Search results for ""Carcanet Press Ltd""

Shortlisted for The Premio Valle Inclán Award for Spanish Translation 2020. In his poems Dario Jaramillo relentlessly interrogates time, ecstatically celebrates life lived, and mourns its transience. This is the first substantial sampling in English of Colombia's greatest living poet, and it draws on five decades' work. Time has been Jaramillo's key theme, all the more urgently so as he grows older. Impossible and lost loves provide another theme, as do the effects of violence done to the body. Absences and disappearances are part of the mix, all underpinned by nostalgia for an idealised, rural childhood. Most of the poems lack a specific geography, though others shift between Bogota, where the poet lives, the tropical Antioquia of his childhood, and a nameless place peopled by the ghosts of dead friends. Jaramillo also takes time to interrogate the humble mango, the rubber tree, the domestic cat. Paradox lies at the core of his work: an only child, the poet's 'brothers' are often wild, chaotic characters, given to excess and self-destructive behaviour. 'I like to hallucinate in words,' he said when he won the National Poetry Award in 2017. The book includes a full afterword by the award-winning poet and writer Richard Gwyn, translator of the celebrated anthology The Other Tiger: Recent Poetry from Latin America (2016). This is a dual-language edition.

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The May-June 2021 issue; Major new sequence of poems by Jamaican Poet Laureate Lorna Goodison; Opening essay in new eco-essay series by Brian Morton, about living rough in the remote Hebrides; Conversation with great New Zealand poet Bill Manhire; Philip Terry's huge supplement on experimental poetry, OuLiPo, with first contributions from a huge range of European, American and other poets; New to PN Review this issue: Ariane Dreyfus, Naush Sabah, Devin Johnston and Silis MacLeod; and more...

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The March-April 2020 issue New sequence of poems about climate change from New Zealand’s greatest living poet, Bill Manhire Frederic Raphael, (Eyes Wide Shut, screenwriter) discusses being a Jewish intellectual John Clegg on a new source for Keat’s ‘Nightingale’ New poems from major Welsh poet Gwyneth Lewis Sasha Dugdale translates Maria Stepanova New to PN Review this issue: Maria Stepanova, Leeanne Quinn, and Francesca A. Bratton and more...

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The September-October 2020 issue. Rachel Hadas explores connections between literature and the pandemic. Jena Schmitt on ekphrasis (the description of artwork in writing), from Virgil to Tolstoy to Rilke. First published poem 'Elaine' by Katriona Feinstein, granddaughter of Elaine Feinstein. Sharron Hass on Sophocles' Farewell to Poetry, translated from the Hebrew. New poetry by Jee Leong Koh, Nyla Matuk, and Joe Carrick-Varty. New to PN Review this issue: Matthias Fechner, Rachel Hadas, Paul Stephenson, and Katriona Feinstein. And more...

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The Poetry Book Society Autumn 2018 Recommended Translation. Asked to name the great Latin love poets, today’s reader is likely to offer Catullus, Ovid, Virgil, Horace. Propertius, a successor of the first and influential peer to the others, has not been blessed by posterity. Yet at their best his poems match any of the period. They are poems of love, of desire, of insecurity and obsession: of struggle, too, as they resist the Augustan Empire’s attempts to turn its love poets into propagandists. The result is a highly refined irony, a subtlety of tone and humour that is unique. Patrick Worsnip’s translations bring out Propertius’ playfulness and his psychological acuity, reinstating his poems at the heart of Latin literature’s golden age.

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In this pithy abecedarium, doctor and poet Iain Bamforth takes a close look at the conflict of values embodied in what we call medicine - never entirely a science and no longer quite the art it used to be. Bamforth brings his wide experience of medicine around the world, from the high-tech American Hospital of Paris to the community health centres of Papua, together with his engaging interest in the stranger manifestations of medical matters in relation to art, literature and culture - such as the mysterious 'Stendhal's syndrome', which caused 106 tourists in Florence to be hospitalised due to an overload of sublime Renaissance art.

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Martina Evans's fifth collection moves from the impact of American culture and rock'n'roll in the 1960s on her home town, a small Catholic community in rural Ireland, to life in contemporary London. Her poems spring from memories, anecdotes of local characters, children's books, shoes and cats; finally they revisit her Burnfort schooldays in sharp, truthful and often funny poems. Her poems will appeal to all who enjoy her unique blend of poetry and storytelling, her astute mimicry of conversational styles and her gift for offbeat humour.

