Poetry / poems by individual poets

Book SynopsisProfessor Lattimore, holding closely to the original metres, has produced renderings of great power and beauty. His feeling for the telling noun and verb, the simple yet poignant epithet, and the dramatic turn of syntax is marked. He has completely freed the poems from sentimentality, and the thrilling ancient namesAnacreon, Alcaeus, Simonides, Sapphoacquire fresh brilliance and vitality under his hand.Louise Bogan, The New YorkerThe significant quality of Mr. Lattimore's versions is that they are pure. The lenses he provides are as clear as our language is capable of making them.Moses Hadas, N.Y. Herald Tribune

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Book SynopsisFew people writing today could successfully combine an intimate knowledge of Chicago with a poet's eye, and capture what it's really like to live in this remarkable city. Embracing a striking variety of human experience a chance encounter with a veteran on Belmont Avenue, the grimy majesty of the downtown El tracks, domestic violence in a North Side brownstone, the wide-eyed wonder of new arrivals at O'Hare, and much more these new and selected poems and stories by Reginald Gibbons celebrate the heady mix of elation and despair that is city life. With Slow Trains Overhead, he has rendered a living portrait of Chicago as luminously detailed and powerful as those of Nelson Algren and Carl Sandburg. Gibbons takes the reader from museums and neighborhood life to tense proceedings in Juvenile Court, from comically noir-tinged scenes at a store on Clark Street to midnight immigrants at a gas station on Western Avenue, and from a child's piggybank to nature in urban spaces. For Gibbons, the city's people, places, and historical reverberations are a compelling human array of the everyday and the extraordinary, of poverty and beauty, of the experience of being one among many. Penned by one of its most prominent writers, Slow Trains Overhead evokes and commemorates human life in a great city.

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Book SynopsisA book about belief - not belief in the unknowable but belief in what seems bewilderingly plain. Pondering the bodies we inhabit, the words we speak, these poems aims to discover infinitude in the most familiar places.Trade Review"A sensibility this cogent, this subtle and austere is rare; even rarer is its proof that poetry still flows through all things and transforms all things in the process." - Carol Muske-Dukes, Los Angeles Times Book Review"

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Book SynopsisLucrezia Marinella (1571-1653) is, by all accounts, a phenomenon in early modernity: a woman who wrote and published in many genres, whose fame shone brightly within and outside her native Venice, and whose voice is original and reflective of her time and culture. This book tells the story of the conquest of Byzantium in the Fourth Crusade.

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Book SynopsisChiara Matraini was a member of the great flowering of poetic imitators and innovators in the Italian literary heritage begun by Petrarch. She excelled in a number of literary genres - poetry, religious meditation, discourse, and dialogue. This book is a collection of her erotic love poetry and poems on spiritual salvation.Trade Review"The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe series allows little-known women's voices to be heard, with translations of sixteenth- to eighteenth-century European texts. The approach is feminist, and each volume is prefaced with a historical account of the systematic oppression and frustration of women." - Maya Slater, Times Literary Supplement"

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Book SynopsisNow, from the sweet fragrance of roses, bitterness stings our nostrils. The bay's withdrawn from us, the beach is littered with broken things - splintered oars, bits of old clay pipe from a long ago shipwreck, fragments of china plates. Enchanting, those days my townspeople scavenged rare cargo, furnishing their long winters with random wares.Trade Review"In their subjectivity, the poems appeal to each reader's personality, as well as to his or her aesthetic expectations. Mazur's careful use of natural speech turns personal remembrances into crafted parables.... Extraordinary language is required in order to honor, accurately and lovingly, the ordinary - a notion already embodied in much of Gail Mazur's poetry." (Alexandra Yurkovsky, San Francisco Chronicle)"

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Book SynopsisA series of poems on the complexities of relationships between parents and children, the desires of the body and its frailties, the distinctions between memory and history, and the hope of art to recapture these seemingly inscrutable realities.

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Book SynopsisIncludes poems that sift layers of natural and human history across several continents, observing paintings, archaeological digs, cityscapes, seascapes, landscapes. Employing an impressive array of traditional meters and various kinds of free verse, this title celebrates communities both invented and real.Trade Review"Miller demonstrates that what Eliot said about reading a poem may be equally true of writing them: the best thing 'is to be very, very intelligent' and intelligence is not the same as erudition. Whether the world is made, found, or named, Miller offers an engaging portrait of things as they are." - Poetry "The Phoenix Poets list contains a number of poets currently on my list of favorites. This is a strong, vital series that has given voice to some of the best voices in American poetry today." - Billy Collins"

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Book SynopsisThese new poems of Howard Nemerov are the poems of a master at his best. What is more, they are accessible. They speak out in a beautiful unclouded voice of the experience of a flyer of the Second World War. Although as 'war poems' they take their place among the best of that genre, they resonate far beyond their history with an arresting immediacy.--Karl Shapiro

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Book SynopsisWe often ask ourselves what gets lost in translation--not just between languages, but in the everyday trade-offs between what we experience and what we are able to say about it. But the visionary poems of this collection invite us to consider: what is loss, in translation? Writing at the limits of language--where the signs loosen, fray, and drift--Alan Shapiro probes the startling complexity of how we confront absence and the ephemeral, the heartbreak of what once wasn't yet and now is no longer, of what (like racial prejudice and historical atrocity) is omnipresent and elusive. Through poems that are fine-grained and often quiet, Shapiro tells of subtle bereavements: a young boy is shamed for the first time for looking girly; an ailing old man struggles to visit his wife in a nursing home; or a woman dying of cancer watches her friends enjoy themselves in her absence. Throughout, this collection traverses rather than condemns the imperfect language of loss--moving against the current

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Book SynopsisA collection that carries the poet's themes of family and friends, responsibility to the natural world of evolved diversity, the transience of life, the fragility of happiness, and the consolations offered by art and music.Trade Review"Pack's poems may be characterized as exhibiting eloquent pathos, and they show a mature, deeply seasoned courage to surmount suffering in their exaltation of the common life. Laughter Before Sleep returns Pack to Frost's hard wisdom of stoic endurance and to the music of that endurance: a somber joy." (Harold Bloom)"

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Book SynopsisA collection of poems, which draw inspiration from sources as whimsical as snails and frogs, as poignant as a homeless woman taking shelter inside a post office on a winter's night, and as deeply personal as the poets own diagnosis of cancer at a young age.Trade Review"Partridge is a technical wizard for whom thinking and feeling are not separate activities. She is a hawk-like observer of the particular... many times ascending to pitch-perfect verse." - Ken Babstock, Globe and Mail"

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Book SynopsisRanging from lyricism to street slang, these poems are written on the theme of doubling, simulation, impersonation and mimicry. Together, they provide a vision of urban life.

