Katie Peterson, Department of English

In her new collection A Piece of Good News, Katie Peterson, English professor and head of the creative writing program, explores interior and exterior landscapes, exposure and shelter. The poems are powerful meditations of mourning, love, doubt, political citizenship and happiness. Peterson is the author of six collections of poetry, including the forthcoming Fog and Smoke (2024).

Katie Peterson, Department of English

A lyric fable, Life in a Field intersperses Katie Peterson’s slow-moving, cinematic, and sensual writing with three folios of photographs by Young Suh. Life in a Field tries to reverse our accelerating destruction of the natural world, reminding us of “the cold clarity we need to continue on this earth.”

Sandra McPherson, Department of English

The 5150 Poems is the 12th poetry collection by Sandra McPherson, professor emerita of English. The "5150" in the title refers to a section of California law which allows an adult who is experiencing a mental health crisis to be involuntarily detained for a 72-hour psychiatric hospitalization and was inspired by McPherson's experiences.

Margaret Ronda, Department of English

In her second poetry collection For Hunger, Associate Professor of English Margaret Ronda offers a fierce look at the interiors of motherhood, examining what it means to become a mother and lose a mother. Ronda joined the UC Davis faculty in 2014 after teaching in the Department of English at Rutgers University New Brunswick. She specializes in American poetry from the nineteenth century to the present.

Margaret Ronda, Department of English

Another collection by Margaret Ronda, Remainders: American Poetry at Nature’s End is a literary history of postwar American poetry and reflects on new dimensions of ecological crisis. These poems portray various forms of remainders that convey the ecological consequences of global economic development.

Margararet Ronda, Department of English

Personification undertakes dreamlike journeys through crumbling architecture and airless interiors, discovering anachronistic and apocalyptic emblems among the commonplace particulars of modern day life.

Andy Jones, University Writing Program

In the Almond Orchard: Coming Home from War represents the experiences of American veterans who have served overseas, and who are readjusting to life in the United States, especially California, after their service. With power and bravery, Continuing Lecturer Andy Jones speaks to the struggle of those who must hold within themselves two people, and exchange one life for another

Andy Jones, University Writing Program

Where's Jukie? uses poems by Continuing Lecturer Andy Jones and essays by Kate Duren to present the joys and challenges of raising their son Jukie, a boy with autism and Smith-Lemli-Opitz Syndrome. The authors of this book—the parents of three children, including Jukie—together have more than 50 years experience reading and communicating emotions with deft and wit, and counseling parents and children with special challenges.

Poems by Pos Moua, Foreward by Gary Snyder, Department of English

This open-hearted book is the gorgeous collection of a visionary Hmong poet whose radiant language and natural eloquence has offered us the dark and light of his soul. Moua’s poems sing that we will never satiate the sorrows of our dead and displaced, where grief, for the Hmong, knows no season. Here, we find ourselves nursed into strange health, contending always with decisions that may “dismember or consume” our people. It is a revelation that every person should read.

Cindy Juyoung Ok, Department of English

In the 118th volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets, Assistant Professor of English Cindy Juyoung Ok moves assuredly between spaces — from the psych ward to a prison cell, from divided countries to hospice wards. Ok’s resolute, energized debut shifts language’s fissures to reassemble them into a new place of belonging.

To celebrate 30 years of Eggheads, Bashaw wrote a poem inspired by the iconic statues.

Welcome to Books of the Month, where once a month, L&S staff select works from our Bookshelf of UC Davis authors. Our November 2024 selections are in honor of National Native American Heritage Month.