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Poetry
Millennial Harvest is a unique and most wonderful project. Neither a book of scholarly essays nor solely a collection of poetry, Millennial Harvest interweaves poetry and prose into a continuous personal narrative in the manner of Dante's La Vita Nuova. It does so with a tremendous intellectual scope, a very wide range of references, and an original vision of the evolution of a writer's consciousness, as well as with sharp and memorable portraits of some of the people involved--Simone Weil, Albert Einstein, Erika Mann, and William Carlos Williams, for example. Above all, Millennial Harvest is the autobiography of a beloved, highly gifted, and most unusual man.
For seventy or so years, Charles Bell has been a great thinker and a great teacher and has brought enlightenment and joy to countless others. Like that of many of the great thinker-teachers, a number of Charles' own writings have gone unpublished or are out of print.
Now, for the first time, all his poetic work is brought together, thoroughly revised and in a way that allows each part to be read in relationship to the rest--a boon to all Bell's admirers and to the many admirers who will doubtless spring up, of whom there will be many. Charles' writing makes highly entertaining, indeed gripping, reading and is full of startling insights; and it is often very, very funny.
The first English translation of the earliest Latin poems about miracles performed by the Virgin Mary, composed in twelfth-century Canterbury by a Benedictine monk who inspired Chaucer.
Nigel (ca. 1135-1198), a Benedictine monk at Christ Church in Canterbury, is best known for The Mirror of Fools--a popular satire whose hero Burnellus the Ass is referenced in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Nigel's oeuvre also includes other important poems and hagiography. The Miracles of the Virgin is the oldest Latin poem about miracles performed by Mary. This collection features seventeen lively tales in which the Virgin rescues a disappointed administrator from a pact with the devil, has a Roman emperor killed by a long-dead martyr, saves a Jewish boy from being burned alive, and shields an abbess from the shame of pregnancy. Each story illustrates the boundlessness of Mary's mercy. In the Tract on Abuses, a letter that resembles a religious pamphlet, Nigel rails against ecclesiastical corruption and worldly entanglements. Alongside authoritative editions of the Latin texts, this volume offers the first translations of both works into English.
Callimachus (ca. 303-ca. 235 BC), a proud and well-born native of Cyrene in Libya, came as a young man to the court of the Ptolemies at Alexandria, where he composed poetry for the royal family; helped establish the Library and Museum as a world center of literature, science, and scholarship; and wrote an estimated 800 volumes of poetry and prose on an astounding variety of subjects, including the Pinakes, a descriptive bibliography of the Library's holdings in 120 volumes. Callimachus' vast learning richly informs his poetry, which ranges broadly and reworks the language and generic properties of his predecessors in inventive, refined, and expressive ways. The "Callimachean" style, combining learning, elegance, and innovation and prizing brevity, clarity, lightness, and charm, served as an important model for later poets, not least at Rome for Catullus, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, and the elegists, among others.
This edition, which replaces the earlier Loeb editions by A. W. Mair (1921) and C. A. Trypanis (1954, 1958), presents all that currently survives of and about Callimachus and his works, including the ancient commentaries (Diegeseis) and scholia. Volume I contains Aetia, Iambi, and lyric poems; Volume II Hecale, Hymns, and Epigrams; and Volume III miscellaneous epics and elegies, other fragments, and testimonia, together with concordances and a general index. The Greek text is based mainly on Pfeiffer's but enriched by subsequently published papyri and the judgment of later editors, and its notes and annotation are fully informed by current scholarship.
Formally fractured and yet gleefully alive and whole, E. E. Cummings's groundbreaking modernist poetry expanded the boundaries of language. In A Miscellany, originally released in a limited run in 1958, Cummings lent his delightfully original voice to "a cluster of epigrams," a poem, three speeches from an unfinished play, and forty-nine essays--most of them previously written for or published in magazines, anthologies, or art gallery catalogues. Seven years later, George J. Firmage--editor of much of Cummings's work, including Complete Poems--broadened the scope of this delightfully eclectic collection, adding seven more poems and essays, and many of Cummings's unpublished line drawings.