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Book SynopsisFrom the Baltimore Catechism to the great noir films of the last century to today's Elvis impersonators and Paris Hilton, this book tracks the snares, abrasions, and hijinks of personal identities in our society of the spectacle, a place where who we say we are, and who we think we are, fade in and out of consciousness.Trade Review"The poems in this collection are as striking for their language, which reveals a subtle rhetorical intelligence, as for their dramas, which exist in an atmosphere charged with violence. Polito handles his volatile material with an almost ritual caution: an instinct for structure and symmetry guides his descent into the underworld of adulterous betrayal and psychic exposure." - New Yorker"

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Book SynopsisThis sophisticated first collection by Jim Powell synthesizes personal and world history to produce a compelling vision of the past, through verse letters to friends and relatives, translations of Horace, Propertius, Sappho, and others, and allusions to ancient figures of history and mythology. I find it difficult to overpraise the ease of this writing, which in one act combines succinct physical presentation and explanation of it. . . . It is perhaps here that Jim Powell, not yet forty, most shows his superiority to many of his contemporaries and seniors. He not only understands the way in which opposites are necessary to one another, he achieves his knowledge in the poem, and so we grasp it as we read.. . .he has tapped a subject matter that is endless and important, and by the thoroughgoingness and the subtlety of his exploration shows he has the power to do almost anything.Thom Gunn, Shelf LifeHis title burns away everywhere in the volume, in the fevers of eros, divination, memor

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Book SynopsisTrade Review"'The restaurant in Beijing called Bitterness / and Happiness has two menus, ' recalls the insatiable speaker of this bountiful debut. Combining a novelist's narrative command with a poet's faith in the mystical felicities of rhyme, DeWoskin chronicles a life lived in voracious pursuit of all aspects of earthly experience. Whether rock climbing in China, river rafting in California, nursing her child, grieving another's child, visiting a family member in prison, or a dying friend in the hospital, she savors the living pith of each passing moment, and transmutes it into nourishing song. 'Here's how / we stay human even torched by sorrow, ' she writes, singing down mortal dread. 'Spackled, rageful, wracked, we sparkle.'"--Suzanne Bauffam, author of A Pillow Book "DeWoskin's spectacular debut Two Menus offers us a lyrical banquet of tempting contradiction. In the title poem, we learn of "[t]he restaurant in Beijing called Bitterness / and Happiness", which has "two menus: the first of excess, / second, scarcity." Through DeWoskin's own uncanny language, both larger-than-life and daringly precise, we read to rediscover the boundaries that both divide and join our worlds: us/them, love/disgust, safety/danger, sanity/madness, language/silence. How can one life be expected to take in all that there is before us? How can it all make sense? And yet, with lucid description, and with abiding love and wit, each poem in this audacious book asks for more--even when it hurts."--Frederick Speers, author of So Far Afield "Smart, fierce and formally brilliant, the poems in Two Menus are wonderfully energetic and alive. Spinning between love and loss, childhood and womanhood, Chinese and English, DeWoskin creates a blaze of language that stuns with precision, wisdom and joy."--Kirun Kapur, author of Visiting Indira Gandhi's Palmist "DeWoskin takes us from grief to romance in Two Menus, a debut of stunning clarity and formal dexterity. The subtleties of this book are balanced by the world each poem means to hold. DeWoskin is a poet of things, of the image, and of the narratives that attention to image allows. This is a beautiful book."--Jericho Brown, author of The Tradition

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Book SynopsisRevealing a world troubled by difference while struggling toward commonality, from the mythic past to the abrasive intimacies of the present, this collection of poems charts the ways social and sexual identities are formed, threatened, altered and preserved.

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Book SynopsisIn The Chain, Sleigh explores the nature of memory and its ability to recast events in contradictory ways as it links individual lives to history. The book takes the form of a series of elegies, portraits and love poems.

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Book SynopsisThis work is a collection of American love poems. It is a personal collection that places the reader both inside and outside the poet's life. Filtering personal experiences through improvisatory structures, Smith communicates the want, the lack and the desire for what is missing.

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Book SynopsisFrom Tuscaloosa west to Mississippi then north to Memphis through country as unmusical as I was unloved by the decorous ardor of the South and the voice of one whose griefs were Cherokee, absentee, left in the Chevy and secret. She didn't love my love like Shiva's everywhere and blue and many-handed, some with knives and some with billet-doux.Trade Review"The lines - sometimes single but usually paired - fold into each other like the parts of an origami bird and, like the bird, resist being opened. After all, when you unfold the bird you're left with a plain piece of paper. Meaning, elegance, pleasure - everything is in the folding." (F. D. Reeve, Antioch Review)"

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Book SynopsisRanging among traditional, open, and newly invented forms, and including a series of free translations of medieval dream visions and love poems, this title begins as a historical meditation on our fall and grows into a song of praise for the green and turning world.Trade Review"What we cannot fail to hear, in Red Rover, is a wise and troubled lullaby for what may yet prove to be the infancy of our species." (Nation) "Her strenuous devotion to the life of the mind doesn't stop her from finding artful ways of giving the call of the wild its due with incantatory conviction." (Boston Globe)"

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Book SynopsisA cross-genre poetry collection that troubles the idea of poetic voice while considering history, biology, the shamanistic, and the shapes of racial memory. In the final section of Negro Mountain, C. S. Giscombe writes, Negro Mountainthe summit of which is the highest point in Pennsylvaniais a default, a way among others to think about the Commonwealth. Named for an incident in which a Black man was killed while fighting on the side of white enslavers against Indigenous peoples in the eighteenth century, this mountain has a shadow presence throughout this collection; it appears, often indirectly, in accounts of visions, reimaginings of geography, testimonies about the natural world, and speculations and observations about race, sexuality, and monstrosity. These poems address location, but Giscombewho worked for ten years in central Pennsylvaniaunderstands location to be a practice, the continual action of situating. The book weaves through the ranges of thinking that poetic voice Trade Review"These poems have a bardish musicality that reminds me of Nathaniel Mackey: 'there was statuary, there was / a mild nausea which, dreaming, / I’d mistaken for evil, and / also a jaguar.' Later pieces are more like essays, a combination of poetic elision and more prosaic rhetoric, block quotes and citations, gestures like 'as noted above.' The sections all comment and expand on one another, a multivocal text interrupting itself ('The mountain intervenes') with sudden shifts that unsettle and destabilize—small landslides. . . . I found it dazzling." * New York Times, on "The Best Poetry of 2023" *"[Giscombe's] journey is captivating, sardonic, entertainingly digressive, and luminous with thought, whether stopping to ponder the Black figure in Rousseau’s painting Jaguar Attacking a Negro or spinning dream tales where he becomes a white man or 'a woman in a prison camp.' . . . The lithe veracity of his writing, it turns out, is a testament to freedom—not the 'white freedom' that he imagines in a dream, but the harder-earned cognitive liberty that comes from confronting the mystery of the journey: 'Travel’s enigmatic and we don’t have to go to Negro Mountain to see that.'" * LitHub *"Through Giscombe, history speaks as a living, ongoing thread, one that attempts to work and rework bearings across an enormous sense of distance, both temporal and physical. There are dangerous shapes in those hills, some of which still work to reveal themselves, enough to cause any traveler to, through the finding, discover themselves lost." * rob mclennan's blog *"As a poet, Giscombe is in search of big game and proceeds with due caution and foresight. He often holds us at arm’s length, interposing himself, his dreaming consciousness, and his memories between reader and subject. . . . the meaning of these dully glinting utterances in Negro Mountain may be bottomless, but Giscombe is a poet who rewards patience with cunningly mapped detours through our dislocated continent." * Rain Taxi *“Negro Mountain traces realms of consciousness and recollection involving its namesake and presence. The weathered trail crosses thermals and paths of apexes. Buteos, maybe monsters, ever wolves and bears, dusky figures cool in the mountainside shadow of poetic accounts. Giscombe’s cadence is a ‘mountain sense’ and a methodology—a profoundly gifted range of practices surfacing love and affinity while navigating what is measureless.” -- Cecily Nicholson, author of "Harrowings"“Negro Mountain reveals the rich layers exposed between excavating time, history, and visibility. Giscombe’s rigorously brilliant and careful book unveils its complex strata through dreams, history, and collective psyche, presenting the precarious condition of human engagement across histories of enslavement and freedom.” -- Ronaldo V. Wilson, author of "Carmelina: Figures"“In Negro Mountain, horizontality gets its comeuppance in verticality, from the bottomless abyss of nightmarish dreams to mountains shrouded in lore and myth. In the dreamscapes of these poems, survival depends on both ‘Negro luck’ and a knack for being a bit ‘country.’ A wolf (or coyote) in sheep’s clothing, the fool on the hill is s/he who exposes ‘the story’s / sham,’ that ‘tiresome trope’ of captivity or freedom, criminality or servitude, violence or resignation. Negro Mountain turns the tables on the sacrosanct.” -- Tyrone Williams, author of "As iZ"“Haunted by the memory of a ‘colossal’ Black man who died on Negro Mountain, Giscombe’s text returns to the eponymous landmark of an obscure historical figure. Giscombe’s itinerant poetic speakers, in their restless incarnations, have mapped territories, ridden the rails, and followed foxes. In Negro Mountain, they walk with wolves, crossing boundaries, escaping enclosure, always shape-shifting as they guide the reader through passages where the self is also the mythic other.” -- Harryette Mullen, author of Urban Tumbleweed“A transtemporal cartography of a decidedly complex site, where ‘the devil’s in the long, long song,’ Negro Mountain rises powerfully out of the craggy terrain of race, history, and nomenclature. Dreams, locales, and a multiplicity of voices are here whispered, haunted, recorded, revealed. Poetry as dusk and interstice, prose as lucid, sinuous amalgamation: ‘The wolf is the thought.’” -- Sawako Nakayasu, author of Pink WavesTable of ContentsSeven Dreams The Negro Mountains Camptown Overlapping Apexes (for Ed Roberson) Notes on Region Acknowledgments Sources

