Jorn Ake's new book of poems is Boys Whistling Like Canaries, winner of the 2008 Blue Lynx Prize; David Wojahn, who selected the book, says it's a "collection haunted by the grim history of the twentieth century and by how its legacy continues so troublesomely to endure "Ake recalls the work of two of our finest poets of social conscience, George Oppen and Thomas McGrath." Beginning as a painter, Ake won the X.J. Kennedy Poetry Prize for his first book of poems, Asleep in the Lightning Fields ; his second is The Circle Line.

Peter Dale Scott's newest book of poems is Mosaic Orpheus. A former Canadian diplomat, both a writer and a poet, Scott has received enormous acclaim for his poetic trilogy Coming to Jakarta, which Robert Hass has called "the most important political poem to appear in the English language in a very long time." James Laughlin said of it, "Not since Robert Duncan's Groundwork and before that William Carlos Williams' Paterson , has New Directions published a long poem as important as Peter Dale Scott's." A professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley and a former Canadian diplomat, he has also published a number of important nonfiction books, including The Iran-Contra Connection and Cocaine Politics.

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