Search results for ""zephyr press""

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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One of Serbia’s most important living writers, Marija Knežević writes poems that often read as narratives, replete with characters, humor, pathos, and unexpected twists. Readers will meet a father and daughter frolicking on a Mediterranean beach during the continuing refugee crisis, or an Inca girl whose world will be destroyed by “milk-colored people,” or a beloved worldly heiress who wears men’s pajamas. Knežević also writes more classical lyrics about love, relationships, writing (or the blocks to writing), and an ample range of other topics. Her work fearlessly and frequently addresses current events and social issues, both in urban Belgrade where she lives, and more global concerns.

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Vaan Nguyen has been described as “a veritable juggler of Hebrew,” a poet whose work radically remixes world classics and pop culture, the personal and the political, past and present. Born in 1982 in Israel to refugees of the Vietnam War, Nguyen’s debut collection The Truffle Eye addresses questions of identity and cultural legacy from what she has described as “points of emotion and shock.” Her poems travel far and wide, between Tel Aviv and Hanoi, taking in views of Manhattan, Paris, Milan, Salzburg, Pasadena and more. Through these movements, Nguyen reflects on how our lives take shape in the daily migrations we make between lovers, family, work, and the places we call home.

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Like her mentor, the late celebrated Hong Kong author PK Leung, Natalia completed her PhD studies at the University of California, San Diego, which has given her a leg up in terms of visibility and familiarity with the North American academic community. Without writing overtly political verse, her poems engage directly with the current turmoil in Hong Kong (and broader China) politics and society. Apart from her university work, she is the guest anchor of Radio Hong Kong’s Performing Arts program. Her recent publications in Chinese include Flying Coffin, which received the 9th Biennial Award for Chinese Literature (Poetry) in 2007, and Butterfly of Forbidden Colors: The Artistic Image of Leslie Cheung, which received the Hong Kong Book Prize as well as the 2008 “Best Book of the Year” award.

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1.) Combines a love story, suspense, tragedy and an inside-look in the business of music; 2.) Written by someone who has spent her entire adult life in the music world, as wife of acclaimed violinist Zvi Zeitlin and close friend to some of the biggest names in classical music, including Leonard Bernstein, Itzhak Perlman, Gary Graffman, Jerome Lowenthal, and others; 3.) Will appeal to book clubs, and publisher will include book club discussion guide on web site; 4.) Taps into growing interest in musical novels, as indicated by growing number of musical and literary web sites that include lists of them (Classical.net, Amazon.com, Violinist.com, goodreads.com, etc.)

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First in a series of bilingual Polish books.

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"… a highly developed range that's very beautiful."—Leslie Scalapino Zhang Er grasps for the spiritual through objects of the mundane, quietly detailing the wonder and desperation that courses through human lives. In these poems, the eye watches the eye so that no facet of our existence remains unexplored. "Zhang Er belongs to the generation beyond lament or anger over the hardship endured by Chinese intellectuals, from overthrown rebellion to construction, from confusion to clarity, from darkness to light (ambiguity to clarity). She walks out of suffering and uncertainty, discovers the loveliness, preciousness of life and self-respect . . ."—(New World Poetry Bimonthly) From the poem "Verses on Bird": The river is moving. The blackbird must be flying. From classical fugues to Romanticism, this effort produced Schubert. When storms attack, the nightjar’s cry Swells. The noble revolution will require great Sacrifice, yet do not ask me to capture this process on the black And white keys, nor to switch to another tone. I could not find two birds with identical pitch. With nothing to induce it, innocence makes me walk Into rushing water as if I were brave. Empty space is great, but nothing Repeats itself there. Whether I do Or whether I don’t; from each, the sum of the piano’s voice will rise. Not to be doubted: bird writes poem, one vowel at a time. Zhang Er was born in Beijing, China and moved to the United States in 1986. Her poetry, nonfiction and essays have appeared in publications throughout the world, and she is the author of multiple books in Chinese and in English translation. She has also participated in projects sponsored by the New York Council for the Arts and by the Minetta Brook Foundation.

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Chinese Writing Today is an anthology of contemporary Chinese poetry, prose and essays taken from the literary journal Jintian (Today). Jintian has been the foremost voice of contemporary Chinese writing since its inception on "The Democracy Wall" in Beijing in 1978, and its subsequent reinvention in 1989. This is the third volume in the series and the first undertaken by a U.S. publisher. Authors include Bei Dao, Gao Er Tai, Yang Lian, and Zhu Wen—names that will only continue to grow in importance as Chinese literature expands the established Western canon. "This anthology is a window into the minds and lives of some of the world’s finest young writers."—Gary Snyder

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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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There has been a growing interest in Polish literature in the past decade, but only a tiny number of titles are available in English, particularly of Polish poetry. This is the third in Zephyr Press' New Polish Writing series, which came out of our anthology "Carnivorous Boy Carnivorous Bird: Poetry from Poland"(2004). The book will include a critical introduction to place Dycki's poetry in a larger context of contemporary Polish poetry. According to the Internet, there are almost 70 colleges and universities in the US offering Polish studies, 83 offering Slavic Studies, and 66 cities that have a sizable Polish or Polish-American community.

