Search results for ""Zephyr Press""

The poet travels from her home in the United States to her ancestral village in Shanxi province to bury the ashes of her paternal grandparents in a ritual lasting several days. The narrative arc of the story movingly explores death and life, a multi-branched and multi-generational clan, and ancient and modern belief systems, as it moves toward a tragic climax. First Mountain is bilingual on facing pages, and Zhang Er's third book to be published by Zephyr Press.

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"The Burden of Being Burmese displays an extraordinary fertile and febrile imagination—one that will both delight and disturb American readers."—Marjorie Perloff "A brilliantly off-kilter book."—John Ashbery Ko Ko Thett writes that he is "a poet by choice and a Burmese by chance." The poems in this collection—the first major volume in English by a contemporary Burmese poet—range from "faddish sugar crystals," written in Burmese for his 1996 illegal campus chapbook in Yangon, to his autumn 2014 "anxiety attack" in the Netherlands, where he now lives. Thett is the co-editor and translator of the seminal volume Bones Will Crow: 15 Contemporary Burmese Poets.

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Ko ko thett’s poems — described by John Ashbery as “brilliantly off-kilter” — bring oddball lists, linguistic inventiveness, and sardonic humor to the brutal contradictions of life and history in and outside of his native Burma. In some poems he muses on chairs or metaphors or potatoes, while elsewhere, and often with the same, dispassionate tone, he turns his gaze on a strangulating bureaucracy or the horrific treatment of prisoners. Thett writes in Burmese and in English. In this second volume to appear in English, most are English originals but thirteen will be presented bilingually on facing pages.

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A seminal work from the second wave of Chinese modernism. So great is Ya Hsien's influence on younger generations of Taiwanese and Chinese writers that he is sometimes referred to simply as "The Poet." Yet he never wrote a second book after Abyss appeared in an expanded edition in 1971. This single book's variety and virtuosity have made it a modern classic and the poet something of a legend. A new documentary, "Ya Hsien: A Life that Sings," was nominated for Best Documentary at the 2015 Taipei Film Festival. Under the Barber Pole The barbers sing Always it's the same wheat-harvest festival Always an abundance of rye without ears Always it is reaped, reaped On the land of inspiration A small southern path leads to ears of grain And it's also a kind of horticultural school A kind of beauty A kind of agricultural reform A kind of taste for something other than Greek sculpture The barbers sing Ya Hsien's poetry runs the gamut from realism to surrealism, incorporating elements of folksong and modernist poetics, expressing a wide emotional range, and deftly capturing the critical spirit of the times. The sixty poems are divided into seven sections that present differing styles and themes, including "Wartime," "Songs without Music", and "Wild Water Chestnuts." The pen name Ya Hsien (his given name is Wang Ching-Lin) means "mute string." Ya Hsien lives in Vancouver, British Columbia. Award-winning translator John Balcom lives in Monterey, California.

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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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"Subtle and compelling, Bai Hua is among the best in contemporary Chinese poetry."—David Der-wei Wang, Harvard University "Fish" Unfathomable, the fish can't sing swimming from silence to silence It needs things, it needs to speak but it stares blindly at a stone The strength of endurance is too precise Senility urges it to walk the road of kindness What is it? Image of a people or an act of soundless immersion? The face of grievance veers toward shadow the silence of death toward error Born as metaphor to clarify a fact: the throat where ambiguous pain begins Considered the central literary figure of the post-Obscure (post-"Misty") poetry movement during the 1980s, Bai Hua was born in Chongqing, China, in 1956. After graduating from Guangzhou Foreign Language Institute, he taught at various universities before working as an independent writer. His first collection of poems, Expression (1988), found immediate critical acclaim. A highly demanding writer, Bai Hua has a small but selective poetic output: between the mid-'80s and 2007 Bai Hua wrote fewer than one hundred poems, most of which continue to command a large audience across China. After a silence of more than a decade, he began writing again in 2007. This bilingual selection is a comprehensive overview of Bai Hua's writing career. Fiona Sze-Lorrain writes and translates in French, English, and Chinese. Her recent work includes Water the Moon (Marick Press, 2010). Co-director of Vif Éditions and one of the editors at Cerise Press, she is also a zheng concertist.

