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Poetry
*Winner of The Griffin International Poetry Prize and the Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Award*
The title section of Kim Hyesoon's powerful new book, Autobiography of Death, consists of forty-nine poems, each poem representing a single day during which the spirit roams after death before it enters the cycle of reincarnation. The poems not only give voice to those who met unjust deaths during Korea's violent contemporary history, but also unveil what Kim calls "the structure of death, that we remain living in." Autobiography of Death, Kim's most compelling work to date, at once reenacts trauma and narrates our historical death--how we have died and how we survive within this cyclical structure. In this sea of mirrors, the plural "you" speaks as a body of multitudes that has been beaten, bombed, and buried many times over by history. The volume concludes on the other side of the mirror with "Face of Rhythm," a poem about individual pain, illness, and meditation.
In this collection of essays, talks, and reviews, Major Jackson revels in the work of poetry not only to limn and assess the intellectual and spiritual dimensions of poets, but to amplify the controversies and inner conflicts that define our age: political unrest, climate crises, the fallout from bewildering traumas, and the social function of the art of poetry itself. Accessible and critically minded, Jackson returns to the poem as an unparalleled source of linguistic pleasure that structures a multilayered "lyric self." In his interviews, Jackson illustrates poetry's distinct ability to mediate the inexplicable while foregrounding the possibilities of human song.
Collected over several decades, these essays find Jackson praising mythmaking in Frank Bidart and Ai's poetry, expressing bafflement at the silence of white-identified poets in the cause of social and racial justice, unearthing the politics behind Gwendolyn Brooks's Pulitzer Prize, and marveling at the "hallucinatory speed of thought" in a diverse range of poets including Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Brenda Hillman, Afaa Michael Weaver, Forrest Gander, and Terrance Hayes. This collection passionately surveys the radical shifts of the art and notes poetry as a necessity for a modern sensibility.
An incandescent collection from one of American poetry's most distinctive and essential voices
The Beauty opens with a series of dappled, ranging "My" poems--"My Skeleton," "My Corkboard," "My Species," "My Weather"--in which Hirshfield uses materials both familiar and unexpected to explore the magnitude, singularity, and permeability of our shared existence. Of her memory, she writes, "Like the small soaps and shampoos / a traveler brings home / then won't use, / you, memory, / almost weightless / this morning inside me." With a pen faithful to the actual yet dipped at times in the ink of the surreal, Hirshfield cuts, as always, directly to the heart of human experience. Her robust affirmation of choice even amid inevitability and her contemplation of our moral, societal, and biological intertwinings sustain poems that tune and retune the keys of a life. For Hirshfield, "Zero Plus Anything Is a World." Her recipes for that world ("add salt to hunger," "add time to trees") offer an altered understanding of our lives' losses and additions, and of the small and larger beauties we so often miss.
A collection of poems from a changing Bedouin world
Bedouin Poets of the Nafūd Desert features poetry from three poets of the Ibn Rashīd dynasty-the highwater mark of Bedouin culture in the nineteenth century. Khalaf Abū Zwayyid, ʿAdwān al-Hirbīd, and ʿAjlān ibn Rmāl belonged to tribes based around the area of Jabal Shammar in northern Arabia. A cultural and political center for the region, Jabal Shammar attracted caravans of traders and pilgrims, tribal shaykhs, European travelers (including T.E. Lawrence), illiterate Bedouin poets, and learned Arabs. All three poets lived at the inception of or during modernity's accelerating encroachment. New inventions and firearms spread throughout the region, and these poets captured Bedouin life in changing times. Their poems and the accompanying narratives showcase the beauty and complexity of Bedouin culture, while also grappling with the upheaval brought about by the rise of the House of Saud and Wahhabism. The poems featured in Bedouin Poets of the Nafūd Desert are often humorous and witty, yet also sentimental, wistful, and romantic. They vividly describe journeys on camelback, stories of family and marriage, thrilling raids, and beautiful nature scenes, offering a window into Bedouin culture and society in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A bilingual Arabic-English edition.