Together, these pieces paint a distinctive portrait of Cummings's eccentric, yet precise, genius. Like his poetry, Cummings's prose is lively; often witty, biting, and offbeat, he is an intelligent observer and critic of the modern. His essays explore everything from Cubism to the circus, equally quick to analyze his poetic contemporaries and satirize New York society. As Cummings wrote in his original foreword, A Miscellany contains "a great deal of liveliness and nothing dead." This remains true today, more than fifty years after its original publication.
Winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets, Sherry Shenoda's collection Mummy Eaters follows in the footsteps of an imagined ancestor, one of the daughters of the house of Akhenaten in the Eighteenth Dynasty, Egypt. Shenoda forges an imagined path through her ancestor's mummification and journey to the afterlife. Parallel to this exploration run the implications of colonialism on her passage.
The mythology of the ancient Egyptians was oriented toward resurrection through the preservation of the human body in mummification. Shenoda juxtaposes this reverence for the human body as sacred matter and a pathway to eternal life with the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European fascination with ingesting Egyptian human remains as medicine and using exhumed Egyptian mummies as paper, paint, and fertilizer. Today Egyptian human remains are displayed in museums. Much of Mummy Eaters is written as a call and response, in the Coptic tradition, between the imagined ancestor and the author as descendant.
Sherry Shenoda is a Coptic poet and pediatrician, born in Cairo, living near Los Angeles. Working at the intersection of human rights and child health, she serves as a pediatrician in a nonprofit health center. She is the author of The Lightkeeper: A Novel.
In "My Way, " (in)famous language poet and critic Charles Bernstein deploys a wide variety of interlinked forms--speeches and poems, interviews and essays--to explore the place of poetry in American culture and in the university. Sometimes comic, sometimes dark, Bernstein's writing is irreverent but always relevant, "not structurally challenged, but structurally challenging."
Addressing many interrelated issues, Bernstein moves from the role of the public intellectual to the poetics of scholarly prose, from vernacular modernism to idiosyncratic postmodernism, from identity politics to the resurgence of the aesthetic, from cultural studies to poetry as a performance art, from the small press movement to the Web. Along the way he provides "close listening" to such poets as Charles Reznikoff, Laura Riding, Susan Howe, Ezra Pound, Allen Ginsberg, and Gertrude Stein, as well as a fresh perspective on "L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, " the magazine he coedited that became a fulcrum for a new wave of North American writing.
In his passionate defense of an activist, innovative poetry, Bernstein never departs from the culturally engaged, linguistically complex, yet often very funny writing that has characterized his unique approach to poetry for over twenty years. Offering some of his most daring work yet--essays in poetic lines, prose with poetic motifs, interviews miming speech, speeches veering into song--Charles Bernstein's "My Way" illuminates the newest developments in contemporary poetry with its own contributions to them.
The title of the collection refers to the Mississippi Native Guards, a black regiment whose role in the Civil War has been largely overlooked by history. As a child in Gulfport, Mississippi, in the 1960s, Trethewey could gaze across the water to the fort on Ship Island where Confederate captives once were guarded by black soldiers serving the Union cause.?
The racial legacy of the South touched Trethewey's life on a much more immediate level, too. Many of the poems in Native Guard pay loving tribute to her mother, whose marriage to a white man was illegal in her native Mississippi in the 1960s. Years after her mother's tragic death, Trethewey reclaims her memory, just as she reclaims the voices of the black soldiers whose service has been all but forgotten.
One of the most noted of American fiction writers, Gilbert Sorrentino is also a brilliant poet, and has authored some nine books of poetry, including the renowned The Orangery, first published in 1978 and republished by Sun & Moon Press in 1995. This new volume of selected poems includes the poems of the Black Sparrow edition of 1981 and the numerous new poems written in the 20 years following that volume.
Elegantly designed in compact editions, printed on acid-free paper, and textually authoritative, the American Poets Project makes available the full range of the American poetic accomplishment, selected and introduced by today's most discerning poets and critics.
Here, Wendell Berry revisits for the first time his immensely popular Collected Poems, which The New York Times Book Review described as "a straightforward search for a life connected to the soil, for marriage as a sacrament, and family life" and "[returns] American poetry to a Wordsworthian clarity of purpose." In New Collected Poems, Berry reprints the nearly two hundred pieces in Collected Poems, along with the poems from his most recent collections--Entries, Given, and Leavings--to create an expanded collection, showcasing the work of a man heralded by The Baltimore Sun as "a sophisticated, philosophical poet in the line descending from Emerson and Thoreau . . . a major poet of our time."