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In "How Now!" Alan Moore treats themes of love, evil, and personal loss with gentle humour and tough seriousness. He evokes memories of Ireland in the sixties, seventies and eighties, capturing flashes of awareness from childhood, youth and adult years with masterful description of emotion and settings. This absorbing work is his second collection of poems, following "Opia", a Poetry Book Society Choice in 1986, which was described by Ciaran Carty as 'a virtuoso first collection'.

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The brilliant Aztec poetic tradition would have all but vanished after the Spanish Conquest in 1521 without the friars who painstakingly transcribed and preserved the poems in the years that followed. In this new edition of their translations, Edward Kissam and Michael Schmidt - two poets who spent formative years in Mexico - give us powerful echoes of the lyrical and philosophical songs, the songs of rejoicing, sorrow, ritual and war, the laments made by Nezahualpilli and others as the end of their empire approached, and the epics of myth and legend. Their introduction is a distilled account of the background to the Aztec empire, its way of life and its fall, to the role of poetry in Aztec life and to how the poems were preserved.

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The first part of Thomas McCarthy's book collects his recent short lyrics. Part Two daringly recreates a forgotten period in the Anglo-Irish world: a Big House in the years between the World Wars, a FitzGerald ('Geraldine') family that has tilled the soil of County Waterford, absorbed its language and history, and sent young men back to British regiments, particularly the Irish Guards. Focusing on his Gaelic-speaking soldier-poet, Sir Gerald FitzGerald, and his man-servant, Paax Foley, McCarthy creates a fully imagined landscape of men escaped from Irish neutrality to fight against Fascism. Moving from ballad to prose poem, from mid-century Gaelic verse to County Waterford recipes, McCarthy mixes competing loyalties and readings of Irish history to create a single Irish narrative of exile and bereavement, of battles won and love lost and found.

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Anthony Howell's first collection for several years moves in unusual directions. Guilt and society's victimization of those it punishes are among its subjects: it begins with poems concerned with the harm caused by anorexia and moves on to investigate the situation of offenders held in units for 'vulnerable' prisoners. The collection includes two longer poems: "Ode to a Routine" chronicles the odyssey of one sentenced to commute across London, while the title poem extends a theme of dubious empathy explored by Browning in "My Last Duchess". As always Anthony Howell's poems are cool, intelligent, entertaining and simply different from anything else being written. 'The best of Ashbery's disciples is without doubt Anthony Howell' - Robert Nye in "The Times".

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This bilingual collection of Aldo Vianello's poems draws on early translations by Richard Burns from Vianello's "Time of a Flower" (1968), with new versions by Peter Jay and Linda Lappin of poems from his later books. Vianello's exceptional lyric gift and his striking imagery shine through poems about many aspects of the human and natural conditions.

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Gabriel Levin's second collection builds confidently on his highly praised first. In graceful, exacting lyrics, he addresses subjects wrested from a stark, natural world of 'fire and ash' desert tints, and its diverse, vital heritage, with a rare sensitivity to the life of things past as well as present. In "Ostraca", his journey through the Mediterranean and the Levant is attuned to a wide mix of voices (among them, the lone voice of a sentry, pieced together from five potsherds or 'ostraca') and a range of times and places, from the Sahara, Cyprus, Byzantine Mt Athos and war-torn Lebanon to his refractory, adopted Jerusalem, and an emerging Palestine.

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Josep Carner's "Nabi" is a masterpiece of modern Catalan poetry. Based on the biblical story of Jonah, it is essentially a Christian poem, though it is scathing about the effects of religious perversion. In the widest sense a poem about the limits of rationality, it is a triumph of language - of a language which Carner helped to establish as a vehicle for serious poetry. This bilingual edition is introduced by the noted Catalan expert Arthur Terry.

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Sir Thomas Wyatt, "the first great English lyric poet", remains one of the most popular writer's of Henry VIII's court, and the most romantic, given his entanglement with Anne Boleyn, which resulted - legend has it - in some of his most passionate and vulnerable poems. This book contains a representative selection of his work: all the best-loved poems and many lesser-known pieces which illuminate a complex and sophisticated sensibility. Hardiman Scott sees Wyatt as a modern poet before his time and demonstrates the impact he and his younger contemporary the Earl of Surrey had on the development of English poetry. Wyatt introduced the sonnet, terza rima and other Italian verse forms into English and invented forms and processes of his own. Hardiman Scott's introduction and notes illuminate Wyatt's importance as "a modern poet before his time", "at a crossroads in English poetry", and provides a detailed outline of the social and literary context in which Wyatt worked and the impact he had on the development of English poetry.

