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Poetry

MAGNETIC FIELDS

MAGNETIC FIELDS

By: Soupault, Philippe
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An indispensible classic of French poetry, this is a new translation of Breton and Soupault's experiment with automatic writing, and also the first known work of literary surrealism.

In the spring of 1919, two young men, André Breton and Philippe Soupault, both in a state of shock after World War I, embarked on an experiment. Sick of the literary cultivation of "voice," sick of the "well-written," they wanted to unleash the power of the word and to create "a new morality" to replace "the prevailing morality, the source of all our trials and tribulations." They had a plan. They would write for a week on every day of the week and they would write fast, as fast as possible, in complete secrecy. When the week was over, the writing would be done. No touching up.

This was how The Magnetic Fields, the first sustained exercise in automatic writing, came to be. Charlotte Mandell's brilliant new translation reveals a key work of twentieth-century literature.

MAJOR WORKS

MAJOR WORKS

By: Dryden, John
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John Dryden (1631-1700) was the leading writer of his day and a major cultural spokesman following the restoration of Charles II in 1660. His work includes political poems, satire, religious apologias, translations, critical essays and plays. This authoritative edition brings together a unique combination of Dryden's poetry and prose--all the major poems in full, literary criticism, and translations--to give the essence of his work and thinking.
The collection includes the poems, MacFlecknoe and Absalom and Achitophel as well as Dryden's classical translations; his versions of Homer, Horace, and Ovid are reproduced in full. There are also substantial selections from Dryden's Virgil, Juvenal, and other classical writers. Fables, Ancient and Modern, taken from Chaucer, Ovid, Boccaccio, and Homer, his last and possibly greatest work, also appears in full.
MAJOR WORKS

MAJOR WORKS

By: Pope, Alexander
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Alexander Pope has often been termed the first true professional poet in English, whose dealings with the book trade helped to produce the literary marketplace of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In this representative selection of Pope's most important work, the texts are presented in chronological sequence so that the Moral Essays and Imitations of Horace are restored to their original position in his career.
This edition represents the single most comprehensive anthology of Pope's works. The Duncaid, The Rape of the Lock, and Imitations of Horace are presented in full, together with a characteristic sample of Pope's prose, including satires, pamphlets, and periodical writing. This edition also includes a further reading list, an invaluable biographical index as well as indexes of titles, first lines, and correspondences.
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MAJOR WORKS OF LORD BYRON ED. JEROME MCGANN

By: Byron, George Gordon Lord
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This authoritative edition brings together the complete collection of Byron's poetry and prose - all the major poems, complemented by important letters, journals, and conversations - to give the essence of his work and thinking.

Byron is regarded today as the ultimate Romantic, whose name has entered the language to describe a man of brooding passion. Although his private life shocked his contemporaries his poetry was immensely popular and influential, especially in Europe. This comprehensive edition includes the complete texts of his two poetic masterpieces Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and Don Juan, as well as the dramatic poems Manfred and Cain. There are many other shorter poems and part of the satire English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. In addition there is a selection from Byron's inimitable letters, extracts from his journals and conversations, as well as more formal writings.

About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

MAKING OF A SONNET: A Norton Anthology

MAKING OF A SONNET: A Norton Anthology

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This illuminating anthology follows the sonnet through its various moments and makers over five and a half centuries. Edward Hirsch and Eavan Boland, two of our foremost poets, focus on vicissitudes, paying particular attention to how individual poets from Shakespeare to Strand have claimed these fourteen lines: lengthened them, shortened them, elaborated on them, and, in turn, been defined by them. Three sections "The Sonnet in the Mirror," "The Sonnet Goes to Different Lengths," and "The Sonnet extraordinary durability and its reinventions. The collection opens with personal introductions by the editors, and, in the appendix, they provide "Ten Questions for a Sonnet Workshop" to jump-start a conversation between students and teachers. With more than three hundred poems, The Making of a Sonnet guides readers through a vigorous adventures in craft and practice, right up to its extraordinary resurgence in contemporary poetry.

