Winner of the 2021 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry

National Jewish Book Award Finalist

"Maya Pindyck’s Impossible Belonging is a collection of elemental folklore conceived from the inside and outside of bodies and the yearnings that shape them. Diaspora is complicated by the Anthropocene in this prescient collection. Pindyck unpacks the stories we shake off to seek out our own paths as mothers, Americans, as artists, and sisters with urgency and hope. At the same time, Impossible Belonging honors those legacies through the tender utterances of these crystalline poems." — Carmen Giménez Smith

“You have to touch the fire of letters,” writes Maya Pindyck in a startling collection of poems where we are forced to not look away from the war of language and its gouged field of bodies, blood, blossoms, and ideas. Here is the memory of a self and her home, bleakly dissonant as a war-stained country … Impossible Belonging is defiant, immediate. Beyond geographies of war, love, and words, Pindyck commands the past, present, and future: “Remember our country/banning the book noting/our refusal to see./Remember this compass/mapping our last past.” — Rachel Eliza Griffiths

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“A Poetry Pedagogy for Teachers is part master class, part treasure trove. It does more than describe a set of practices; it immerses the readers in fresh ways of encountering, inhabiting, and attending to poems, while simultaneously offering ready-to-share mentor texts and prompts for writing. This is a beautiful, necessary book.” —Matthew Burgess

“It’s great to have a book about teaching poetry that goes beyond exercises and tricks. Poems are great ways of beginning conversations and they can be used in teaching situations to enable a wide range of artistic interpretation. This book will open doors for many teachers.” —Michael Rosen

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"In Henri Michaux's Land of the Magicians, the deepest wizadry is the sorcerer's power to 'remove the horizon.' Suddenly we're confronted with sheer experience, no prompts. Maya Pindyck's Emoticoncert has that breathtaking immediacy: the volatile gist of narrative, without the cues... Pindyck isn't a miniaturist: she's a gem cutter with huge themes. The concision, the cumulative force—these poems are musical in their fierceness: not akin to music, but music themselves." —D. Nurkse

"In Emoticoncert , Maya Pindyck writes of the conflicting emotional soundtracks that play continuously in all our minds. These honest, sonically dazzling poems pursue the music of human emotion, of the expressions we are taught to hold back and which appear in every family photograph." —Idra Novey

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Winner of the Many Voices Project Award

"Maya Pindyck's poems are intense and magical, but they don't achieve their effects by tricks of illusion or legerdemain. Instead, they stick steadfastly to the truth, and reveal in wonderfully clear and distinct language the strange, awesome magic at the heart of things." —Vijay Seshadri

"Maya Pindyck possesses such a keenness of eye, such a linguistic intelligence, that her poems charge the atmosphere with Technicolor vigor & straightforward revelation. These are relevant poems, & their beauty & strike shock me, like the first time I ever saw a cardinal." —Aracelis Girmay

"Sometimes (most times!) less is more and that is true of these spare yet richly imagined poems... Maya Pindyck's poems very often find exactly the right slant, the right channel, the right wire, the right hypodermic-- straight to the reader's heart!" —Thomas Lux

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"Maya Pindyck's poems are notable for their wonderful combination of being at once densely packed and voluminous, like parachutes. A descriptive facility is everywhere evident, in the 'two gray parrots with necks like birch back' ; in 'the pile on the chair/made an animal I can't forget," but is all the more powerful for its not being belabored. The combination of matter-of-fact and magic is reminiscent of William Carlos Williams... It's a pleasure, then, to welcome a poet who is capable of immediate power without the plodding one-dimensionality with which it is so often accompanied, of weight without the sense that one's somehow being burdened, of translucency without the sense that one can see right through it." —Paul Muldoon

out of print