In these powerful lyric poems, Idra Novey's exploration of "country" extends beyond national boundaries into the countries of marriage and family, history and the unspoken, leading to a bold and imaginative reckoning of the self with the larger world.

From "Into the Atacama":

When I said I wished this trip, I meant the rush of song
as we left the city. I meant the bus. I meant the woman who
played her flip-fl ops like drum sticks against the window.
For singing with strangers in a desert is like getting closer
to the moon. And the glow of a moment is like a moon,
caught behind clouds and then visible and then hidden again.

And when I said here, I meant elsewhere-I meant moving.

Idra Novey has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Poets & Writers Magazine, the Poetry Society of America Chapbook Series, and the PEN Translation Fund. Her poems have appeared in Slate, Paris Review, A Public Space, AGNI, Ploughshares, and in the anthology Poet in Your Pocket, forthcoming from the Academy of American Poets (Harry N. Abrams, 2008). In 2007, a book of her translations of Brazilian poet Paulo Henriques Britto, The Clean Shirt of It, was published in the Lannan Translation Series with BOA Editions. Her translations and reviews appear in a number of publications, including BOMB, Zoetrope, and The Believer.