A major new collection from the winner of the 2019 Frost Medal for distinguished lifetime achievement in poetry
Before Our Eyes gathers more than thirty new poems by Eleanor Wilner, along with representative selections from her seven previous books, to present a major overview of her distinguished body of work. A poet who engages with history in lyrical language, Wilner creates worlds that reflect on and illuminate the actual one, drawing on the power of communal myth and memory to transform them into agents of change. In these poems, well-known figures step out of old texts to alter their stories and new figures arise out of the local air--a girl with a fury of bees in her hair, homesick statues that step down from their pedestals, a bat cave whose altar bears a judgment on our worship of war, and a frog whose spring wakening invites our own. In the process, ancient myths are naturalized while nature is newly mythologized in the service of life. Before Our Eyes features widely anthologized works such as "Sarah's Choice" and "Reading the Bible Backwards." In the new poems, Wilner records the bewildering public shocks of the current moment, when civic life is under threat, when language itself is attacked, and when poetry's lens of collective imagination becomes a way to resist falsity, to seek meaning, and to really see what is before our eyes.
The definitive selection of Robert Burns's best poetry and prose, including some newly discovered verses
There are more statues of Robert Burns in the United States than there are of any American poet. Scotland's favorite poet has been loved by generations of Americans-from Abraham Lincoln and Walt Whitman to Robert Frost, Maya Angelou, and Bob Dylan. Now this book makes Burns's greatest poetry more accessible to American readers than ever before. This is the only comprehensive selection of his work that has discreet line-by-line marginal glossing of the Scots, archaic, and obscure words, allowing readers to understand and enjoy the poems without constantly having to turn to footnotes or a glossary. Newly edited from manuscripts and early printed texts, this definitive, wide-ranging collection also introduces some recently discovered verses-and it is the only edition to present a substantial selection of Burns's important prose writings, including letters and key statements about his art. Edited and annotated by acclaimed Burns biographer Robert Crawford and textual expert Christopher MacLachlan, the book also includes a substantial introduction that puts the poet in biographical, historical, and cultural context. The Best Laid Schemes demonstrates like no other collection why Burns is considered one of the world's greatest poets of love and democracy-and why he continues to entertain, move, and intrigue readers two and a half centuries after his birth.
Entering its sixth year, Best New Poets has established itself as a crucial venue for rising poets and a valuable resource for poetry lovers. The only publication of its kind, this annual anthology is made up exclusively of work by writers who have not yet published a full-length book. The poems included in this eclectic sampling represent the best from the many that have been nominated by the country's top literary magazines and writing programs, as well as some two thousand additional poems submitted through an open online competition. The work of the fifty writers represented here provides the best perspective available on the continuing vitality of poetry as it's being practiced today.Distributed for the Samovar Press in cooperation with Meridian: The Semi-Annual from the University of Virginia
Entering its fifteenth year, Best New Poets has established itself as a crucial venue for rising poets and a valuable resource for poetry lovers. The only publication of its kind, this annual anthology is made up exclusively of work by writers who have not yet published a full-length book. The poems included in this eclectic sampling represent the best from the many that have been nominated by the country's top literary magazines and writing programs, as well as some two thousand additional poems submitted through an open online competition. The work of the fifty writers represented here provides the best perspective available on the continuing vitality of poetry as it is being practiced today.
Seamlessly matching word with sound, these poems fly off the page with lyrical beauty and a rhythmical electric charge that transports you into Sheri-D's surreal world: an empowering, sensual place where one can discover what it means to be a woman in the 21st century.
In this collection, Sheri-D's language is brilliantly alive with the wit, charm and playfulness she is known for. She reaches into the soul's dark abyss and finds that what makes us different is what makes us the same.
Just what does it mean to be human? Sheri-D Wilson traverses the extremes of the human condition, as she examines the many entendres of what it means to be -Between Lovers.
Praise for Between Lovers:
Sheri-D's poems give the tone-deaf world tone; they take the clumsy world and make it dance.--Andrei Codrescu
Passionate, gutsy, wise, these personal addresses and observations move out in a range of populist Voice. A lively and affecting collection.--Anne Waldman
Sheri-D Wilson is a poet, playwright, performer and teacher who has been called one of North America's most compelling action poets. She divides her time between Calgary and Vancouver, and recently represented Canada at the World Poetry Circus at Taos, New Mexico.
In her legendary career, artist and activist Nikki Giovanni has established herself as a writer who can entertain and challenge, and a voice for social justice who can inform and inspire in times of national crisis. Controversial, revolutionary, ethereal, or illuminating, her poems about race, Black lives, violence, gender, and family move readers of all ages and backgrounds.