Wendell Berry is the author of over forty works of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction, and has been awarded numerous literary prizes, including the T.S. Eliot Prize, a National Institute of Arts and Letters award for writing, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Jean Stein Award, and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. While he began publishing work in the 1960s, Booklist has written that "Berry has become ever more prophetic," clearly standing up to the test of time.
Reaching through time, language, and poetic history, A New Divan offers a lyrical conversation and opens paths of connection across cultures.
The formative work of the legendary poet who sought to write "not feelings but things I had felt"
When Rainer Maria Rilke arrived in Paris for the first time in September 1902, commissioned by a German publisher to write a monograph on Rodin, he was twenty-seven and already the author of nine books of poems. His early work had been accomplished, but belonged tonally to the impressionistic, feeling-centered world of a late-nineteenth-century aesthetic. Paris was to change everything. Rilke's interest in Rodin deepened and his enthusiasm for the sculptor's "art of living surfaces" set the course for his own pursuit of an objective ideal. What was "new" about Rilke's New Poems, published in two independent volumes in 1907 and 1908, is a compression of statement and a movement away from "expression" and toward "making realities." Poems such as "The Panther" and "Archaic Torso of Apollo" are among the most successful and famous results of Rilke's impulse. This selection from both books unites the companion volumes in a torrent of brilliant work intoxicated with the materiality of the world. Edward Snow has now improved upon the translations for which he received the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award and with which he began his twenty-year project of translating Rilke.
WINNER OF THE 2018 JAMES LAUGHLIN AWARD
Geffrey Davis's second collection of poems reads as an evolving love letter and meditation on what it means to raise an American family. In poems that express a deep sense of gratitude and wonder, Davis delivers a heart-strong prayer that longs for home, for safety for Black lives, and for the messy success of breaking through the trauma of growing up during the crack epidemic to create a new model of fatherhood. Filled with humor and tenderness, Night Angler sings its own version of a song called grace--sung with a heavy and hopeful mix of inherited notes and discovered chords.
One of the most celebrated poetry books of the year:
The New Yorker, The Best Books of Poetry of 2016
New York Times, Critics Pick
Boston Globe, Best Books listing
NPR, Best Books listing
Miami Herald, Best LGBTQ Books
San Francisco Chronicle, Top 100 Books of the Year
Library Journal, Best Books of 2016
Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times writes: "The poems in Mr. Vuong's new collection, Night Sky With Exit Wounds...possess a tensile precision reminiscent of Emily Dickinson's work, combined with a Gerard Manley Hopkins-like appreciation for the sound and rhythms of words. Mr. Vuong can create startling images (a black piano in a field, a wedding-cake couple preserved under glass, a shepherd stepping out of a Caravaggio painting) and make the silences and elisions in his verse speak as potently as his words...There is a powerful emotional undertow to these poems that springs from Mr. Vuong's sincerity and candor, and from his ability to capture specific moments in time with both photographic clarity and a sense of the evanescence of all earthly things."
"Reading Vuong is like watching a fish move: he manages the varied currents of English with muscled intuition. His poems are by turns graceful and wonderstruck. His lines are both long and short, his pose narrative and lyric, his diction formal and insouciant. From the outside, Vuong has fashioned a poetry of inclusion."--The New Yorker
"The language is painfully, exquisitely exact, the scenes haunting and indelible.... Highly recommended."--Library Journal, starred review
"Night Sky with Exit Wounds establishes Vuong as a fierce new talent to be reckoned with...This book is a masterpiece that captures, with elegance, the raw sorrows and joys of human existence."--Buzzfeed's "Most Exciting New Books of 2016"
"This original, sprightly wordsmith of tumbling pulsing phrases pushes poetry to a new level...A stunning introduction to a young poet who writes with both assurance and vulnerability. Visceral, tender and lyrical, fleet and agile, these poems unflinchingly face the legacies of violence and cultural displacement but they also assume a position of wonder before the world."--2016 Whiting Award citation
"Night Sky with Exit Wounds is the kind of book that soon becomes worn with love. You will want to crease every page to come back to it, to underline every other line because each word resonates with power."--LitHub
"Vuong's powerful voice explores passion, violence, history, identity--all with a tremendous humanity."--Slate
"In his impressive debut collection, Vuong writes beauty into--and culls from--individual, familial, and historical traumas. Vuong exists as both observer and observed throughout the book as he explores deeply personal themes such as poverty, depression, queer sexuality, domestic abuse, and the various forms of violence inflicted on his family during the Vietnam War. Poems float and strike in equal measure as the poet strives to transform pain into clarity."--Publishers Weekly
Torso of Air
Suppose you do change your life.