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Carl Phillips's Scattered Snows, to the North is a collection about distortion and revelation, about knowing and the unreliability of a knowing that's based on human memory.

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In "Red House", her third collection, Sasha Dugdale evokes the ghosts and presences that flit about on the margins of our lives. She finds them at the edge of towns where superstores and allotments blur an older landscape, in Europe where emigrants leave their gods, their neighbours, their memories 'jettisoned like old clothes'; and across the chalk Downs of her native Sussex. She traces the shapes that they leave through folk song, lament and lyric poetry. Haunted by history, confronted by primal brutalities, the poems in "Red House" proclaim the fierce, bright authenticity that is 'all the proof we need that we're alive'.

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The title poem of this volume describes the vineyards of an area of Italy which has been the subject of many of Tomlinson's poems since his earliest work. In the Cinque Terre, vines are cultivated along the cliffs, within precarious sight of the sea beneath. These are the poems of a traveller, exploring the personal through the sense of place - Italy, Greece, Spain, Portugal and the West of England.

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Perhaps best known for his much anthologized World War II poem, "Naming of Parts", and a number of radio plays and translations from the Italian, Henry Reed published only one volume of verse during his lifetime, "A Map of Verona" in 1946. Jon Stallworthy's introduction traces Reed's life and offers a critical assessment of the published and many unpublished poems, the "Lessons of the War", translations, songs, and early fragments included in this "Collected Poems" that should help establish Reed alongside the other great war poets.

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Edward Thomas is one of the best-loved of English poets, and a model of integrity for many of his successors. His poetry was written during the space of just two years, before he was killed in the First World War. Those years lie at the heart of "Edward Thomas' Poets": Judy Kendall's gathering of poems and letters embeds that brief period of intense poetic creativity within the wider narrative of Thomas' life. For the first time, letters by Thomas about writing and publishing are set alongside his poems, revealing the occasions of their composition, illuminating the processes of recollection, revision and development that transformed him into a poet. Interleaved with Thomas' own poems and letters are works by the literary friends whom he criticised and admired, and whose influence he absorbed: Walter de la Mare, W.H. Hudson, Robert Frost, Eleanor Farjeon and others. Many of the letters included here have not been collected before or are out of print.Enhanced by Judy Kendall's detailed notes and bibliographies, "Edward Thomas' Poets" provides a new perspective on Thomas' reading and writing of poetry, illuminating specific poems and revealing the complex sources of his mature verse.

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In 1939, following her marriage, the poet Lynette Roberts went to live in a small village in Wales. This experience, both enriching and isolating, became the source of some of her extraordinary poetry. Her diary observes daily life in a Welsh village in wartime with a poetic intensity: communal harvest, the arrival of evacuees, a frozen water pump, the cadences of voices and the effects of light and rain. Seven haunting stories weave modernist myths of Wales, while her magazine articles explore Welsh life with an anthropologist's eye.Roberts' restless intelligence never limits itself to the local. She writes about Picasso and Le Corbusier, about a visit to Spain on the trail of Lorca, the solemn drama of afternoon tea with the Sitwells, the comic disaster of taking her young children to visit T.S. Eliot. Enquiring, unsentimental, wryly humorous, Roberts engages us with her speaking voice. The publication of Lynette Roberts' "Collected Poems" in 2006 restored her to her place in twentieth-century poetry. This collection of her prose writings, most published here for the first time, accompanied by evocative family photographs, discloses the world that she transformed into poetry.

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Horace (65-8 BC) is the most beguiling of the great Latin poets. He has left an ineradicable mark on Western literature: Dante placed him alongside Homer and Virgil, and his works have been translated and re-imagined since the Renaissance. Len Krisak, an acclaimed poet and translator, provides a close metrical translation of the four books of the Odes and the Centennial Hymn, the first for many years. He translates for the modern reader, combining linguistic precision with an ebullient sense of the possibilities of these inexhaustible works as poems in English. Printed alongside the Latin text, Krisak's translations provide a line-for-line sense of the Latin rhythms, while rendering them in a living English that captures both the wit, tenderness and the occasional irascibility of the great Roman poet. Supporting notes clarify allusions and historical and mythological names. Here Horace's world is made luminously accessible to eye and ear.