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First book in English translation since 2005 for celebrated Russian poet Translator, Wachtel, is one of the most well-known and respected Russian translators and academics working today Over the past few years Polonskaya has taken part in a number of writers' residency programs in the U.S., which means that we will not be starting from square one with name recognition, and we will be able to use those previous contacts to advertise this title

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In a 1989 interview, Han Dong declared that he wrote poetry for nobody, not even himself. He likens the poet to a roofer: "I write poetry for the constitution of poetry, just as a roofer gives no thought to who lives in the house whose roof he is covering—he builds to meet the criteria of what a house is. Poetry is not subordinate to purposes beyond itself: its highest purpose is to be without purpose." So–and–so's come to a sad end . . ." In the gloom, he smiles gently, lovingly As if to say I can rely on him in this world of nothingness "But the thing is, we could never be sure . . ." "We probably should" and "Possibly". . . Earnest words like the thread in a foster mother's hand As she darns a monk's ragged robe That's a story that can't be darned "Poor man!"—The thread is knotted But the knot in my heart tries to pass through the needle's eye The tree leaves at dusk have an oily gleam Han Dong was born in 1961 in Nanjing, where he continues to work as a full-time writer. He is also a respected novelist—his first, published in translation as Banished! by University of Hawai'i Press, was longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize 2008. Nicky Harman lives in the United Kingdom. Besides translation work, Harman is active on the Chinese translated fiction website Paper Republic and in literary translation organizations in the United Kingdom.

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Flash Cards is a primer of modern Chinese life, constructing a complex philosophical vision from swatches of daily events and observations. As Yu Jian has written about his own work: “It is possible to see eternity—to see everything—in a teacup or a sweet wrapper. Everything in the world is poetry.” An eighteen-year-old college girl walks to class on a spring morning rosy cheeks long legs inside a wool skirt only a small wild part revealed beautiful girl chest held high a cup of tea between her hands a book beneath her elbow crossing the flower garden looking straight ahead she is rushing to catch a philosophy class Yu Jian, born in 1954 in Kunming, China, is a poet, author, and documentary film director. He began writing poetry in the early 1970s, influenced both by classical Chinese poetry and modern Western writers such as Walt Whitman. Yu Jian is a major figure among the "Third Generation Poets” who came after the “Misty Poetry” movement of the early 1980s. Wang Ping’s books include two collections of poetry, The Magic Whip and Of Flesh & Spirit, and the cultural study Aching for Beauty: Footbinding in China. Her novel The Last Communist Virgin was winner of the 2008 Minnesota Book Award in the category of Novel & Short Story and the 2007 Book Award from the Association for Asian American Studies in the category of Poetry/Prose. Ron Padgett’s translations include Blaise Cendrars' Complete Poems, Guillaume Apollinaire's Poet Assassinated, and, with Bill Zavatsky, Valery Larbaud's Poems of A. O. Barnabooth. A chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Padgett was named officer in the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government. In 2009 he received the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America.

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Only anthology of its kind. Earlier anthologies of Polish poetry focused on classical, post-communist, and women's writing in the 80s. Bilingual collection of the “younger lions” of Polish poetry

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Twelve years ago, a guy named Bush was president, the country was in the midst of turmoil in the Middle East, and, although the president enjoyed unprecedented support, seeds of opposition were beginning to spread. Some things are slow to change. Meanwhile, Boston was experiencing a harsh recession and Jamaica Plain (one of Boston’s southern neighborhoods) became a low-rent mecca for aspiring artists, musicians, and writers. A blend of inspiration, naiveté, technology, and vision led a handful of these artists to found compost magazine. Their mission was to facilitate a better understanding of the world’s people through art and literature by re-internationalizing poetry in the United States, by showcasing emerging and established artists in the Boston area and across the continent. Early issues featured translations from Russian, Bengali, and Bulgarian; sketches and artwork by inter-national and Boston-area artists; and poetry and interviews with Robert Pinsky, KRS-ONE, and Rosanna Warren. Each issue contained a feature on the poetry of a culture other than mass culture USA, a section called "Hear America Singing" that featured established and emerging writers from the U.S., and a section that presented Boston-area artists and writers. Much of the inspiration for compost’s international slant came from the publisher James Laughlin and the translator Kenneth Rexroth. Laughlin was one of compost’s earliest enthusiasts, as well as their most frequent contributor; and the magazine created a Memorial Translation Prize to honor Kenneth Rexroth. Greatest Hits contains a range of work from compost’s twelve-year run, an overview of the magazine’s conception and history from two of its editors, and a preface by Rosanna Warren. Kevin Gallagher and Margaret Bezucha are two of the founding editors of compost magazine.