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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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Polonskaya’s second book with Zephyr reflects unflinchingly upon themes of exile and the anguish it can cause, home, war, authoritarianism, and personal relationships. Trains and ships figure in many poems, but their overall trajectory take us to the edge of a precipice: of loss, separation, death, and mortality. The award-winning poet lives in Germany because of threats she received in Russia after writing poems of political dissent, including poems for Kursk: An Oratorio Requiem, about the 2000 sinking of the Russian submarine. Those oratorio poems were included in Paul Klee’s Boat, published by Zephyr in 2013, and short-listed for both the 2014 PEN Poetry in Translation Award and the 2014 Best Translated Book Award. This bilingual edition of To the Ashes will allow English-speaking and Russian readers to read Polonskaya’s latest work, as she can no longer publish her poetry in her native country.

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Xiang Yang's poetry stands as elegant testimony to the Taiwan experience. From start to finish, the collection is an articulation of Taiwan's identity imbued with salient cultural details. The range and variety of his seven books of poetry include the development of a new formalism, narrative verse forms, and a strong engagement with Taiwanese dialect poetry. Since the publication of his cycle The Four Seasons (1986) he has written little, publishing but a single collection titled Chaos in 2005. In the intervening years, he has earned a PhD in journalism and moved from journalism to academia, devoting himself primarily to teaching. Apart from writing and his academic life, Xiang Yang is an established woodblock artist.

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One of Israel's most celebrated poets, Tuvia Ruebner has been awarded every major literary prize in Israel, including the Prime Minister's Prize and the prestigious Israel Prize (2008), and numerous awards in Germany, including the Konrad Adenauer Literature Prize (2012). Born in Slovakia, he is a prolific poet who wrote his first works in German, and began writing in Hebrew in 1953. His work is pervaded with a sense of both public and personal loss, including that of his first homeland, culture, and family in the Holocaust, and later on, his first wife and son. He immigrated to Mandatory Palestine in 1941, and eventually settled in Kibbutz Merhavia where he lives today.

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Zodiac is a bilingual sequence of poems loosely organized around the signs of the zodiac, which considers the turn of the millennium, the history of Albania and the Adriatic region, and the author's place in the universe as he confronts his own mortality and his decision to remain in his homeland after the fall of communism. Born in Durrës, Albania, in 1949, Moikom Zeqo is the author of more than a dozen books of poetry and fiction, as well as numerous monographs on Albanian history, literature, and culture. He served as Albania's minister of culture and directed the National Historical Museum in Tirana.

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Featured writer at International Poetry Nights in Hong Kong [http://www.ipnhk.com/] in Hong Kong Featured writer at most recent Poetry International Rotterdam [http://www.poetryinternationalweb.net/pi/site/festival/poet/22909/Liu-Waitong] Potential participant (with translator Desmond Sham) for the new round of Luce Foundation Fellowships at the Vermont Studio Center [http://www.vermontstudiocenter.org/news/]

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Phoenix is a bilingual edition of a poem commissioned by Xu Bing's studio to accompany his installation—Phoenix. Xu Bing spent two years creating this work, which features two monumental birds fabricated entirely from materials harvested from construction sites in urban China, including demolition debris, steel beams, tools, and remnants of daily lives. The Phoenix will move to New York City after its current run at MASS MoCA. This edition includes over two dozen color photographs of the Phoenix interspersed between the long poem. Ouyang Jianghe is one of mainland China's most established poets. Zephyr published his first book in English translation, Doubled Shadows.