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Book SynopsisFrom nursery rhymes to riddles to prose poems, this collection intertwines the literary and the personal, the elevated and the slang, and the sacred and the profane.

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Book SynopsisSong for Thom GunnThere is no east or westin the wood you fear and seek,stumbling past a gate of mossand what you would not take. And what you thought you had(the Here that is no rest)you make from it an aidto form no east, no west. No east. No west. No needfor given map or bell,vehicle, screen, or speed. Forget the house, forget the hill. Taking its title from a set of writings found in the Dead Sea Scrolls, From the Book of Giants retunes the signal broadcast from these ancient fragments, transmitting a new sound in the shape of a Roman drain cover, in imitations of Dante and Martial, in the voice of a cricket and the hard-boiled American photographer Weegee, in elegies both public and personal, and in poems that range from the social speech of letters to the gnomic language of riddles. Out of poetry's complex of complaint and praise, Joshua Weiner discovers, in one poem, his own complicity in Empire during his son's baseball game at the White House. In another, an embroidere

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Book SynopsisAlan Williamson artfully joins social and literary history with personal experience in The Pattern More Complicated, a collection of his very best poems over the last twenty years. A powerful section of new poems draws the whole work together in a kind of autobiographical novel, asin Eliot's phrase, from which the title is takenthe pattern of dead and living grows more complicated with the years. Williamson's verse is a refreshing examples of how delicately the personal can intersect with the public in a love for the considered life. The Pattern More Complicated assembles Williamson's most important, representative poems, marking the trajectory of poetic development and the recurrence of themes across the span of four previous collections to present a survey of a major American poet in a single volume.

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Book SynopsisWinner of the 2005 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. The long-awaited follow-up to The Key to the Citya finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1986Anne Winters's The Displaced of Capital emanates a quiet and authoritative passion for social justice, embodying the voice of a subtle, sophisticated conscience. The displaced in the book's title refers to the poor, the homeless, and the disenfranchised who populate New York, the city that serves at once as gritty backdrop, city of dreams, and urban nightmare. Winters also addresses the culturally, ethnically, and emotionally excluded and, in these politically sensitive poems, writes without sentimentality of a cityscape of tenements and immigrants, offering her poetry as a testament to the lives of have-nots. In the central poem, Winters witnesses the relationship between two women of disparate social classes whose friendship represents the poet's political convictions. With poems both powerful and musical, The Displaced of

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Book SynopsisThe notion of the disposable camera permeates the entire book, where the author considers the instabilities in even our deepest attachments. Here gulfs expand, for instance, between twins, between the musician and his instrument, between the recluse and his inconsolable solitude.Trade Review"Janet Foxman's Disposable Camera is a brilliant book of great freshness and great originality. It is an exhilarating book, one that keeps the reader off balance about its ambitions and procedures." (Frank Bidart)"

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Book Synopsisthe body / knows what / it truly / wants yet / the mind / wavers allIn Edward Carson's provocative new work, the poetic moving parts of movingparts confront and breathe new life into what's true and what's not in Aesop's fable The Fox and the Crow, as well as the shifting, often fragmentary ground between what's said and what's not about identity and intimacy in Sappho's lyrics.Reflecting the moment-to-moment ways our minds think, these poems take us from a creative process of disconnection and reassembly to a sonic pacing of words arising out of their stillness on the page. A flair for syntactical compression is found throughout, balanced by a capricious yet transforming diction, what John Ashbery described as seeking to stretch the bond between language and communication. Calling witness to the narratives of history while pivoting their reach forward to the present, the rhythms, allusions, and resulting outcomes of Carson's use of language expand both narrative Trade Review“I have a weakness for beast fable, so the first part of movingparts, cunningly engaged with Aesop’s The Fox and the Crow, was a delight to me. Removing the moral, while keeping the story both ethically and existentially charged in a brisk series of prose poems brings this ancient material newly to life. Staying Greek, the latter two parts are engaged with the literary monument that is Sappho, and what she has meant, in particular, to English translators, especially Anne Carson, rather a monument herself. Sappho’s notorious aporia provides Edward Carson with room to speculate both on how difficult it is to translate desire into language, and further, how the act of translation dually reifies and destabilizes a famous poet’s work. His poems warily circle literary monoliths, and from time to time blow right through them, suddenly rendering their substance into breath.” Sarah Tolmie, author of The Art of Dying, Trio, and Check“Edward Carson’s movingparts engages the primordial subject of deception and truth, ‘mapping it onto’ appearance and reality, so that the either/or can also appear as both/and. For reality appears in appearance, as Carson progressively realizes – makes real – in three suites of poems that nervously explore the ambiguities of language and the unwarranted arrogance of intellect, only to arrive at the healing awareness that the word is at bottom ‘a body / of tectonic / mingle.’ There we can ‘see more where nothing seems to be / each poem setting free all that is missing.’ In one of the volume’s finest poems, set at its centre, entitled – after James Joyce – ‘the bit of seedcake out of my mouth,’ Carson finds that the true word, in the poem and elsewhere, is ‘a sub rosa / of paradise / snared from a wider silence.’ The truthful words have ‘escaped free as a bird’ from the ‘lolling addiction to hoodwink’ in the deserts of theory and politics. And even in that desert itself there are words with substance and more-than-substance, words ready to be ‘startled into / life like / detonations of thought,’ such that we can again ‘begin to / realize what / is happening.’” A.F. Moritz“Edward Carson’s movingparts is truly ‘a temple of dapple in a tempest of cause.’ His preoccupation with how our minds work – how they are sparked by desire and emotion – treats us to urgent explorations, like his meditation on Aesop’s fable of the fox and the crow. Carson turns that encounter over and over in his hands to create a brilliant sixteen-faceted jewel, each surface polished by investigation, analysis, and poetic wit. He then presents fourteen sonnets that are ‘detonated’ by lines from other poets, and that meld desire memory anatomy. And, finally, with exquisite control of his craft, Carson walks with Sappho through the terrain of the erotic, discussing ‘the physics of craving.’” Maureen Hynes, author of Sotto Voce“Read each poem here aloud, they are riffs on myth and fable, they are koans, they are parables. Edward Carson’s poems in movingparts move between what is or has been already said and what lies under the surface to be spoken. These poems are feminist. They are playful. His fox and crow poems, based on Aesop’s fable, are jazzy riffs on wonder. The tight boxes of one section fall away to short lines and then to long-lined couplets, no punctuation so language is fluid as instinct and gesture.” Yvonne Blomer, author of The Last Show on Earth: Poems“Edward Carson’s movingparts weaves in and out of conceptual and material realms, deftly combining crow talk, particle physics, philosophy, and erotica, in the restless search for hints and foreshadowing of paradise. Can we imagine it? Can we get there? This poet wagers his soul on the hope and wonder of it, however far off, however thinly glimpsed – a satisfying tour guide through the conceptual and experiential mazes of the contemporary moment.” Di Brandt, author of The Sweetest Dance on Earth: New and Selected Poems“In movingparts, Edward Carson has created a rare thing: a book of poetry with dramatic sensibility! His poems each form individual parts of a literally moving narrative that stylistically drift within themselves via parataxis. When the poems eventually meditate upon their own mimesis while still extending the narrative and maintaining dramatic tension, one realizes that this is a special book.” Shane Neilson, author of You May Not Take the Sad and Angry Consolations“Carson has created a beautiful collection of riffs and reveries. movingparts is freeing to read – an effortless display of approaching opaque, distant, and even difficult art with warmth.” Quill & Quire

