Michael Bishop

Women's Poetry in France, 1965-1995 is the first bilingual anthology of modern French women poets yet published. Michael Bishop's translations are true to each of the twenty-eight distinctive voices in this volume. His translations thereby free the poems themselves to justify their place, not only in this bilingual volume but also in the realm of international poetry. This anthology could reshuffle canons, alter the international perception of French poetry, and bring pleasure to many individual readers.

It is 1982. The United States has a permanent Moonbase. Richard M. Nixon is in the fourth term of the "imperial presidency." And an eccentric novelist named Philip K. Dick has just died in California. Or has he? Psychiatrist Lia Pickford, M.D., is nonplussed when Dick walks into her office in small-town Georgia, with a cab idling outside, to ask for help. And Cal Pickford, a longtime Dick fan stunned by the news of his hero's death, is electrified when his wife tells him of the visit. So begins a sequence of events involving Cal in the repressive Nixon regime, the affairs of an aging movie queen, a hip but frightened Vietnamese immigrant and an old black man who works as a groom--all leading up to a fateful confrontation between Dick, Cal, and Nixon himself on the moon.

Unicorns roam the uplands of Libby Quarrels' mountain ranch. When Libby takes the AIDS-afflicted Bo Gavin out of exile in Atlanta to live with her in Colorado, she sees no connection between his disease and the fantastic secret she guards. But it so happens the unicorns suffer from an ugly, implacable plague of their own, and the parallel world that touches the high country has unleashed magic sinister as well as marvelous. While Libby's Indian ranch hand Sam is stalked by his wife's headless ghost, his estranged daughter has visions that propel her toward the grueling Sun Dance ritual, where an encounter with the spirit world may decide the fate of both the unicorns and the people whose lives they've touched.