& the body is more than
a portion of night--sealed
with bruises. Suppose you woke
& found your shadow replaced
by a black wolf. The boy, beautiful
& gone. So you take the knife to the wall
instead. You carve & carve
until a coin of light appears
& you get to look in, at last,
on happiness. The eye
staring back from the other side--
waiting.
Born in Saigon, Vietnam, Ocean Vuong attended Brooklyn College. He is the author of two chapbooks as well as a full-length collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds. A Ruth Lilly Fellow and winner of the Whiting Award, Ocean Vuong lives in New York City.
"Nine Gates" begins with a close examination of the roots of poetic craft in "the mind of concentration" and concludes by exploring the writer's role in creating a sense of community that is open, inclusive and able to bind the individual and the whole in a way that allows each full self-expression. in between, "Nine Gates" illumines the nature of originality, translation, the various strategies by which meaning unfolds itself in language, poetry's roots in oral memory and the importance of the shadow to good art.
A person who enters completely into the experience of a poem is initiated into a deeper intimacy with life. Delving into the nature of poetry, Jane Hirshfield also writes on the nature of the human mind, perception and experience. "Nine Gates" is about the underpinnings of poetic craft, but it is also about a way of being alive in the world--alertly, musically, intelligently, passionately, permeably.
In part a primer for the general reader, "Nine Gates" is also a manual for the working writer, with each "gate" exploring particular strategies of language and thought that allow a poem to convey meaning and emotion with clarity and force. Above all, "Nine Gates" is an insightful guide to the way the mind of poetry awakens our fundamental consciousness of what can be known when a person is most fully alive.
"Nowhere have I found such humble honesty laced with such beauty. Nowhere, such boundless grace. Sarah Kay writes with a particular and rare magic, evoking emotions we may have forgotten we possess. No Matter the Wreckage is both spare and dense, uproarious and healing. An enchanting collection, imbued with courage, wisdom, lament, and triumph." - Jeanann Verlee, Author of Racing Hummingbirds
* 2011 TED speaker (recording has been viewed 3 million times online)
* First book, "B" was ranked #1 Bestselling Poetry Book on Amazon
* Featured on HBO, American Public Radio, Huffington Post, CNN.com
* Founder and Co-Director of Project VOICE
Following the success of her breakout poem, "B", Sarah Kay, in collaboration with illustrator Sophia Janowitz, released her debut collection of poetry featuring work from the first decade of her career.
"Forgive yourself for the decisions you have made, the ones you still call mistakes when you tuck them in at night"
No Matter the Wreckage presents readers with new and beloved poetry that showcases Kay's talent for celebrating family, love, travel, and unlikely romance between inanimate objects ("The Toothbrush to the Bicycle Tire"). Both fresh and wise, Kay's poetry allows readers to join her on the journey of discovering herself and the world around her. It is an honest and powerful collection.
The Books We Love in 2016 - The New Yorker
Best Poetry Collections of 2015 - The Washington Post
Best Books 2015: Poetry - Library Journal
Best Books of 2015 - NPR Books
16 Best Poetry Books of 2015 - BuzzFeed Books
Juan Felipe Herrera, the first Latino Poet Laureate of the United States and son of Mexican immigrants, grew up in the migrant fields of California.
Exuberant and socially engaged, reflective and healing, this collection of new work from the nation's first Latino Poet Laureate is brimming with the wide-open vision and hard-won wisdom of a poet whose life and creative arc have spanned chasms of culture in an endless crossing, dreaming and back again.