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Kopenhaga is the first comprehensive collection of prose poetry by Grzegorz Wróblewski, one of Poland’s leading contemporary writers. The book offers a series of vignettes from the crossroads of politics and culture, technology and ethics, consumerism and spirituality. It combines two tropes: the emigrant’s double identity and the ethnographer’s search for patterns. While ostensibly focused on Denmark, it functions as an investigation of alterity in the post-cold war era of ethnic strife and global capitalism. Whether he writes about refugees in Copenhagen (one of Europe’s major transnational cities), or the homeless, or the mentally ill, or any other marginalized group, Wróblewski points to the moral contradictions of a world supposedly without borders. There is something strange and indecent about people who suddenly dispose of their libraries. Recently, the well-off R. appeared at my door with a carton of books; he is moving and there is no space for them in his new apartment (which is probably bigger than the previous one). This is how Formy by Tadeusz Rózewicz (Czytelnik, Warsaw, 1958, 1st edition) ended up in Christianshavn. Last sentence of the volume: Amid all this din we walk toward silence, toward explanation. Grzegorz Wróblewski, born in 1962 in Gdansk and raised in Warsaw, has been living in Copenhagen since 1985. He has published ten volumes of poetry and three collections of short prose pieces in Poland; three books of poetry, a book of poetic prose and an experimental novel in Denmark; a book of selected poems in Bosnia-Herzegovina; and a selection of plays. His work has been translated into fifteen languages. His poems in English translation appear in many journals, anthologies, and chapbooks, as well as in two collections Our Flying Objects (Equipage Press, 2007) and A Marzipan Factory (Otoliths, 2010). Translator Piotr Gwiazda has published two books of poetry, Messages (Pond Road Press, 2012) and Gagarin Street (Washington Writers’ Publishing House, 2005). He is also the author of James Merrill and W.H. Auden: Homosexuality and Poetic Influence (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). He is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC). "Alien to Joycean effulgence, Kopenhaga is nonetheless a book of silence, exile, and cunning: silence instead of moralizing in the face of modernity’s indignities; exile from native land and language; cunning in cajoling these conditions to sing a new song, one lacking in all jubilation, still somehow victorious in the absolute character of defeat. Grim, glancingly beautiful, always necessary." —Joshua Clover " Wróblewski is the true poetic chronicler of our 21st century diaspora in all its absurdities and anxieties. Kopenhaga, his book of aphoristic prose poems, pulls out all the rhetorical stops to present us with a relentless, sardonic, and hilarious picture of a culture (at once highly particular and yet anyculture) as insane as it is public-spirited and kindly. Kopenhaga is a journey to the end of the night that always makes a U-turn in the middle, to take in the latest folly—and also self-rescue mission—of the transplant. Read it and weep—and then laugh!" —Marjorie Perloff "Wróblewski has written one of the most important books of our time: these are at once unsettling and comforting, timely and wryly moving poems about the laughable annoyances, limited joys, and the never fully present sorrows of cosmopolitanism, the life of the citizens of the world. Gwiazda has rendered this study in a language full of 'water and shouting and whalers.' I can think at the moment of no better book for you to read in this our immense and always new Copenhagen." —Gabriel Gudding

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Originally published in Chinese in 1999, Salsa has been Hsia Yü's most successful collection of poetry, selling thousands of copies in Taiwan and Hong Kong alone. Zephyr Press's 2001 edition Fusion Kitsch included a generous selection of material from Salsa, but this marks the first time that an entire Hsia Yü volume has been translated into English. Hsia Yü studied film and drama at the National Taiwan Academy of the Arts. Besides poetry she writes essays, lyrics, and stage plays. After living for many years in France, she now divides her time between Paris and Taipei.

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This delightfully illustrated reader is one of a series that uses the revolutionary educational theory of multiple intelligences to address such issues as dealing with bullies, listening, and boredom, as well as common academic stumbling blocks such as multiplication, reading comprehension, and spelling. Young readers will travel down Intelligence Avenue guided by Brilliant Brain and Magnificent Mind, in search of tools to help them grasp these difficult social and learning skills. Along the way, they will encounter the Smart Parts: Music Smart, Picture Smart, Body Smart, Number Smart, Self-Smart, Nature Smart, World Smart, and People Smart--personifications of the eight known multiple intelligences--who provide nuggets of knowledge to help overcome the problem at hand. An original rhyme at the beginning of each story introduces children to the coming adventure; teacher/parent guide provides lesson plans in tandem with each book.

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This delightfully illustrated reader is one of a series that uses the revolutionary educational theory of multiple intelligences to address such issues as dealing with bullies, listening, and boredom, as well as common academic stumbling blocks such as multiplication, reading comprehension, and spelling. Young readers will travel down Intelligence Avenue guided by Brilliant Brain and Magnificent Mind, in search of tools to help them grasp these difficult social and learning skills. Along the way, they will encounter the Smart Parts: Music Smart, Picture Smart, Body Smart, Number Smart, Self-Smart, Nature Smart, World Smart, and People Smart--personifications of the eight known multiple intelligences--who provide nuggets of knowledge to help overcome the problem at hand. An original rhyme at the beginning of each story introduces children to the coming adventure; teacher/parent guide provides lesson plans in tandem with each book.