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The poems in Mary O'Malley's new collection focus on legal separation: of Northern from Southern Ireland, of written Irish from its original script, and of husband from wife. The book explores a season in hell when the verities vanish, the love we live by dies, and the ramparts that shore up our existence are demolished. A marriage breaks down, children leave home, love itself is questioned. What is home now? Where is it? And how do we live when we cannot return? The personal is examined through the lens of the greater human chaos. This is a book about eviction, an examination of the nature of home that is both private and political, written out of a sense of the barbarism that threatens to overwhelm the deep song of Ireland.

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A collection of bold and original poems by Grevel Lindop which navigate the boundary between the sexual and the erotic with imaginative insight and verbal virtuosity.

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The beauty and strangeness of inner landscapes is reflected in these powerful poems. As each poem tends to the intricacies of human experience, their focus on the fractal patterns within familiar structures the tree within the leaf, the series of recurrences that unfold to create a fugue add an element of discovery and revelation to the poems, modulating and rendering strange these musings on what is ostensibly human. "

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One area of Sarah Raphael's work that has so far been inadequately displayed is her drawing. Frederic Raphael draws from over 25 years of work in her notebooks and sketchbooks. She did justice to every model and had amazing sense of setting, economy of perspective, and ability to create presence.

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In Letters of Introduction Kevin Jackson invents a new genre, the Alphabet Essay. Always inventive, scholarly and sometimes zany, Jackson approaches ten writers and two 'themes', building an alphabet around each: 'A is for' to 'Z is for'. The alphabet touches on his subjects' history, their culture, their private and intimate lives, their anxieties, and most importantly their achievement. The Alphabets are introductory and exploratory. Jackson picks his way through the worlds of Hildegard of Bingen, William Blake, Dante, Duke Ellington, Freud, Goethe, the Harlem Renaissance, Paul Klee, Friedrich Nietzsche, Surrealism, Andy Warhol and Marguerite Yourcenar. As he goes he finds out more and more, by association, through legend and gossip, in imagination. It is a wonderful process, an approach which imposes wonderful juxtapositions and elicits delicious ironies. The form is redolent of childhood, the content is remote from childish things.

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This sequence of poems takes the reader into the early 20th century, to Northern Germany where a group of artists founded a colony in Worpswede, a rural community near Bremen. Fascinated by the number of self-portraits, Sujata Bhatt imagines the painters' inner and outer worlds.

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In "Your Name Here", a title suggested by bullfight posters hawked to tourists who then fill in their name as "terero", John Ashbery continues to examine preoccupations of age, loss, childhood memories and how the magic of dreams can transform daily living.

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This text brings together Clare's longest poem, "The Parish", and his satires, "The Hue and Cry" and "The Summons". Other poems, some previously unpublished, are included. They reveal his reactions to political and social conditions and events of his age. There are also prose works and fragments in which he reflects on the issues of the day included in the collection. A detailed introduction evokes the larger context of Clare's writings and the difficulties he faced as a labourer trying to voice the concerns of his class in a period when such matters were regarded as the exclusive province of the educated and propertied classes. The book is part of Carcanet's "John Clare Programme".

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Ford's novel, "Parade's End", has been acknowledged as one of the great British novels about World War I. This book features a selection of Ford's other writings about the war, and should shed light on the tetralogy. It includes reminiscences, an unfinished novel, stories, and excerpts from letters.

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'The Observer' described Anne Ridler as 'one of the best poets of her generation.' Her first book, 'Poems', was published in 1939, and her work developed in the light and shadow of the poets of the day - MacNeice and Auden, but also Durrell and Watkins. As important to her was an affinity with the secular and devotional writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Ambitious for her poems, she was never ambitious for reputation. Her work, like that of her friend E.J. Scovell, is only now receiving the attention it deserves. She has published ten collections of poetry, original and translated opera libretti, including Monteverdi's 'Orfeo'. She is the author of verse plays which have been performed in Oxford and London. This volume contains all that she wishes to preserve of her lyric poetry, together with choruses from the play 'The Trial of Thomas Cranmer'and a masque for music by Elizabeth Maconchy, 'The Jesse Tree'.

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"The 501 quatrains of Second Best Moments in Chinese History" make it seem at first like a repackaged version of Frank Kuppner's celebrated first collection "A Bad Day for the Sung Dynasty (1984)". But it isn't: 'Please note that this is a completely different work, although it is formally identical and very similar in its preoccupations.' Its tone is different - something to do with maturity and cadencing, which make the laughter and heartbreak more intense, more political.

