 26 short stories by geographical region sounds like a good idea, in practice, I didn't find regional differences embodied in the stories to be distinctive enough to warant such arrangement. Perhaps a better grouping would have been coastal, inland, mountainous, and urban, I'm not sure. Another possible reason I might not have found the selections very evocative is their length. There are 26 stories by 20 authors (six have two stories in the collection) over 220 pages, so one gets more a sense of vignettes with fleeting impressions than a solid sense of what the people or places are like. The one aspect that does appear in the many of the stories is the importance of nature in Costa Rica, both as a source of beauty and as something to struggle against.

Don't leave home without it
A fascinating variety of styles and topics. We especially enjoyed the way the stories are arranged, by region. Sleepy, pick a short story. If you wonder what it might be like to labor with a machete or to live in a small house in the jungle. If you want to know what it might be like to be theonly white girl, or the only brown boy. Read this. This book will changethe way you see the uniformed schoolchildren, the mysterious round rocks,the lizards... There is more to Costa Rica than identifying birds andeating mangoes.

¡Pura Vida! A Superb Insight into the Soul of Costa Rica
This small compilation of short stories was a priceless companion on my trip to Costa Rica. The philosophy of the "Traveler's Literary Companion" series is terrific: one of the best ways to reallyunderstand a country and its culture is through that country's literature.I highly recommend this book for anyone planning a trip to Costa Rica, orjust curious about this glorious and inviting place. ¡Pura Vida y Tuanis! ... Read more