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Polina Barskova, Anna Glazova, and Maria Stepanova all were born in the early to mid-1970s and came of age during perestroika. They are old enough to have visceral memories of Soviet life but young enough to move adeptly with the new influences, new media and new life choices introduced in the post-Soviet era. In distinct ways all three are engaged in the project of renovating Russia's great modernist tradition for a radically different historical situation. They write poems of imaginative daring, pushing recognizable scenarios into the fantastic, the surreal or the speculative, bending form and language to the task. They also display a cerebral firepower boosted by their education in institutions Soviet, European and American, and which they exercise in their chosen professions—Barskova and Glazova are academics, teaching at Hampshire College and Cornell University respectively, and Stepanova is chief editor of the influential online journal Open Space. Barskova, Glazova, and Stepanova read one another attentively and have published reviews of each other's work, a mark of how they perceive themselves as engaged in the same project of "modernizing" Russian poetry. The broad trend in Russian poetry after the collapse of Soviet-era literary paradigms has been dispersal—of hierarchies, of institutions, of poetic models and of poets themselves, many of whom live and work outside the cultural capitals, whether abroad or in the provinces. These poets are moving beyond the Russian modernists' engagement with totalitarianism to address subjects such as the Holocaust and the war in Chechnya, and they are doing so in a fundamentally new mode. "Relocations is a highly enjoyable collection of poetry introducing the English-language world to three incredibly diverse and talented women poets writing in Russian that could be as meaningful to a casual fan of poetry as to a comparative literature scholar. A much-needed, timely, fun, and all-too-relevant read in 2014." —Will Evans, Three Percent

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The period in China's recent history between the death of Mao and the debacle of 1989 can be seen as a long decade, but also historically as a "lost" decade. It is "lost" in the sense that the political engagement of intellectuals and makers of culture was erased by China's official history makers; it is also "lost" in that its memory has been abandoned even by many who lived through it; "lost" also in the embarrassed silence of those who prefer to focus on the subsequent economic miracle of the 1990s that gave rise to today's more prosperous China; and "lost" as a time of opportunity for cultural and political change that ultimately did not happen. The relevance of the lost decade to China's living, if untold, history was once more made clear by the conferral of the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize on Liu Xiaobo, a political activist since 1989, and by the awarding of the 2010 Neustadt literature prize to the poet Duoduo whose poetry and personal trajectory loom large in Gregory B. Lee's book. Gregory B. Lee was educated in London and Peking. He has taught at the universities of Cambridge, London, Chicago, Hong Kong, and Lyon, and is currently chair professor of Chinese and transcultural studies at City University of Hong Kong. He is the author of Dai Wangshu: The Life and Poetry of a Chinese Modernist; Troubadours, Trumpeters, Troubled Makers: Lyricism, Nationalism and Hybridity in China and Its Others; and Chinas Unlimited: Making the Imaginaries of China and Chineseness.

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Few of Andrei Sen-Senkov's patients and colleagues know of his status as one of Russia's better-known contemporary poets, but he doesn't lose much sleep over this. Indeed, in person Sen-Senkov exhibits none of the pathos of the Inspired Lyricist. He is just as likely to complain about the weather, bemoan the latest political or natural disaster, or exclaim breathlessly over a newly discovered jazz musician as he is to discuss poetry. And when you read his poems, it all makes sense: for Sen-Senkov, anything can be poetry, everything is poetry. Born in 1968 in Dushanbe (now capital of Tajikistan), Sen-Senkov moved to central Russia following the break-up of the Soviet Union. He moved to Moscow in the beginning of the 2000s and joined the city's lively literary scene, although he works primarily as a gynecologist. His involvement in literary life has been as eclectic and wide-ranging as his choice of subjects: a tireless advocate of artistic innovation, Sen-Senkov participates in events devoted to visual poetry, sound poetry, video poetry, and other multidisciplinary endeavors, as well as traditional poetry readings. Sen-Senkov's poetry comes across easily and well in translation. Some of his imaginative leaps are more obscure than others, but this only increases the pleasure gained from following them. As a poet he is anti-hermetic--he writes to be understood, and he is generous in sharing his observations. Translators and English-language readers alike can delight in the fact that the intuitive logic of his imagination essentially transcends linguistic boundaries.

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First collection of major Israeli poet. Bilingual edition.

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Along with the anthology In the Grip of Strange Thoughts: Russian Poetry in a New Era, and the other books in the ITG series, Aizenberg’s volume can be used as a general introduction to contemporary Russian poetry. Aizenberg is one of the most well respected critics of contemporary Russian writing, and his work has been contained in every major survey of Russian poetry.

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Ignatova also authored the screenplay for THE PERSONAL FILE OF ANNA AKHMATOVA, (dir. Semyon Aronovich, Lenfilm, 1989). Her poetry has been included in numerous anthologies in print and on the web, including Zephyr's anthology IN THE GRIP OF STRANGE THOUGHTS.

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