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After John Ashberry's "Flow Chart" (1991), "Hotel Lautreamont" (1992) and "And the Stars were Shining" (1994), this work provides an A-Y of poems, moments in which voices, images and tones come in for his attention. The poems are generally short, except for "T" when "Tuesday Evening" occurs.

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The virtuosity and high spirits of Sophie Hannah's poems are unusual at any time of day. She handles rhymed metrical forms with wily insouciance and passes the 'memorability test' with flying colors. What seems simple or simply achieved more often than not on closer inspection yields subtleties of feeling and form. A surrealising impulse unsettles even the most tidy of her stanzas with a shrewd imaginative wantonness. Her experiments with subject-matter produce something more satisfying than 'social verse'. An urban person who prefers shopping, eating and romance to hopping over cowpats on a country walk, she writes with generous rather than reductive wit.

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Jacinto, an absentee noble from Portugal, revels in joyous extreme in the latest of French sophistications. Circumstances compel his return to his family estates where he rediscovers the values and pleasures of Portuguese traditional life, but there are doubts about this perfection he finds.

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"Ends and Beginnings" is Iain Crichton Smith's most ambitious collection for years. It begins in elegy, with the exiles and deaths about which he writes so memorably, and progresses through place, history and positive change. After a trip to the Golan Heights, he conceived a major poem on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, using an unaccustomed Biblical idiom. He considers the isolated people of his native Lewis, and those isolated in a wider culture-scholars, writers, lovers, the old-whose need for communion is thwarted by estranging disciplines or by the depredations of history.

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The Rose of Toulouse is a book of geographies tracing where the poet has lived and taught, their histories, and his history as he travels away from who he was.

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Complete Poems brings together the published and unpublished work of one of the most significant poets of the late twentieth century, founding editor of Stand and of the Northern House imprint. As well as reprinting all the poems included in Silkin's books (from The Portrait and Other Poems in 1950 to Making a Republic in 2002), it includes significant poems previously unpublished or published only in a wide variety of journals, and work transcribed from manuscripts. Complete Poems demands a new perception of Silkin's language and his concerns, the breadth of his passionately humane response to war and the Holocaust, and his scrutiny of humanity alongside nature.

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"Bevel" is William Letford's first book, but his poems have already earned him a large following thanks to his brilliant performances and through Carcanet's "New Poetries V" anthology. Letford makes poems from the rhythms of speech and the stuff of daily life: work and love, seasons and cities, and his writing is alive with the wonder and comedy of the mundane. Bevel is filled with voices - 'an he says / A love the summer / it's hoat / ye kin wear yer shoarts...' - and with the knowledge that becomes engrained in the body: 'The weight of a drill. The texture of rust.' Letford works as a roofer, a trade that gives him a particular perspective on life at ground level. 'Be prepared', he writes: pay attention to the moment, know which way to fall. His poems are sure and strong, the words dance.

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Cities is a book of travels, from Basel to Budapest, Tampico to Tiblisi - and from the child in wartime Leicester to a 'fortune beyond any deserving / to be still here' in a London garden, eight decades later. 'Migrations', the book's opening poem, celebrates the recurring 'filigree of migration, symbiosis, assimilation'. Inheriting 'a long history of crossing borders', Feinstein explores the haunted landscape between past and present, public history and personal memory, in simple intense lyrics.

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"Painting Rain" explores an Ireland where uncontrolled development is tearing apart a sustaining ecology. Paula Meehan sifts through the lore and memory available to her: her own journey through life, the small victories and large defeats that shape a world. Hers is an ambitious meditation, from that point where private memory, mythology and ecology meet. The home, the city's heart, neglected suburban battlegrounds, all are shot through with visionary light. In poems of loss, hymns to the empty world, celebrations of people and place, Meehan confronts the darkness that everywhere threatens. These are poems that sustain belief in the power of language to reveal, interrogate and heal.

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Sidetracks, Bei Dao's first new collection in almost fifteen years, is also the poet's first long poem and his magnum opus-the artistic culmination of a lifetime devoted to the renewal and reinvention of language.

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The March-April 2024 issue of PN Review, one of the most outstanding poetry journals of our time.

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The May-June 2024 issue of PN Review, one of the most outstanding poetry journals of our time.

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Caroline Bird's new collection charts marriage, lesbian parenthood, addiction and recovery: the ambush of real life that occurs in the stillness, after the happy ending.

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