With BICYCLES, she's collected poems that serve as a companion to her 1997 LOVE POEMS. An instant classic, that book--romantic, bold, and erotic--expressed notions of love in ways that were delightfully unexpected. In the years that followed, Giovanni experienced losses both public and private. A mother's passing, a sister's, too. A massacre on the campus at which she teaches. And just when it seemed life was spinning out of control, Giovanni rediscovered love--what she calls the antidote. Here romantic love--and all its manifestations, the physical touch, the emotional pull, the hungry heart--is distilled as never before by one of our most talented poets. In a time of national crisis or personal crisis, this is a collection that will open minds and change hearts as only the best art can.
Bitters is an extended quarrel with God, driven by the desire to recover what is banished to the marginal and apocryphal. In her third collection Seiferle claims whatever originates in the earth as an emissary of the divine, whether it is a starving boy in a supermarket or the maggots thriving in the skin of a cat.
Seraphim
Even houseflies must have their angels.
Principalities, at knee or elbow, the voice
of God caught within an ear, at such a pitch,
it makes the skull hum. And if I swat them,
can they blame me? Like all good messengers,
they're just testing whether we are still alive.
By such means, the priest taught me, "God creates.
All the living and the dead, just a nursery
for his hatching." So when I found a trinity
of maggots in the abdominal wall
of a living kitten, though I had to pinch
them out, I could not blame them--Shadrach,
Meshach, Abednego, pale witnesses
of a homesick God, caught in the furnace
of the flesh, hoping to sprout wings.
Against the background and harsh light of the desert Southwest or withing the darkness of European history and religion, Seiferle has created a new kind of beauty: tragic, wise, open to every possibility. And just as the liquor of the title are colorful, earthy draughts of distilled spirits with an ancient medicinal history, so too are they a fitting metaphor for these darkly humorous and curative poems.
Rebecca Seiferle's The Music We Dance To was nominated for the Pulitzer prize and poems from the volume are included in The Best American Poetry 2000. Her first book, The Ripped-Out Seam won the Bogin Memorial, the Writers' Exchange, and the Writers' Union Poetry Prize. Her translation of Cesar Vallejo's Trilce won the 1992 PenWest Translation Award. She lives in Farmington, NM.
This anthology begins with the well-known Black Mountain Poets--Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, and Denise Levertov--but also includes the artist Josef Albers and the musician John Cage, as well as the often overlooked women associated with the college, M. C. Richards and Hilda Morley.
Longlisted for the 2023 PEN America Voelcker Award for Poetry Collection. American Book Awardñwinning poet dg okpik's second collection of poems, BLOOD SNOW, tells a continuum story of a homeland under erasure, in an ethos of erosion, in a multitude of encroaching methane, ice floe, and rising temperatures.
Here, in a true Inupiaq voice, okpik's relationship to language is an access point for understanding larger kinships between animals, peoples, traditions, histories, ancestries, and identities. Through an animist process of transfiguration into a shaman's omniscient voice, we are greeted with a destabilizing grammar of selfhood. okpik's poems have a fraught relationship to her former home in Anchorage, Alaska, a place of unparalleled natural beauty and a traumatic site of devastation for Alaskan native nations and landscapes alike. In this way, okpik's poetry speaks to the dualistic nature of reality and how one's existence in the world simultaneously shapes and is shaped by its environs.
"For okpik, subject and environs, exterior and interior are inseparable."--Diego B-ez, Harriet Books, Poetry Foundation
Poetry. Native American Studies.
"Blue Hour is an elusive book, because it is ever in pursuit of what the German poet Novalis called 'the [lost] presence beyond appearance.' The longest poem, 'On Earth, ' is a transcription of mind passing from life into death, in the form of an abecedary, modeled on ancient gnostic hymns. Other poems in the book, especially 'Nocturne' and 'Blue Hour, ' are lyric recoveries of the act of remembering, though the objects of memory seem to us vivid and irretrievable, the rage to summon and cling at once fierce and distracted.