MAKING PEACE

MAKING PEACE

By: Rosenthal, Peggy
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Anti-war poems by Denise Levertov, a passionate advocate of peace and justice and one of the greatest American poets of the twentieth century.

Denise Levertov achieved recognition as a poet at a young age, winning the admiration of such older poets as T.S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams. Though she initially drew a line between her poetic works and her commitment to peace and justice, the Vietnam War inspired a change, and at the time of her death in 1997, she was acclaimed not only for her poetry, but also for her political engagement. Making Peace collects Levertov's finest poems about war and peace, subjects which she addresses with passion and nuance. Spanning the last three decades of her life, their subjects range from Vietnam to the death-squads of El Salvador to the first Gulf War. Often brutally vividin The Certainty she writes, war / means blood spilling from living bodiesLevertov's poems always have at their core her love for humanity, even as she registers her horror at what humans do to one another.

Introduced by Levertov scholar Peggy Rosenthal, these poems mirror the destruction that we witness today, but they also hold within them, as Levertov writes, a small grain of hope.
MANFRED: A DRAMATIC POEM

MANFRED: A DRAMATIC POEM

By: Byron, George Gordon, 1788-
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George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron, but more commonly known as just Byron was a leading English poet in the Romantic Movement along with Keats and Shelley. Byron was born on January 22nd, 1788. He was a great traveller across Europe, spending many years in Italy and much time in Greece. With his aristocratic indulgences, flamboyant style along with his debts, and a string of lovers he was the constant talk of society. In 1823 he joined the Greeks in their war of Independence against the Ottoman Empire, both helping to fund and advise on the war's conduct. It was an extraordinary adventure, even by his own standards. But, for us, it is his poetry for which he is mainly remembered even though it is difficult to see where he had time to write his works of immense beauty. But write them he did. He died on April 19th 1824 after having contracted a cold which, on the advice of his doctors, was treated with blood-letting. This cause complications and a violent fever set in. Byron died like his fellow romantics, tragically young and on some foreign field.
MARRIAGE OF HEAVEN and HELL

MARRIAGE OF HEAVEN and HELL

By: Blake, William
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Once regarded as a brilliant eccentric whose works skirted the outer fringes of English art and literature, William Blake (1757-1827) is today recognized as a major poet, a profound thinker, and one of the most original and exciting English artists. Nowhere is his glorious poetic and pictorial legacy more evident than in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, which many consider his most inspired and original work.
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is both a humorous satire on religion and morality and a work that concisely expresses Blake's essential wisdom and philosophy, much of it revealed in the 70 aphorisms of his "Proverbs of Hell." This beautiful edition, reproduced from a rare facsimile, invites readers to enjoy the rich character of Blake's own hand-printed text along with his deeply stirring illustrations, reproduced on 27 full-color plates. A typeset transcription of the text is included.
MASK FOR JANUS

MASK FOR JANUS

By: Merwin, W S
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A collection centered in myth, A Mask for Janus is the 49th volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets

While Merwin's poetry as a whole is grounded in the poetic forms of many eras and societies, this first collection is inspired by classical models. Writing in American Poetry Review, Vernon Young traces the poems to "Biblical tales, Classical myth, love songs from the Age of Chivalry, Renaissance retellings; they comprise carols, roundels, odes, ballads, sestinas, and they contrive golden equivalents of emblematic models: the masque, the Zodiac, the Dance of Death."

MASNAVI BOOK 1

MASNAVI BOOK 1

By: Rumi, Jalal Al-Din
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Rumi's Masnavi is widely recognized as the greatest Sufi poem ever written, and has been called the Koran in Persian. The thirteenth-century Muslim mystic Rumi composed his work for the benefit of his disciples in the Sufi order named after him, better known as the whirling dervishes. In order to convey his message of divine love and unity he threaded together entertaining stories and penetrating homilies. Drawing from folk tales as well as sacred history, Rumi's poem is often funny as well as spiritually profound.

Jawid Mojaddedi's sparkling new verse translation of Book One is consistent with the aims of the original work in presenting Rumi's most mature mystical teachings in simple and attractive rhyming couplets.

