Search results for ""Zephyr Press""

Three celebrated poets illuminate the complexity of life in Haiti and its diaspora in the 21st century, particularly for women, in this exceptional and unprecedented trilingual collection. In Évelyne Trouillot’s sensual poems about love and yearning, she asks repeatedly “in what language should I speak to you”? Marie-Célie Agnant addresses poverty, pain, death, but also the pleasures of passion. Maggy De Coster’s concise and personal poems explore the world — its nature, light, wind — and, sometimes, political themes. Together, these poems navigate between an impulse to “capture gently these moments of light” (De Coster) and the very different insistence that we see how “pain sits at ground level / at times charging like a beast” (Agnant). The original poems in French and Haitian Kreyòl appear facing the English translations by Danielle LeGros Georges. Agnant is the 2023 Cana

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Yam Gong is a leading Hong Kong poet who has worked as a laborer since adolescence and produced many of his poems during his work breaks. An outsider poet, he explores the synthesis of everyday life and philosophical inquiry. Using shifting tonal registers, he refashions borrowed language, including English song lyrics, Cantonese wordplay, Chinese folk stories and poems, news reports, prayers, and slang. This bilingual volume is the first book-length collection of Yam Gong’s poems in English, drawing from his most important work over the past forty years. Moving a Stone: Selected Poems of Yam Gong is the fourth title in Zephyr’s Hong Kong Atlas series, the only series in the world to showcase Hong Kong poetry in English.

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Glazova invites us to perceive the unfolding natural world with all our senses—a bee, a swamp, the icy north—and to consider our place in it. Her concise and sensory poems elucidate not just a moment in nature, but the flow of time. A snow-covered bud, a clod of earth, an animal’s fur, and human beings are all part of a continuous cycle of life and death. Glazova is also a photographer, and light, shadow, and darkness filter through these poems. But listening is as important as seeing: “put your ear to the ground: the log and the bark beetle / sing as one—they begin.” Glazova came of age during perestroika, moved to Germany as a young woman, and received her doctorate in the U.S. Her poetry is strongly influenced by Paul Celan, whose work she has translated to Russian.

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Song Lin’s poems explore his sojourns in several countries, the natural world outside him, and his own inner landscape. His early imprisonment during the 1989 Tienanmen Square protests gave rise to the title poem, as well as a profound sense of yearning that pervades much of his work. He is a wanderer in the world and in the language of poetry, often finding beauty in others that are also on the move: birds, rivers, the wind. While his work is rooted in both contemporary and classical Chinese poetry, he incorporates American, French, and Latin-American literary traditions into his poems.

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These nine stories span half a century of contemporary writing in Korea (1970s-2010s), bringing together some of the most famous twentieth-century women writers with a new generation of young, bold voices. Their work explores a world not often seen in the West, taking us into the homes, families, lives and psyches of Korean women, men, and children. In the earliest of the stories, Pak Wan-so, considered the elder stateswoman of contemporary Korean fiction, opens the door into two "Identical Apartments" where sisters-in-law, bound as much by competition as love, struggle to live with their noisy, extended families. O Chong-hui, who has been compared to Joyce Carol Oates and Alice Munro, examines a day in the life of a woman after she is released from a mental institution, while younger writers, such as Kim Sagwa, Han Yujoo and Ch'on Un-yong explore violence, biracial childhood, and literary experimentation. These stories will sometimes disturb and sometimes delight, as they illuminate complex issues in Korean life and literature. Internationally acclaimed translators Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton have won several awards and fellowships for the numerous works of Korean literature they have translated into English. Featuring these authors and stories: Pak Wan-so: "Identical Apartments" Kim Chi-won: "Almaden" So Yong-un: "Dear Distant Love" O Chong-hui: "Wayfarer" Kong Son-ok: "The Flowering of Our Lives" Kim Ae-ran: "The Future of Silence" Han Yujoo: "I Am the Scribe-Or Am I" Kim Sagwa: "Today Is One of Those The-More-You-Move-the-Stranger-It-Gets Days, and It's Simply Amazing" Ch'on Un-yong: "Ali Skips Rope"

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"For Richards, life in a poem is like life in a body-most at risk, and most fully at play."-David Rivard, Ploughshares Exfoliating language with wit, Nude Siren is sardonic, intimate, sump-tuous; an exacting sense of remaking the probabilities of words. Richards knows where to find the sinister in humor, and the grace conveyed by beige light. Peter Richards is a recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council Grant in Poetry, an Iowa Arts Fellowship, an Academy of American Poets Prize, and the John Logan Award. He is the author of Oubliette (Verse Press, 2001).

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One of the most versatile and rebellious poets in Poland, Świetlicki takes us into streets, cafes, rooms, and conversations where — with his signature dark glasses — he ponders metaphysical questions in the minutiae of daily life. These are poems about life, forgiveness, communication, love, death, and time: in the slit of a mailbox, he sees “Not the light but / the galloping Now.” The poems have an urban edge and bite, and Świetlicki has recorded many of them as lyrics with his rock band. The collection, his first to be translated into English, culls work from all twelve of his published volumes.