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Book SynopsisThese poems are inquisitive, desiring to evade the grasp of the normative, as endured by those institutionalized by, and through, the concept of normalcy. act normal invites readers to re-orient from the normative task of assuming the safety of consensual interpretation, while risking, cherishing, and performing non-indifference.Trade Review“act normal sings and bends. Hears and sees. It seizes the language by which the disabled have been represented and re-presents them beyond ‘the grasp of the normative as endured by [the] institutionalized.’ It calls to account. It tells and remembers, celebrates and witnesses with invention, beauty, rage, and insight. ‘Do not say that you did not know … you have been told.’ These are words that surge over the unspeakable to create poems about what needs to be said. ‘We needs that caress.’” Gary Barwin“‘The institution’s not a metaphor,’ writes davis halifax, who with foreslashed refusal (of ableism \ normopathy \ collusion \ eugenics), invites lyrical insurrections that might ‘fringe the day wider.’ We need wide days, my friends – days that can hold each story, each body, each ‘wordflower’ that wilds its blossom through the hard days of history. This is a book for ‘the disregarded and guarded,’ for those who have ‘lived loss.’ This is a book that resonates in places where you might find ‘the outlines of memories child shaped.’ This is a book for them, for us, for all those who continue to offer ‘exceptions[s] to the natural order.’ In this remarkable book, legacy and language conspire to ‘f e c u n d d e g e n e r a t e’ crisp futures that can love us all.” Chris Martin“In this unflinching, brutally beautiful collection, davis halifax gives agency and voice to those who could not speak their own truth. These poems are an act of witness, at once tender and yearning, vulnerable and raging. There is an urgency to document ‘the heat before the fire is lit / the ache of the shovel before diggin’,’ to capture the abused and neglected in the strokes of letters because ‘by 2050 the books of memory will’ve been picked clean.’” Lillian Nećakov

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Book SynopsisIn the literary and artistic milieu of early modern Japan the Chinese and Japanese arts flourished side by side. Kodojin, the Old Taoist (1865-1944), was the last of these great poet-painters in Japan. This book brings together 150 of Kodojin's Chinese poems (introduced and translated by Jonathan Chaves).Trade Review"The story of Addiss's patient unearthing of this unusual life and work, very nearly lost to history, itself makes a gripping narrative, and is a triumph of modern scholarship." - David Pollack, University of Rochester "This richly informative volume bring the reclusive painter-poet to life." - Karen M. Gerhart, Northern Arizona UniversityTable of ContentsPreface and Acknowledgments 1. Kodojin's Life and Art 2. Kodojin's Japanese Poetry 3. Kodojin and the T'ao Ch'ien Tradition in Kanshi Poetry, by Jonathan Chaves 4. Kodojin's Chinese Poetry, translated by Jonathan Chaves 5. A Note on Kodojin and the Art and Literature of His Period, by J. Thomas Rimer Epilogue Notes Index

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Book SynopsisThis neglected Greek satire is now available in English. Basing their translation on two critical editions of the 14th-century anonymous poem, Nicholas and Baloglou reveal the full texture of this unique genre of the Byzantine period. The authors provide analysis on form, style and context.Trade ReviewNicholas and Baloglou have here produced a thorough study of a 14th-century 'popular' Byzantine poem concerning an assembly of herbivores and carnivores at the behest of King Lion... Reproductions of the drawings from the one illustrated manuscript of the tale are provided, along with textual notes, six appendixes, an extensive bibliography, and an index of Greek words... Clearly a labor of love. Choice The interest of this work is the insights it provides into various aspects of the life of the time...The introduction and commentary to the translation are both substantial and extensively researched, and would be a great resource for someone wishing to follow up any of these areas... a good read for those interested in the popular culture and daily life of the Eastern Roman Empire. Medieval History Both authors have a vision and an unequivocal perspective, which they have followed from the first page to the last: bringing a modern interested reader close to a mediaeval poem. They do this with a breath of fresh air, which blows away the traditional philologists' dust. -- Hans Eideneier Byzantinische Zeitschrift An Entertaining Tale of Quadrupeds definitely belongs in university libraries and could be used as a textbook in courses on Byzantine Greek literature and late medieval writing in general--in spite of a certain repetitiousness. Fifteenth Century Studies

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Book SynopsisTrade Reviewoffers readers a chance to explore the evolution of this form. Inquiring Minds An erudite, beautifully translated, and accessible source on this form of Japanese poetry that deserves more attention from Anglophone readers. -- Cheryl Crowley Journal of Japanese StudiesTable of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction The Poems The Nun Abutsu Musho Zenna Reizei Tamesuke Muso Soseki Junkaku Gusai Nijo Yoshimoto Shua Soa Asayama Bonto Mitsuhiro Fushiminomiya Sadafusa Chiun Takayama Sozei Gyojo Noa Shinkei Senjun Sugiwara Soi Sogi Hino Tomiko Emperor Go-Tsuchimikado Ouchi Masahiro Inko Shohaku Sakurai Motosuke Socho Inawashiro Kensai Sanjonishi Sanetaka Soseki Reizei Tamekazu Tani Soboku Shukei Soyo Arakida Moritake Shokyu Ikkado Joa Sanjonishi Kin'eda Miyoshi Chokei Satomura Joha Satomura Shoshitsu Oka Kosetsu Hosokawa Yusai Satomura Genjo Matsudaira Ietada Shotaku Nishinoto'in Tokiyoshi Matsunaga Teitoku Wife of Mitsusada Miura Tamenori Nishiyama Soin Nojun Konishi Raizan Matsuo Basho Bibliography