About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

MASNAVI BOOK 2

MASNAVI BOOK 2

By: Rumi, Jalal Al-Din
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The most influential Sufi poem ever written, the six books of the Masnavi are often called the Qur'an in Persian. Book Two is concerned with the challenges facing the seeker of Sufi enlightenment. In particular it focuses on the struggle against the self, and how to choose the right
companions in order to progress along the mystical path. By interweaving amusing stories and profound homilies, Rumi instructs his readers in a style that still speaks directly to them.
Here, Jawid Mojaddedi has translated the text into accessible rhyming couplets, as he did for Oxford's award-winning edition of Book One. This edition--the first ever verse translation of Book Two, and the first translation of any kind for over eighty years--is the closest English speakers can
come to understanding the true beauty of this classic work.

About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert
introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

MASNAVI BOOK 3

MASNAVI BOOK 3

By: Mojaddedi, Jawid
$15.95
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Rumi is the greatest mystic poet to have written in Persian, and the Masnavi is his masterpiece. Divided into six books and consisting of some 26,000 verses, the poem was designed to convey a message of divine love and unity to the disciples of Rumi's Sufi order, known today as the Whirling Dervishes. Like the earlier books, Book Three interweaves amusing stories with homilies to instruct pupils in the understanding of God's meaning. It has a special focus on epistemology, illustrated with narratives that involve the consumption of food.

The first ever verse translation of Book Three of the Masnavi, It follows the original by presenting Rumi's most mature mystical teachings in simple and attractive rhyming couplets.

'Our soul each moment struggles hard with death -
Think of your faith as though it's your last breath.
Your life is like a purse, and night and day
Are counters of gold coins you've put away'

MASS FOR SHUT-INS

MASS FOR SHUT-INS

By: Daniel, Mary-Alice
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The 117th volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets, in which Mary-Alice Daniel confronts tricontinental culture shock and her curious placement within many worlds

"Against humans creating hell on earth, Daniel draws on animistic, Islamic, and syncretic Christian traditions from her native Nigeria to unleash potent incantations, rituals and spells, electric as St. Elmo's fire. Buckle up."--Rae Armantrout, judge

In Mass for Shut-Ins, African and Western mythic systems and modern rituals originate an ill-omened universe. Here, it is always night, grim night, under absurd moons. Venturing through dreamscapes, hellscapes, and lurid landscapes, poems map speculative fields of spiritual warfare. This collection is controlled chaos powered by nightmare fuel. It animates an utterly odd organism: a cosmology cobbled with scripture, superstition, mass media, mad science. Horrid, holy, unholy--these pages overrun with the unhinged, intrusive thoughts that obsess us all late into nighttime.

MAUSOLEUM OF FLOWERS

MAUSOLEUM OF FLOWERS

By: Summerhill, Daniel
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A poetry collection that celebrates Black culture, creativity, and memory.

From Kendrick to Kanye, to a Sunday in Oakland with Frank Ocean's falsetto in the foreground, Mausoleum of Flowers is still life set against the backdrop of demise. Daniel Summerhill's sophomore collection grabs fate by the throat and confronts it. What does it mean to continue living when your friends are dying beside you? This collection melds an exploration of spirituality and rebellion with Black tradition. Summerhill's poems invite the reader near in order to self-excavate and explore tones of loss, love, and light.

MEMOIRS

MEMOIRS

By: Neruda, Pablo
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The classic and deeply moving memoir by Pablo Neruda, the most widely read political poet of our time and winner of the Nobel Prize

The south of Chile was a frontier wilderness when Pablo Neruda was born in 1904. In these memoirs he retraces his bohemian student years in Santiago; his sojourns as Chilean consul in Burma, Ceylon, and Java, in Spain during the civil war, and in Mexico; and his service as a Chilean senator. Neruda, a Communist, was driven from his senate seat in 1948, and a warrant was issued for his arrest. After a year in hiding, he escaped on horseback over the Andes and then to Europe; his travels took him to Russia, Eastern Europe, and China before he was finally able to return home in 1952. The final section of the memoirs was written after the coup in 1972 that overthrew Neruda's friend Salvador Allende.

