Galleys available: national mailing to key review/media outlets 4-5 months prior to publication. National print campaign: 100 finished books will be mailed to key review outlets, specifically targeting Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, The New York Time Book Review, The New Yorker, Poets & Writers Magazine, The Rumpus, Huffington Post Poetry, The San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Times, etc. National advertising in Poets & Writers magazine, American Poets magazine, the Academy of American Poets newsletter, Rain Taxi, and Redactions. Fall announcements will be submitted to Publishers Weekly. Will pitch the book/translator for readings and events at regional bookstores, festivals, trade shows, etc. Online/social media campaign: Extensive promotion through BOA's website and blog; Facebook (6,300+ contacts), Twitter (5,500 followers), Instagram (1,200+ followers), and Pinterest (500+ followers) accounts; print and e-postcards; print and e-materials; and print and e-catalogs. Electronic postcards to announce book publication will be sent to academic contacts, bookstore contacts, and literary bloggers. Electronic newsletter feature will be emailed to BOA's database of 5,500+ contacts. Translator will attend the AWP Conference 2017 in Washington, DC, where she will have a book signing. Ebook will be available at the same time as print publication to maximize sales. Ebook ISBN will be included on all press materials, author and publisher websites, and whenever print ISBN is listed. Publisher and author will be promoting both e and p through social media. Latvian filmmaker and director Ivars Tontegode is currently shooting a biographical documentary feature, The Deviant/Nepareizais about the life of Knuts Skujenieks, "a poet who survived the Soviet prison camps and was later to become one of the most influential figures in Latvian society." The film follows Knuts Skujenieks’s life through interviews with him and memories of his peers, emphasizing his rebellious relationship with the Soviet regime, which later cost him a prison sentence in a labor camp. Director Tontegode uses Skujenieks as a role model for every individual as well as the Latvian nation as a whole. The film is being produced by Pomegrande Productions, and will premier in 2016.

This first US publication of Knuts Skujenieks—one of Latvia's foremost contemporary poets—is the author's most important and widely-translated body of work. Convicted in 1962 of anti-Soviet sentiment, Skujenieks wrote these poems during seven years of imprisonment at a labor camp in Mordovia. Vivid and expressive, this collection overcomes the physical experience of confinement in order to assert a limitless creative freedom.

A Love Poem

I would like clarity. To exclude
A relationship's tangled yarn.
Not a word.
Let reaction suffice.

So. Only so. And if the two of us
Are pitched alone against the world,
That we can instantly swing about
From face-to-face
And stand back to back.

Would that be too much?
But a poem cannot be written
If one awaits the bullet
From the back,
And not from the front.

Knuts Skujenieks was born in 1936 in Latvia, where he studied philology and history at the University of Latvia. In 1962, he was convicted of anti-Soviet activity and served a seven-year prison sentence in the Mordovia gulag. While there, he sent out many poems in letters to his wife, which were first published in 2002 as Sekla sniega (Seed in Snow). A polyglot, Skujenieks has translated into Latvian such poets as Lorca, Ritsos, Neruda, Vallejo, Galczinsky, and Tranströmer. He has received the highest literary and state honors in Latvia, as well as awards across Europe, including Sweden's Tomas Tranströmer prize, and his poetry has been translated into more than thirty languages. He currently lives in Salaspils, Latvia.