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Book SynopsisTraces the proliferation of formally experimental poetry to a growing fascination with allegory in philosophy, linguistics, critical theory, and aesthetics.Trade ReviewInfectiously interesting, Poetic Machinations is useful both as a survey of critical claims for allegory and as a practical guide for reading the challenges of contemporary poetry. -- Bob Perelman, University of Pennsylvania Clark Coolidge's photographic meta-process, Lyn Hejinian's alphabet, Susan Howe's Peirce, what Lorine Niedecker learned from Surrealism, what language writers learned from Czech and Russian Formalism, what Craig Dworkin learned from everyone-- Golston's provocative, ambitious, learned, and useful study unifies these discoveries under the banner of allegory, a term capacious enough to include many ways that Golston's challenging present-day writers highlight the invention, the arbitrariness, and yet the continuing meaningfulness, of their estranged, and yet explicable, forms. If you care for those writers-- and I do-- you will be glad you read Golston's book. -- Stephen Burt, Harvard University, author of Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry Poetic Machinations demonstrates that, from 1930s Objectivism to 2010s Conceptualism, poets have written allegorically, that is, taken metaphors--writing as photography, history as assembly line, colonial politics as printing press--and turned them into 'systematic procedures for formal composition.' Golston reassesses marquee names such as John Ashbery, Lyn Hejinian, Susan Howe, and Myung Mi Kim, and he excels when analyzing 'formally extreme' poetry by Clark Coolidge and P. Inman. He twists the kaleidoscope and, suddenly, much writing that seemed illegible becomes pellucid. -- Brian Reed, University of WashingtonTable of ContentsPolemical Preface Acknowledgments Introduction: Etymologies, 1980-the Allegorical Moment 1. Entomologies: Louis Zukofsky and Lorine Niedecker 2. Epistemologies: Clark Coolidge 3. A=L=L=E=G=O=R=I=E=S: Peter Inman, Myung Mi Kim, Lyn Hejinian 4. Semiologies: Susan Howe 5. Fictocritical Postlude: The Melancholy of Conceptualism Notes Works Cited Index

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Book SynopsisTrade ReviewIn his Translator's Afterword, Heinz Insu Fenkl describes his astonishing encounter with the poems in this collection-from dream encounter with the poet, to the poems, then the poet himself. Extraordinary workings of the three-line sijo form into the spaces of Zen practice, the poems call us to see! -- David McCann, Harvard University Reading these translations of Cho Oh-hyun's Zen sijo is like shining a light on a carefully cut, many-faceted stone. The poems are concentrated, understated, and effortlessly colloquial, both immediately accessible and, paradoxically, mysterious. The Zen nature of the poems' inquiries and observations-with their allusiveness and open-endedness-bear up under many readings, defying prized Western rationality and yielding a surprisingly rich range of tones, moods, and insights. -- Elizabeth Spires, poet and author of The Wave-Maker and Now the Green Blade Rises [Cho Oh-Hyun] has created a new tradition of Korean sijo poetry. -- Choi Yearn-hong The Korea Times While some of the poems embrace the kind of open-ended imagery commonly associated with Buddhist poetry, Cho innovates in this volume with narrative techniques that engage the senses and the imagination. World Literature TodayTable of ContentsContents Preface Introduction, by Kwon Youngmin Bitter Flower Daydream Distant Holy Man Elm Tree & Moon Desire, Deeper than the Marrow What I've Always Said The Sound of Ancient Wood The Dance & the Pattern Spring Musan's Ten Bulls 1. Searching for the Bull 2. Finding the Footprints 3. Seeing the Bull 4. Catching the Bull 5. Taming the Bull 6. Riding the Bull Home 7. The Bull Transcended 8. Both Bull & Self Transcended 9. Reaching the Source 10. Return to Society Regarding My Penmanship Weekend Scrawl Wild Foxes Hoarse Speaking Without Speaking 1 Speaking Without Speaking 2 Speaking Without Speaking 3 Speaking Without Speaking 4 Speaking Without Speaking 5 Speaking Without Speaking 6 Waves What the Northeast Wind Said 1 What the Northeast Wind Said 2 What The Southeast Wind Said Ancient Rules for Everyman 3. Amdu-Drowned Man 4. Joju's Great Death 11. Gaesa Entering the Bath 13. Chuimi's Zen Gong Buddha Children of Namsan Valley Walking in Place The Path of Love At the Razor's Edge Crime & Punishment Today's Beaming The Way to Gyerimsa Temple Jikjisa Temple Travel Diary 1. The Way Forward 2. Not Two Gates 3. Sitting Buddha 4. Blue Crane-Zen Master Yeongheo 5. Stone Lamp 6. Cold Lamp-Master White Water 7. Mind Moon Tales from the Temple 2. The Seagulls & the East Sea 3. Two Squirrels 16. The Cry of Wild Ducks 25. The Otter & the Hunter 29. The Green Frog The Way to Biseul Mountain 2007-Seoul at Noon 2007-Seoul at Night Wild Ducks & Shadow Winter Mountain Beasts A Day at Old Fragrance Hall Bodhidharma 1 Bodhidharma 2 Bodhidharma 3 Bodhidharma 4 Bodhidharma 5 Bodhidharma 6 Bodhidharma 7 Bodhidharma 8 Bodhidharma 9 Bodhidharma 10 Sunset, Bay of Incheon The Sea Words of a Boatman Moments I Wished Would Linger You and I: Our Outcry You and I: Our Lamentation Siblings When the Dawn Comes Down A Fistful of Ashes Holding on to a Finger When the Thunder God Came to My Body Opening the Mountain-Side Window Proximation Sun & Moon Arising, Passing, Attachment The Wind that Once Wept in the Pine Grove Gwanseum This Body of Mine The Day I Try Dying As I Look Upon Myself Waning Landscape At the Tomb of King Seondeok Forest New Shoots Early Spring Three Views of Spring The Sound of My Own Cry All the Same at Journey's End Scarecrow Days Living on the Mountain Vapors My Lifelines Embers (Afterword) Translator's Afterword Acknowledgments