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Shcherbina emerged in the early 1980s as the spokesperson for the new, independent Moscow culture. Her work was first published in the official press of the Soviet Union in 1986, and five volumes of her poetry were published in samizdat prior to 1990. Her poetry is now widely published in both established and experimental journals at home and abroad, and has been translated into Dutch, German, French, and English. Shcherbina’s poetry blends the personal with the political, and the source for her material is pulled from classical literature, as well as French and German cultural influences. "Still-Life" Zing—Boom—Snap: drop here and there drop the seed senses the ground like a greedy trap. Whether it needs to fall, it needs to stay put as the uttermost prophetic white grasslet in the air and kafka, with golden inks a crazy engraver writes: "The seed succeeded, conceived immaculate." The seed Zing—Snap—Boom: sets out at random either toward this mother or that mother or swimming orphaned toward a leeside cutter: hurrah, an oasis! hurrah, an oasis! And all of it a mess! Snap—Boom—Zing: my mother's a sun descended from yellow melons, father a boomerang of moons a lunar elk, between them a euclidean parallel: il mirroring il, elle mirroring elle.The seed, mothlike, like trout knocks knocks against the lantern's light locked behind a glass door… Still-life: pitch dark on market day. Tatiana Shcherbina Shcherbina was awarded a Bourse de Création from the French Ministry of Culture. After living abroad for several years in the early 1990s, she returned to Moscow, where she has served as editor-in-chief of the cultural journal Estet (Aesthete) since 1995.

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1. Seminal collection of Russian contemporary poetry (in bilingual format). 2. More than 2500 paper and 500 cloth copies sold since initial publication in March of 99. 3. Received outstanding reviews from “Choice”, “Harvard Review”, and others

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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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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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Considered a representative figure of the post-1970s Chinese poets, Yu Xiang is part of a new generation of contemporary Chinese poets following in the footsteps of the "Obscure" (otherwise known as "Misty") poets and the post-"Obscure" writers. If identification is indeed a shadow act of figuration, Yu Xiang does not care for any post-age or post-modern label. Her response toward specific social or political realities in China during these recent years differ from her predecessors' during their respective epochs, in the sense that she does not necessarily depict them from an oblique stance. She does not merely dwell in ambiguities, contradictions and ambivalence. Nor does she present her work as a purely journalistic understanding of the downtrodden: impoverished villagers, traumatized mothers who lost children during the collapse of "tofu-skin" schools during the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. Instead, she depicts characters with a comparative eye—not just as a witness—but also from the starting point of having "felt a feeling," an epiphany. Unafraid of going near politically radioactive realities and histories, Yu Xiang is least interested in scoring ideological points, or telling "her" side of a narrative, be it as an artist or a social critic. At first read, each of Yu Xiang's poems comes across as an intimate address with a personal touch. Through poetry, she seeks a specific reader and listener, while being a reader and listener herself. She is interested in peeling silence with verses. Fiona Sze-Lorrain writes and translates in French, English, and Chinese. Her recent translation work includes Wind Says (Zephyr Press)—collected poems of Bai Hua. "Yu Xiang’s poems are the poetic equivalent of shoegazer rock. She takes the mundane—a whiff of cigarette smoke, a falling leaf, a housefly—and stares at it so intently that it splits open to reveal something unexpected." — Naomi Long Eagleson, wordswithoutborders.org

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One of most acclaimed Beijing poets of his generation Honored three times as one of China’s top ten poets The Guardian published a major article on Zang Di and one of his poems: https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2009/may/18/poem-of-the-week-zeng-di Eleanor Goodman’s translation of Something Crosses My Mind, by Chinese poet Wang Xiaoni, won the 2015 Lucien Stryk Asian Literature Prize and was short-listed for the 2015 Griffin International Poetry Prize Several poems appeared in July 2016 issue of Harvard Review Bilingual on facing pages, with introduction and notes to the poems

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A rising star in Polish letters explores faith, eros, death and the making of poems in these deft, personal musings. Hailed in Poland as "the hope of Polish poetry" and the inheritor of its metaphysical tradition, Dabrowski offers these "posts" from city streets and trains, his bedroom and Skype, a hospital and his own notebook, employing colloquial language to confront weighty subjects: "And right here /poetry appears, and forces a stag to bolt / in front of the hood of your car." Tadeusz Dabrowski is the author of six books and recipient of numerous awards, and his work has been translated into 20 languages. Antonia Lloyd-Jones's brilliant translations have twice won her the Found in Translation Award.

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Paper-thin Skin is the debut collection by Aigerim Tazhi, who has broken ground as a Kazakhstani woman poet by gaining attention both in Russia and internationally. Fish, insects, birds, the sea, the sky, humans seeking connection, and death figure frequently in these succinct poems, as do windows, mirrors, and eyes: these are poems of observation and deep reflection. Tazhi gently insists that we look at words and the world “in the eye,” as she seeks to create what translator J. Kates calls a “mystic community of communication.”

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