Many of the century's most important literary and artistic figures were Neruda's friends, and figure in his memoirs--Garcia Lorca, Aragon, Picasso, and Rivera, among them--and also such political leaders as Gandhi, Nehru, Mao, Castro, and Che Guevara. In his uniquely expressive prose, Neruda not only explains his views on poetry and describes the circumstances that inspired many of his poems, but he creates a revealing record of his life as a poet, a patriot, and one of the twentieth century's true men of conscience.

MEMORY ROSE INTO THRESHOLD SPEECH: THE COLLECTED EARLIER POETRY BILINGUAL TR. JORIS

MEMORY ROSE INTO THRESHOLD SPEECH: THE COLLECTED EARLIER POETRY BILINGUAL TR. JORIS

By: Celan, Paul
$45.00
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Memory Rose into Threshold Speech gathers the poet Paul Celan's first four books, written between 1952 and 1963, which established his reputation as the major post-World War II German-language poet.

Celan, a Bukovinian Jew who lived through the Holocaust, created work that displays both great lyric power and an uncanny ability to pinpoint totalitarian cultural and political tendencies. His quest, however, is not only reflective: there is in Celan's writing a profound need and desire to create a new, inhabitable world and a new language for it. In Memory Rose into Threshold Speech, Celan's reader witnesses his poetry, which starts lush with surrealistic imagery, become gradually pared down; its syntax tightens and his trademark neologisms and word formations increase toward a polysemic language of great accuracy that tries, in the poet's own words, to measure the area of the given and the possible.

Translated by the prize-winning poet and translator Pierre Joris, this bilingual edition follows the 2014 publication of Breathturn into Timestead, Celan's collected later poetry. All nine volumes of Celan's poetry are now available in Joris's carefully crafted translations, accompanied here by a new introduction and extensive commentary. The four volumes in this edition show the flowering of one of the major literary figures of the last century.

This volume collects Celan's first four books: Mohn und Gedächtnis (Poppy and Memory), Von Schwelle zu Schwelle (Threshold to Threshold), Sprachgitter (Speechgrille), and Die Niemandsrose (NoOnesRose).

MIDDLE PASSAGES

MIDDLE PASSAGES

By: Brathwaite, Kamau
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Kamau Brathwaite's poetry offers stunning collages devoted to the history, mythology, and language of the African diaspora, and has gained him a world reputation. Middle Passages, his most recent collection, is his sixteenth poetry volume, but his first with an American publisher. With notes of protest and lament, the fourteen poems of Middle Passages address the effects of the Middle Passage of slavery on the New World, and celebrate great musicians (Ellington, Bessie Smith), poets, heroes of the resistance, and Third World leaders Kwame Nkrumah, Walter Rodney, and Nelson Mandela. And as the London Times Literary Supplement noted, it is "a poetry that moves between rage and tenderness, doubt and displacement to affirmation... Middle Passages is a potent and effective book, a work of passion and integrity."
MIGHT KINDRED

MIGHT KINDRED

By: Gomery, Mónica
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The poems of Might Kindred wonder aloud: can we belong to one another, and "can a people belong to a dreaming machine?" Conjuring mountains and bodies of water, queer and immigrant poetics, beloveds both human and animal, Mónica Gomery explores the intimately personal and the possibility of a collective voice. Here anthems are sung and fall apart midsong. The speaker exchanges letters with her ancestors, is visited by a shadow sister, and interrogates what it means to make a home as a first-generation American.

Winner of the Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, the poems in Might Kindred are rooted in the body and its cousins, seeking the possibility of kinship, "in case we might kindness, might ardor together." Belonging and unbelonging are claimed as part of the same complicated whole, and Gomery's intersections reach for something divine at the center.

MIHYAR OF DAMASCUS HIS SONGS

MIHYAR OF DAMASCUS HIS SONGS

By: Adonis
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Born in Syria in 1930, Adonis later moved to Lebanon and became a pivotal figure in the new poetry of the late 1960s. With the publication of Mihyar of Damascus: His Songs in 1963--widely viewed as a watershed moment in Arabic poetry--Adonis forged a new set of possibilities for Arabic poetry, writing in traditional meters but infusing them with modernist rhythms, styles, and conceptual complexities.