"The voice we hear in Blue Hour is a voice both very young and very old. It belongs to someone who has seen everything and who strives imperfectly, desperately, to be equal to what she has seen. The hunger to know is matched here by a desire to be new, totally without cynicism, open to the shocks of experience as if perpetually for the first time, though unillusioned, wise beyond any possible taint of a false or assumed innocence."-- Robert Boyers
Blue Pastures collects fifteen prose works from Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winning poet Mary Oliver.
"This transcendent collection is Oliver's joyful sharing of her love of her craft."--Library Journal
With consummate craftsmanship, Mary Oliver has fashioned fifteen luminous prose pieces: on nature, writing, and herself and those around her. She praises Whitman, denounces cuteness, notes where to find the extraordinary, and extols solitude. Nature speaks to her and she speaks to nature.
"This book is biased, opinionated; also it is also joyful, and probably there is despair here too...But the reader will find the pleasures more certain, and more constant, than the rills of despond. Thus it has turned out in my life thus far, influenced by the sustaining passions: love of the wild world, love of literature, love for and from another person." -Mary Oliver
You will come away bruised
but this will give you poetry."
"Metaphors, puns, surrealist visions, converted into sharp, disturbing little narratives . . . only a poet, and a good one, could have written it."--The Atlantic Monthly
W.S. Merwin's acclaimed short prose--many of which first appeared in The New Yorker--blur the distinction between fiction, poetry, essay, and memoir. Reminiscent of Kafka, Borges, and Beckett, they evoke mythical patterns and unlikely adventures and raise questions about art, reality, and meaning. As the Saturday Review remarked, they have "astonishing range and power."
The Book of Fables is an affordable paperback of all the short prose from two out-of-print collections, The Miner's Pale Children and Houses and Travellers. The pieces run from a single sentence to a dozen pages and create a poetic landscape both severe and sensuous.
From "A Garden"
You are a garden into which a bomb once fell and did not explode, during a war that happened before you can remember. It came down at night. It screamed, but there were so many screams. It was heard, but it was forgotten. It buried itself. It was searched for but it was given up. So much else had been buried alive . . .
Poet and translator W.S. Merwin has long been committed to artistic, political, and environmental causes in both word and deed. He has received nearly every major literary accolade, including the 2005 National Book Award in Poetry for Migration. Merwin lives in Hawaii, where he cultivates endangered palms.
"The greatest poet of the 20th century in any language."--Gabriel Garcia Marquez
"His enormous scope was due to the fact that he dared take on the risks of impurity, imperfection, and, yes, banality. He had to do it, in order to name a world. Our world."--New York Times
"Neruda lived a life of passionate engagement and his work was ambitious in every sense."--Los Angeles Times
When Nobel Laureate Pablo Neruda was a teenager, he pawned a family heirloom to fund the publication of his first book, Book of Twilight, which--until now--has never been published in its entirety in the United States.
Presenting the highly romantic style refined and empowered in his later books, Neruda's debut introduces a bold poet unafraid to take risks, push boundaries, and write towards an unapologetic romanticism. Everything we know about Neruda--all his gestures, hyperbole, and effusiveness--appears vividly and for the first time in these poems.
William O'Daly's superb English translations are presented with the original Spanish en face.
From "Prayer"
In this hour in which the lilacs
calmly shake their leaves
to cast off the impure dust,
my untouched spirit flies,
passes the orchard and the fence,
opens the door, jumps the wall
and goes tangling up on its way . . .
Pablo Neruda is one of the world's most beloved and bestselling poets. He won the Nobel Prize in 1971 and died in his native Chile in 1973.
Award-winning new translations of a major contemporary Italian poet
Brief Homage to Pluto and Other Poems collects forty-five poems by Fabio Pusterla, one of the most distinguished Italian-language poets writing today. Born in Switzerland and resident in Italy, Pusterla engages the pressing moral concerns of his age and excavates the hidden realities of our concrete world. These are poems of disquieting Alpine landscapes and rift zones, filled with curious fauna, lanced with troubling memories, built "from the bottom, from the margins, from outside" the mainstream. Pusterla is the author of eight critically acclaimed books of poetry and has received several major literary prizes. Selected and translated by Will Schutt, himself an award-winning poet, this volume draws from Pusterla's six most recent collections to capture a wide range of the poet's work. With English translations and Italian originals on facing pages, Brief Homage to Pluto and Other Poems deftly introduces one of Europe's most ambitious, imaginative, and humane poets to English-speaking readers.
