Fiction. Enigmatic and multi-layered, ISLANDERS is about finding one's own hard-won truth. A young man's indelible memories of the struggle to find intimacy—formative experiences like the ebb and flow of friendships, love, and ordinary workaday life—are viewed through a lens of nostalgic longing and hard-eyed realism as he attempts to come to terms with the past. Set during the cataclysm of the last years of the war in Vietnam, in a landscape that shifts between the bleak fishing towns of the Atlantic coast to the ruined cities of the Northeast, ISLANDERS explores the classic theme of identity's intricate relationship to place.

Author City: NEW YORK, NY USA

Ammiel Alcalay grew up in Boston and, as a child, spent time in Gloucester where family friends included Charles Olson and Vincent Ferrini. As a teenager, through the Grolier and Temple Bar Bookshops in Cambridge, he befriended many poets, including John Wieners. Poet, translator, critic, scholar and activist, he teaches at Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center. His books include SCRAPMETAL (Factory School, 2007); FROM THE WARRING FACTIONS (Beyond Baroque Press, 2002), a book-length poem dedicated to the Bosnian town of Srebrenica; MEMORIES OF OUR FUTURE: SELECTED ESSAYS (City Lights Publishers, 1999); After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture (University of Minnesota Press, 1993); and THE CAIRO NOTEBOOKS (Singing Horse Press, 1993). His translations include SARAJEVO BLUES (City Lights Publishers, 1998) and NINE ALEXANDRIAS (City Lights Publishers, 2003) by the Bosnian poet Semezdin Mehmedinovic, KEYS TO THE GARDEN: NEW ISRAELI WRITING (City Lights Publishers, 11996), and a co-translation (with Oz Shelach), of OUTCAST by Shimon Ballas (City Lights Publishers, 2007). A new book of essays, A Little History, and a collective translation of the Syrian poet Faraj Bayraqdar are forthcoming with Fred Dewey as editor. ISLANDERS, a novel, came out in 2010 (City Lights Publishers). His new selection of poetry, NEITHER WIT NOR GOLD, was published by Ugly Duckling Presse in 2011. Along with Anne Waldman and others, he was one of the initiators of the Poetry Is News Coalition, and organized, with Mike Kelleher and Fred Dewey, the OlsonNow project. Most recently, through the PhD Program in English and the Center for the Humanities at the CUNY Graduate Center, he initiated LOST & FOUND: THE CUNY POETICS DOCUMENT INITIATIVE, a series of student and guest edited archival texts emerging from the New American Poetry.