"[This year] Juan Felipe Herrera's Notes on the Assemblage has been a ladder of hope ..."--Ada Limón, The New Yorker
"Juan Felipe Herrera's family has gone from migrant worker to poet laureate of the United States in one generation. One generation. I am an adamant objector to the Horatio Alger myth of pulling oneself up by the bootstraps, but Herrera's story is one of epic American proportions. The heads carved into my own Mount Rushmás would be Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, Frida Kahlo, El Chapulín Colorado, Selena, and Juan Felipe Herrera. Notes from the Assemblage further carves out Herrera's place in American letters."--David Tomas Martinez
"At home with field workers, wage slaves, the homeless, little children, old folks, artists, traditionalists, the avant-garde, students, scholars and prisoners, the bilingual Juan Felipe Herrera is the real thing: a populist treasure. He will fulfill his appointment as U.S. Poet Laureate with the same high energy, savvy, passion, compassion, commitment and playfulness that his art and life's have always embodied. Bravo! Bravo!"--Al Young
"While reporters can give you the what, when, and where of a war, a poet with the enormous gifts of Juan Herrera can give you its soul."--Ishmael Reed
"I am proud that Juan Felipe Herrera has been appointed U.S. Poet Laureate, bringing his truthful, beautiful voice to all of us universally. As the first Chicano Laureate, he will empower all diverse cultures."--Janice Mirikitani
"Herrera is ... a sometimes hermetic, wildly inventive, always unpredictable poet, whose work commands attention for its style alone ... Many poets since the 1960s have dreamed of a new hybrid art, part oral, part written, part English, part something else: an art grounded in ethnic identity, fueled by collective pride, yet irreducibly individual too. Many poets have tried to create such an art: Herrera is one of the first to succeed."--The New York Times
"Herrera has the unusual capacity to write convincing political poems that are as personally felt as poems can be."--National Public Radio
Compiled when the great poet was 70 years old, November Boughs offers verse and prose reminiscences of a singular American life. Walt Whitman's reflections begin with the essay "A Backward Glance O'er Travel'd Roads," in which he discusses the genesis of his most famous and controversial book, Leaves of Grass. A selection of poetry titled "Sands at Seventy" is followed by a series of essays and recollections that include "Slang in America," "What Lurks Behind Shakespeare's Historical Plays," "The Old Bowery," and notes on the life of the Quaker abolitionist Elias Hicks, whose body -- it was rumored -- he and a youthful group of friends once attempted to exhume.
This affordable, high-quality edition of a rare book of poetry and prose provides a greater context for the interpretation of Whitman's other works. Essential reading for Whitman scholars, this volume is also of interest to historians of the Civil War, abolitionism, and nineteenth-century America.
Null Set collects the slightly obsessive possibilities that rise when we give them the space--odd jobs, trouble-making, and farm boy rambling, all in dialogue with mathematics, or William Faulkner, or other poets.
From "Hypotenuse":
HYPOTENUSE
I write three, erase it, blow rubber
shavings from the desk. Write its notation,
erase it, blow shavings. Then three 3s
erased, shavings blown, persist
for the nonce, three of nothing, nowhere
attending to discrete objects for counting,
themselves objects at any rate. To kiss,
sleep, and focus we know to close
our eyes, imagine. I do, see nothing.
The Oasis of Now is the first U.S. book publication of the works of Sohrab Sepehri (1928-1980), one of the major Iranian poets of the twentieth century. Well-versed in Buddhism, mysticism, and Western traditions, Sepehri mingled Western concepts with Eastern ones, creating a poetry unsurpassed in the history of Persian literature. In Iran, his Persian verses are often recited in public gatherings and lines from them were used as slogans by the protesters in 2009. This first full-length American volume collects poems from three of Sepehri's most important books, including the highly acclaimed Water's Footfall.
I want to know:
Why is a horse noble and the dove beloved
but no one keeps a pet vulture in a gilded cage.
Why is the humble clover trodden upon rather than the red tulip.
I want to see anew and wash the words of the world
in wind and rain.
Sohrab Sepehri wrote the poems collected in The Oasis of Now after traveling through Japan, China, and India, where he was exposed to the arts of those countries as well as the spiritual disciplines of Buddhism, Taoism, and Hinduism. This book is crucial for anyone interested in Iranian arts and culture.
Kazim Ali is author of ten books of poetry, fiction, essays, and translations. He is an associate professor at Oberlin College and founding editor of Nightboat Books.
Mohammad Jafar Mahallati is Presidential Scholar in the religion department of Oberlin College. He served as Iran's ambassador to the United Nations from 1987 to 1989 and was instrumental in brokering a peace agreement between Iran and Iraq during that time.