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Book SynopsisTrade ReviewIn his Translator's Afterword, Heinz Insu Fenkl describes his astonishing encounter with the poems in this collection-from dream encounter with the poet, to the poems, then the poet himself. Extraordinary workings of the three-line sijo form into the spaces of Zen practice, the poems call us to see! -- David McCann, Harvard University Reading these translations of Cho Oh-hyun's Zen sijo is like shining a light on a carefully cut, many-faceted stone. The poems are concentrated, understated, and effortlessly colloquial, both immediately accessible and, paradoxically, mysterious. The Zen nature of the poems' inquiries and observations-with their allusiveness and open-endedness-bear up under many readings, defying prized Western rationality and yielding a surprisingly rich range of tones, moods, and insights. -- Elizabeth Spires, poet and author of The Wave-Maker and Now the Green Blade Rises [Cho Oh-Hyun] has created a new tradition of Korean sijo poetry. -- Choi Yearn-hong The Korea Times While some of the poems embrace the kind of open-ended imagery commonly associated with Buddhist poetry, Cho innovates in this volume with narrative techniques that engage the senses and the imagination. World Literature Today Monk Cho... is not simply another Zen Buddhist, like those I found in the Korean history. Rather, he is his own Zen monk writing his own style of sijo. -- Yearn Hong Choi Korean QuarterlyTable of ContentsContents Preface Introduction, by Kwon Youngmin Bitter Flower Daydream Distant Holy Man Elm Tree & Moon Desire, Deeper than the Marrow What I've Always Said The Sound of Ancient Wood The Dance & the Pattern Spring Musan's Ten Bulls 1. Searching for the Bull 2. Finding the Footprints 3. Seeing the Bull 4. Catching the Bull 5. Taming the Bull 6. Riding the Bull Home 7. The Bull Transcended 8. Both Bull & Self Transcended 9. Reaching the Source 10. Return to Society Regarding My Penmanship Weekend Scrawl Wild Foxes Hoarse Speaking Without Speaking 1 Speaking Without Speaking 2 Speaking Without Speaking 3 Speaking Without Speaking 4 Speaking Without Speaking 5 Speaking Without Speaking 6 Waves What the Northeast Wind Said 1 What the Northeast Wind Said 2 What The Southeast Wind Said Ancient Rules for Everyman 3. Amdu-Drowned Man 4. Joju's Great Death 11. Gaesa Entering the Bath 13. Chuimi's Zen Gong Buddha Children of Namsan Valley Walking in Place The Path of Love At the Razor's Edge Crime & Punishment Today's Beaming The Way to Gyerimsa Temple Jikjisa Temple Travel Diary 1. The Way Forward 2. Not Two Gates 3. Sitting Buddha 4. Blue Crane-Zen Master Yeongheo 5. Stone Lamp 6. Cold Lamp-Master White Water 7. Mind Moon Tales from the Temple 2. The Seagulls & the East Sea 3. Two Squirrels 16. The Cry of Wild Ducks 25. The Otter & the Hunter 29. The Green Frog The Way to Biseul Mountain 2007-Seoul at Noon 2007-Seoul at Night Wild Ducks & Shadow Winter Mountain Beasts A Day at Old Fragrance Hall Bodhidharma 1 Bodhidharma 2 Bodhidharma 3 Bodhidharma 4 Bodhidharma 5 Bodhidharma 6 Bodhidharma 7 Bodhidharma 8 Bodhidharma 9 Bodhidharma 10 Sunset, Bay of Incheon The Sea Words of a Boatman Moments I Wished Would Linger You and I: Our Outcry You and I: Our Lamentation Siblings When the Dawn Comes Down A Fistful of Ashes Holding on to a Finger When the Thunder God Came to My Body Opening the Mountain-Side Window Proximation Sun & Moon Arising, Passing, Attachment The Wind that Once Wept in the Pine Grove Gwanseum This Body of Mine The Day I Try Dying As I Look Upon Myself Waning Landscape At the Tomb of King Seondeok Forest New Shoots Early Spring Three Views of Spring The Sound of My Own Cry All the Same at Journey's End Scarecrow Days Living on the Mountain Vapors My Lifelines Embers (Afterword) Translator's Afterword Acknowledgments

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Book SynopsisOne of the first Russian writers to make a name for herself on the Internet, Linor Goralik writes conversational short works that conjure the absurd, reflecting post-Soviet life and daily universals. Her mastery of the minimal is on full display in this collection of poems, stories, comics, a play, and an interview, translated for the first time.Trade ReviewFound Life will richly reward readers interested in short-form fiction and in the shifting landscape of contemporary Russian literature more generally, not to mention daily life in today’s Russia. -- James H. McGavran III * Translation and Literature *By turns entertaining, quixotic and unnerving, this sampling of the prolific writer’s many voices and styles is something you will want to leave lying around to dip into when you have a spare moment, or just before nodding off to bed, to seed your dreamscape. * Russian Life *The most engaging pieces, despite their brevity, require concentration, but whatever your attention span, you'll be rewarded by miniatures such as this: 'The signature taste of a gun barrel.' -- Anna Aslanyan * Times Literary Supplement *A welcome collection from a writer worth hearing more from—so translators get busy. * Kirkus Reviews *Linor Goralik is a Renaissance woman of our own day, writing (and drawing!) in a wide range of genres, all with sharp intelligence. Her writing is fresh and thought-provoking, with both profound insight and deadpan humor. The numerous translators allow exploration of different aspects of Goralik’s voice, so that this selection of work offers the reader a wonderful variety and versatility. A beautiful and important book! -- Sibelan Forrester, Swarthmore CollegeLinor Goralik has a perfect ear for the wander and wonder of ordinary speech, for the way the weirdness of human language conveys the weirdness of human experience. In turn hilarious and heart-rending, her fictions and poems bristle with epiphanies, with jolts of comprehension and, just as commonly, of vertiginous incomprehension. A literary descendant of Daniil Kharms, the conceptualists, and Chekhov, this transnational writer-ventriloquist describes a world of multiple realities, including that of the supernatural, but she is also painstakingly precise in her depictions of male and female behavior in post-Soviet space. The editors and translators are to be praised for, among many other things, finding the idiomatic and colloquial American English to convincingly express the alive Russian of the original. -- Eugene Ostashevsky, author of The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of PiGoralik remains a key figure in post-Soviet literature and culture due to her omnivorous referentiality and intertextuality, her deployment of detail, her absurdist, jarring wit, and her ability to construct tiny, perfect vignettes out of everyday scraps of language . . . Found Life is a strong introduction to a writer representing an important thread of contemporary Russophone literature and culture. -- Anne O. Fisher * The Russian Review *Table of ContentsIntroductionPart I: PoetryPart II: ComicsPart III: TheaterPart IV: Short ProseExcerpts from Biblical ZooFound LifeIn Short: Ninety-One Rather Short StoriesSomething Like That (A War Story)The Blind EyePart V: Longer ProseAgatha Goes HomeValerii: A Short NovelPart VI: “Everyone Reads the Text That’s in Their Own Head”

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Book SynopsisOne of the first Russian writers to make a name for herself on the Internet, Linor Goralik writes conversational short works that conjure the absurd, reflecting post-Soviet life and daily universals. Her mastery of the minimal is on full display in this collection of poems, stories, comics, a play, and an interview, translated for the first time.Trade ReviewFound Life will richly reward readers interested in short-form fiction and in the shifting landscape of contemporary Russian literature more generally, not to mention daily life in today’s Russia. -- James H. McGavran III * Translation and Literature *By turns entertaining, quixotic and unnerving, this sampling of the prolific writer’s many voices and styles is something you will want to leave lying around to dip into when you have a spare moment, or just before nodding off to bed, to seed your dreamscape. * Russian Life *The most engaging pieces, despite their brevity, require concentration, but whatever your attention span, you'll be rewarded by miniatures such as this: 'The signature taste of a gun barrel.' -- Anna Aslanyan * Times Literary Supplement *A welcome collection from a writer worth hearing more from—so translators get busy. * Kirkus Reviews *Linor Goralik is a Renaissance woman of our own day, writing (and drawing!) in a wide range of genres, all with sharp intelligence. Her writing is fresh and thought-provoking, with both profound insight and deadpan humor. The numerous translators allow exploration of different aspects of Goralik’s voice, so that this selection of work offers the reader a wonderful variety and versatility. A beautiful and important book! -- Sibelan Forrester, Swarthmore CollegeLinor Goralik has a perfect ear for the wander and wonder of ordinary speech, for the way the weirdness of human language conveys the weirdness of human experience. In turn hilarious and heart-rending, her fictions and poems bristle with epiphanies, with jolts of comprehension and, just as commonly, of vertiginous incomprehension. A literary descendant of Daniil Kharms, the conceptualists, and Chekhov, this transnational writer-ventriloquist describes a world of multiple realities, including that of the supernatural, but she is also painstakingly precise in her depictions of male and female behavior in post-Soviet space. The editors and translators are to be praised for, among many other things, finding the idiomatic and colloquial American English to convincingly express the alive Russian of the original. -- Eugene Ostashevsky, author of The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of PiGoralik remains a key figure in post-Soviet literature and culture due to her omnivorous referentiality and intertextuality, her deployment of detail, her absurdist, jarring wit, and her ability to construct tiny, perfect vignettes out of everyday scraps of language . . . Found Life is a strong introduction to a writer representing an important thread of contemporary Russophone literature and culture. -- Anne O. Fisher * The Russian Review *Table of ContentsIntroductionPart I: PoetryPart II: ComicsPart III: TheaterPart IV: Short ProseExcerpts from Biblical ZooFound LifeIn Short: Ninety-One Rather Short StoriesSomething Like That (A War Story)The Blind EyePart V: Longer ProseAgatha Goes HomeValerii: A Short NovelPart VI: “Everyone Reads the Text That’s in Their Own Head”