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A Winding Line gathers poems from the last decade by three of Israel’s most original and insightful poets, all of whom are women. Biblical and mythological allusions, political concerns, landscapes, and personal experiences figure throughout, while each poet brings her unique voice to the pages. Maya Bejerano’s complex poems often speak to human connection. Sharron Hass brings an interest in mythology, fairy tales, and the underworld to her poems of change and metamorphosis. Anat Zecharia addresses more overtly political and erotic themes. Together, their work speaks to the vitality of Hebrew poetry today. The poems are presented bilingually (Hebrew and English) on facing pages.

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The poet and Talmud scholar examines Jewish texts, sexuality, and human vulnerability in poems that brim with wonder, sadness, sensuality, and humor. Kosman’s second volume in English explores Jewish texts —Bible, Talmud, midrash — alongside bodies, physical desires, military experiences, even a refrigerator. Demons and fantasy enter these poems; so do politics, so does God. These are not religious poems in a conventionally liturgical, “inspirational” sense; yet they point to the big questions that religion asks: about love, hate, desire, violence, transgression, disappointment.

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Ya Shi, an “outsider” poet, who teaches math and lives 1,000 miles from the Beijing literary scene, is celebrated among lovers of Chinese poetry from the conservative to the avant-garde. This bilingual (Chinese/English) collection draws together jagged and intense short lyrics, wild nature sonnets, and genre-bending prose poetry from across his career. His work is rooted in the independent spirit, folk imagination and tough music of the people of Sichuan, and combines iconoclasm and heart to demonstrate what's possible in Chinese poetry today.

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Wu Sheng has written vivid poems about rural life and the land since the 1960s, when he became one of Taiwan’s most popular poets. His poems are rooted in the soil, embued with an unshakable affinity for the people who till it, sweat over it, and eventually are buried in it, and serve as his personal response to the industrialization, urbanization and globalization of his vanishing world.

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In this bilingual collection (Turkish and English), Zafer Senocak returns to the language of his childhood even as he writes from Germany, his home since he was eleven. Readers will find explorations of migration, exile, memory, identity, and the fine line between reason and belief — themes that have appeared throughout his career as a leading Turkish-German intellectual, but which gain new shades of meaning as he articulates them in his first language. Some poems reference mystical Islam — exploring both hidden and evident aspects of the world, the real and the dream-like — as well as Turkish poetic traditions. These poems movingly give voice to what his translator Kristin Dickinson calls “moments of cross-cultural contact and entanglement.” The book will be a fascinating companion to his earlier collection, Door Languages, published by Zephyr Press in 2008, translated from German by Elizabeth

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Darkness Spoken is the most complete volume of Ingeborg Bachmann’s poetry in English and German. Considered one of the premiere poets of her generation, Bachmann’s various awards include the Georg Büchner Prize, the Berlin Critics Prize, the Bremen Award, and the Austrian State Prize for literature. Darkness Spoken collects her two celebrated books of poetry, as well as the early and late poems not collected in book form. First published by Zephyr Press in 2006, the volume also contains 129 poems released from Bachmann’s archives that had never been translated before. Twenty-five of them also appeared in German for the first time. Continued research by Peter Fikins on Bachmann’s writing since 2006 as well as his current work on Bachmann’s biography (forthcoming in 2026 from Yale University Press), has drawn him even closer to Bachmann’s

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The poet brings his fascination with formal poetry to 21st century subjects — internet culture, science, postmodern architecture — even as he also explores intimacy, gay love, and emotionally-charged objects in this bilingual (Polish/English) collection. Dehnel's range of style and diction includes poems based on the classic Polish thirteen-syllable line and intricate rhyming stanzas, to prose poems and freer lyrics. "My restlessness… is one of my strongest traits—that insatiability for places, books, paintings, people," he says.

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Andra Schwarz’s probing, unpunctuated poems take us into her native Lusatia, a region in Eastern Germany near the Polish and Czech borders that has undergone drastic changes from coal mining, politics, and demographic shifts. Her work addresses loss, nature, displacement, marginalization, and memory from personal and collective perspectives. In the forests and hillsides, she explores her roots in exquisite language, even as she mourns that “no one comes back this way.”

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A successor to Korean feminist poets like Kim Hyesoon, Yi Won frequently writes about the perilousness of maintaining one’s human identity in a high-tech, digital environment. In this debut book in English, her poems range from avant-garde prose poems to more lyrical, if dark, free verse, as she examines isolation, death, and the passage of time — and in the process, upends polite society and Korean literary culture.

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Derek Chung’s poems capture the East-meets-West synergy of Hong Kong’s cosmopolitan culture, while tracking the city’s myriad transformations over the past two decades. Though his poems bear the influence of Anglophone poets such as Elizabeth Bishop and Seamus Heaney, Hong Kong is at the heart of his work. Writing through the lens of a father, restaurant-goer, dreamer, flaneur, protester, and more, Chung captures a city in motion—and the joy, loss, and heartbreak that comes with loving Hong Kong.

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In these self-mocking poems — populated with youths and elders, cellphones and televisions — Jiang Tao presents and dissects a discontent with the state of the world. The complex use of metaphor highlights his profound wit and poetic mastery, building subtle layers of satire that act as commentary and proposed remedy for society’s flaws. But melancholy, nostalgia, dispassion, and the occasional lyricism also come into play as he explores the passage of time, city life, materialism, economic realities, and the difficulties of human communication and connection. Jiang Tao’s verse is, as translator Josh Stenberg has written, “a quintessential expression of urban malaise in contemporary China.”

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