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Book SynopsisYang Mu is a towering figure in modern Chinese poetry. Hawk of the Mind is a comprehensive collection of Yang Mu’s poetry that presents crucial works from the many stages of his long creative career, rendered into English by a team of distinguished translators, illustrating the distinctive style and affective power of a great poet.Trade ReviewThe work of Taiwanese poet Yang Mu brings vivid and playful pastoral imagery. He examines both Chinese and Western literary and cultural traditions through his personal lens, and his writing retains its beautifully lyrical nature through the translation. * World Literature Today *Braiding images of nature with self-aware literary reference and linguistic terminology, Yang Mu shifts between intimate and expansive realms as he adopts personae. Occasionally retaining in their rich and piquant translations some of the nonspecific agency that typifies Chinese grammar, the translators deftly lavish attention not only on semantic meanings but on meanings made by sounds and tonal sequences. -- Forrest Gander, author of Core Samples from the WorldAn expertly translated, edited, and introduced collection, showcasing the distinctive craft of a consummate lyricist. “Poetry is insistence, not compromise,” writes Yang Mu. What a sumptuous feast he has served us in that remarkable spirit! -- Rey Chow, author of Not Like a Native Speaker: On Languaging as a Postcolonial ExperienceWidely recognized as the most significant lyrical voice now writing in Chinese, Yang Mu is a national figure in Taiwan who has been recently promoted as a candidate for the Nobel Prize. Moreover, the translators are undoubtedly the very best in the English world. The renditions are superb and meet the linguistic challenges of the originals with dexterity and imagination. -- William Tay, University of California, San DiegoYang Mu is always at or near the top of any list of contemporary modernist Chinese-language poets. Thanks to Michelle Yeh and her colleagues, the translations of his poems in this collection offer a generous selection of his lifetime of erudite engagement with both Chinese and Western cultures. -- Edward Gunn, Cornell UniversityThese are superb translations of a sovereign poetic oeuvre. Yang Mu’s writing is at once delicate and forceful, reasoned and imaginative, cosmopolitan and grounded. Sixty years of poetry unfurl through a voice that breaks new ground time and again yet retains its constancy. Hawk of the Mind is a major achievement—and a delight. -- Maghiel van Crevel, Leiden UniversityTable of ContentsAcknowledgmentsBurning and Diffusing Through Eternity: An Introduction to Yang MuPoems The Star Is the Only Guide 1Water’s Edge To Time Fragment Folding Screen A Sequel to Han Yu’s “Mountain Rocks,” a Seven-Character Poem in the Old Style Snake: A Rondo Jizi of Yanling Hangs Up His Sword King Wu’s Night Encampment: A Suite Etudes: The Twelve Earthly Branches Sailing to Ireland Ireland Let the Wind Recite Manuscript in a Bottle Lines of the Hand Bring You Home to Hualian Solitude Forbidden Games 1 Paddy Field Region Light Rain To the Ancient Minor Realization Sonnet: The Travelers Tree in the College Looking Down Someone Asks Me a Question About Justice and Righteousness Tree Miaoyu Sits in Meditation Departing the Grasslands Sonnets on The Book of Changes Leaving a Banquet Early in Summer Heat Lama Reincarnated Village Sonnets In Lieu of a Letter Fable Number 2: Yellow Sparrow Variation on “A Traveler’s Heart” Hawk of the Mind Remembering Berkeley Written on Returning to the Northwest Dusk from an Upper Floor Episodic Capriccio for Solo Six Quatrains, Written in Fun Propositions of Temporality Chang’an A Lyric To the Angel Afternoon of a Gladiolus Lakeview Tale (In the meter of “Metamorphosis Two” by Philip Glass) Bohori (Khabarovsk, 1994) Midnight Solitude. 1910 St. Petersburg Grain Buds Ars Poetica Gazing Up New Songs Symbol A Flurry of Snow Seven Stars Bay The Previous Life Under the Pine Rabbits Rays of the Fading Sun The Vacated Seat Portrait of a Lady Song of Floss Flower Composed for the Lyrical Oboe Subject Misimpression Pheasant A Draw in a Game of Chess The Water Nymph Pindar’s Ode Fallen Leaves The Lost Ring—for Chechnya Written at Daybreak No Time Difference Ancient Banyan Tree in Tainan The Rite of Passage Ziye Extemporizes in Song War Forgotten The Heart Wavers Substitution Untitled 1 Untitled 2 The Fog and My Other Self Cycad Aulacaspis Scale Dragonfly Since You Went Away Betel Creek, Chinan Lakefront #2: Partita per Violoncello Pine Garden To the Tune “Behind the Soochow Curtain” Title Unknown Zuocang: Sakor Cloud Ship On Solitude Greece Discussing Poetry Writing with Someone Substance, Shadow, and Spirit Fern Songs Reading Dante at Year’s End Fluctuating Rhythm As Yet Unattained Written for a Meeting Lectures Variations on Zither Melodies No. 9 Listening to the Wind Autumn Preface to Manuscript in a Bottle Afterword to Someone: Poetry Is Written for People Afterword to Propositions of Temporality Afterword to Cycad Aulacaspis Scale Select Bibliography Translators

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Book SynopsisMaria Stepanova is one of the most powerful and distinctive voices of Russia’s first post-Soviet literary generation. The Voice Over brings together two decades of Stepanova’s work, showcasing her range, virtuosity, and creative evolution.Trade Review2021 is the year of Stepanova. * The Guardian *Stepanova's voice is a multipotent anthology of epic, lyric, and pure spell. She turns myth back into memory, heroes into humans, and her country’s rush from one catastrophe to another into language. No translator who reads Stepanova's work thinks, ‘I can do this.’ This is a book prepared by people who believed in a poetic miracle and this miracle happened—to the English language above all. -- Valzhyna Mort, author of Music for the Dead and ResurrectedA volume of Maria Stepanova’s work in English translation is long overdue, but this one, rendered by a dream team of the best translators and poets working today, has been worth the wait. The Voice Over offers a worthy tribute to Stepanova’s multiple achievements: a rich selection of texts from Stepanova’s poetry and translations of Stepanova’s essays, both illuminated by Irina Shevelenko’s expert introduction and commentary, framing Stepanova’s writing with sophistication and insight. -- Kevin M. F. Platt, founder of Your Language My Ear translation symposiumMaria Stepanova is among the most visible figures in post-Soviet culture. * Los Angeles Review of Books *[Stepanova's] work is defined by fluent phrases expressing complex thoughts, the fusing of different styles, a carefree command of all possible metrical feet, and a great sense of empathy. * Poetry International *Stepanova’s brilliance is matched only by her legendary difficulty. Rather than write in free verse, she sticks to the metric strictures of classic syllabotonic Russian poetry and fills traditional forms with a dizzying mix of references and registers, drawing on everything from Slavic folklore to social media. * Poetry Magazine *Stepanova is finally receiving the attention she deserves in the Anglophone world. Subtle and erudite in its treatment of politics and history, her work is a much-needed antidote to the crude depictions of Russia that have filled the English-language media in recent years. * Harper's Magazine *Each book [The Voice Over, In Memory of Memory, and War of the Beasts and the Animals] casts light on the others, revealing overlapping themes. Their simultaneous appearance gives English-speaking readers a singular opportunity to become familiar with a major Russian poet and thinker. * Times Literary Supplement *This ambitious collection provides English-language readers with a systematic introduction to the work of one of Russia’s most important contemporary poets . . . [The] explicit discussion of translation strategies within the volume will give readers a great deal to think about and highlights current trends and points of debate in literary translation. The translations included in this volume are of very high quality and might together make a wonderful primer for a course in literary translation. * World Literature Today *An exceptional introduction to [Stepanova's] work, the product of intensive collaboration, creative endeavour, and serious scholarship . . . essential reading for anybody interested in poetry today and in contemporary Russian culture. * Translation and Literature *Table of ContentsPrefaceBibliographic NoteIntroduction. “Speaking in Voices”: On Maria Stepanova’s Literary Creation, by Irina ShevelenkoPart I: The Here-WorldA Gypski, a Polsk I, a Jewski, a RusskiThe North of sleep. Head’s in a pillow cradleAhoy! Beyond the azure’s tempestAdieu, until one branched floor higherFor you, but the voice of the straitened MuseThe BrideThe PilotThe morning sun arises in the morningAs Danaë, prone in the incarce-chamberIt is certainly time to stopEven bluer than the toilet tiles(a birthday on the train)(half an hour on foot)July 3rd, 2004The Women’s Locker Room at “Planet Fitness”Sarah on the BarricadesThe Desire to Be a RibBus Stop: Israelitischer FriedhofZoo, Woman, MonkeyPart II: Displaced PersonAnd a vo-vo-voice aroseIn the festive sky, impassivable, tinfurledSaturday and Sunday burn like starsIn every little park, in every little squareMom-pop didn’t know himMama, what janitorA train rides down entire RussiaOrdnance was weeping in the openThe A went past, Tram-TraumWell I don’t sing Kupitye papirosnThe light swells and pulses at the garden gateIn the village, in the field, in the forestA deer, a deer stood in that placeThe last songs are assemblingMy dear, my little LibertyThere he lies in his new bed, a band of paper round his headDon’t wait for us, my darlingDon’t strain your sightFour OperasIn Unheard-of SimplicityDisplaced PersonPart III: SpoliaSpoliaWar of the Beasts and the AnimalsToday Before Yesterday (excerpt)After the Dead WaterIntending to LiveAt the Door of a Notnew AgePart IV: Over Venerable GravesThe Maximum Cost of Living (Marina Tsvetaeva)Conversations in the Realm of the Dead (Lyubov Shaporina)What Alice Found There (Alisa Poret)The Last Hero (Susan Sontag)From That Side: Notes on SebaldOver Venerable GravesNotes

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Book SynopsisA collection of poems which includes an account of the poet's life, along with photos and explanatory notes.Trade Review"I loved the man and his poems. He was the revolutionary angel of American poetry." -- Pete Seeger "A collection that inspires both admiration and gratitude in a reader. The neglected poet Aaron Kramer was an artist of considerable substance, and this volume performs an invaluable service to U.S. cultural history by restoring Kramer's work to print in a form that showcases the breadth and depth of his achievement." -- Alan Wald, Professor of English at the University of Michigan and author of Exiles from a Future Time

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Book SynopsisThis collection of poems explores wayfaring, both in a spiritual sense and in the sense of knowledge navigation in an information age. It explores American history, encompassing writing and identity in the figures of Emily Dickinson and Willard Gibbs, the country''s first mathematical physicist.Trade Review"Erudite—the word might be hurled at a poet as an insult, meant to suggest dull, arcane knowledge and lack of accessibility. In Strickland's case, however, erudite is a term of praise. For ideas and facts stud her poetry like so many gleaming jewels, yet they never tarnish the gold of human experience from which the poems are wrought. Take the trope of the title poem, for instance: beginning with the difference between magnetic and true north, Strickland launches into an exploration of the forces of love, until the metaphor links science and the heart so tightly that they are inseparable. Strickland's language is not easy; it is full of citations and allusions and sometimes dense with wordplay. But the force of her passion for ideas and for human connection sustains each poem." —Patricia Monaghan“Strickland is a thrilling poet. She is a ‘rapt observer’ of shimmering worlds, in and out, and of the long story of human savagery, civility, and intelligence. She shines and dives across the air of many worlds. . . . Rooted in her sense of the profound voluptuous, she is a powerful ‘fabulist of what we are.’”—Marie Ponsot, author of The Bird Catcher"In these poems specialized vocabularies—drawn from science, linguistics, history, mathematics—move in and out of each other in a radical remaking of language. The volume is a tour de force, and exhilarating to read." —The Women's Review of Books

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Book SynopsisThese three poem sequences read like novellas, with each poem/tale set in a real time and place, and each documented with original photographs from scrapbooks and archives.

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Book SynopsisFor years, I''ve wondered in amazement how Walt McDonald does what he does, poem after poem, book after book. He sings like no one else. In Climbing the Divide, McDonald has made his strongest collection of poems yet. David Citino, author of The News and Other Poems Climbing the Divide must have been written with a pen Walt McDonald dipped into his heart. Crisscrossing generations, poems detail watching a grandfather with knuckles the size of walnuts carve a grizzly bear out of oak, taking car keys away from a father ''who drove tanks for Patton'' and thinking about nights in the jungle of Vietnam while pushing a granddaughter in a swing because her father is training overseas for Desert Storm. Binding us to his Texas world in sensual detail about men with big-boned fists who inhabit a land where the moon pockmarks the sky, Walt McDonald refuses to let moments of communion be swallowed by ''war on every channel.'' His poems stay lodged in the heart to remTrade Review"Like feathers, [McDonald’s] poems have both lightness and strength; he understands the poetic virtue of understatement and the human virtue of humility. These are not experimental poems; they are deeply, originally traditional, and just as deeply accomplished."—ForeWord

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Book SynopsisFor years, I''ve wondered in amazement how Walt McDonald does what he does, poem after poem, book after book. He sings like no one else. In Climbing the Divide, McDonald has made his strongest collection of poems yet. David Citino, author of The News and Other Poems Climbing the Divide must have been written with a pen Walt McDonald dipped into his heart. Crisscrossing generations, poems detail watching a grandfather with knuckles the size of walnuts carve a grizzly bear out of oak, taking car keys away from a father ''who drove tanks for Patton'' and thinking about nights in the jungle of Vietnam while pushing a granddaughter in a swing because her father is training overseas for Desert Storm. Binding us to his Texas world in sensual detail about men with big-boned fists who inhabit a land where the moon pockmarks the sky, Walt McDonald refuses to let moments of communion be swallowed by ''war on every channel.'' His poems stay lodged in the heart to remTrade Review"Like feathers, [McDonald’s] poems have both lightness and strength; he understands the poetic virtue of understatement and the human virtue of humility. These are not experimental poems; they are deeply, originally traditional, and just as deeply accomplished."—ForeWord

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