Translators Adnan Haydar (University of Arkansas in Fayetteville) and Michael Beard (University of North Dakota) co-edit a series of books, Middle East Literature in Translation, for Syracuse University Press.

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MILK BOWL OF FEATHERS: ESSENTIAL SURREALIST WRITINGS

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Originating in 1916 with the avant-garde Dada movement at the famous Café Voltaire in Zurich, surrealism aimed to unleash the powers of the creative act without thinking. Max Ernst, André Breton, Tristan Tzara, Paul Éluard, Philippe Soupault, and Louis Aragon created a movement that spread wildly to all corners of the globe, inspiring not only poetry but also artists like Joan Miro and René Magritte and cinematic works by Antonin Artaud, Luis Bunuel, and Salvador Dalí. As the editor, Mary Ann Caws, says, "Essential to surrealist behavior is a constant state of openness, of readiness for whatever occurs, whatever marvelous object we might come across, manifesting itself against the already thought, the already lived."

Here are the gems of this major, mind-bending aesthetic, political, and humane movement: writers as diverse as Aragon, Breton, Dalí, René Char, Robert Desnos, Mina Loy, Paul Magritte, Alice Paalen, Gisele Prassinos, Man Ray, Kay Sage, and Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven are included here, providing a grand picture of this revolutionary movement that shocked the world.

MILLENNIAL HARVEST

MILLENNIAL HARVEST

By: Bell, Charles Greenleaf
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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.

MIRACLES OF THE VIRGIN. TRACT ON ABUSES

MIRACLES OF THE VIRGIN. TRACT ON ABUSES

By: Canterbury, Nigel Of
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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.

MISCELLANEOUS EPICS AND ELEGIES. OTHER FRAGMENTS. TESTIMONIA

MISCELLANEOUS EPICS AND ELEGIES. OTHER FRAGMENTS. TESTIMONIA

By: Callimachus
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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.

MISCELLANY

MISCELLANY

By: Cummings, E E
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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.

MODERNIST QUARTET

MODERNIST QUARTET

By: Lentricchia, Frank
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Modernist Quartet is a study of the four major American modernist poets--Frost, Stevens, Pound, Eliot--in various historical environments (literary, philosophical, gender relations, the business of capitalist economics) with special attention given to their central poetic texts as they simultaneously reflect and shape our understanding of those environments. Frank Lentricchia presents the poems as stories of the poets seeking to sustain a life in noncommercial writing, in a culture that is only hospitable, for the most part, to commercial art.
MOTHMAN APOLOGIA

MOTHMAN APOLOGIA

By: Lynn, Robert Wood
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The latest volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets explores love, grief, the opioid epidemic, and coming of age

"These poems name the hurt wrought upon the meek that makes the elegy, here, as much an exaltation of the living as a mournful dirge for the land."--Major Jackson, Vanderbilt University

The 116th volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets, Robert Wood Lynn's collection of poems explores the tensions of youth and the saturation points of knowledge: those moments when the acquisition of understanding overlaps with regret and becomes a desire to know less. Comprising poems of place set across the Virginias, this collection includes an episodic elegy exploring the opioid crisis in the Shenandoah Valley as well as a separate series of persona poems reimagining the Mothman (West Virginia's famed cryptid) reluctantly coming of age in that state's mountains and struggling with the utility of warnings. These are narrative poems of love and grief, built from a storytelling tradition. Taken together they form an arc encompassing the experience of growing up, looking away, and looking back.

MUMMY EATERS

MUMMY EATERS

By: Shenoda, Sherry
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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.


MY HAIR TURNING GRAY AMONG STRANGE

MY HAIR TURNING GRAY AMONG STRANGE

By: Quintana, Leroy V
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Poetry. This new collection by one of the most recognized Chicano poets presents a vivid portrait of the traditional, small-town New Mexico of his youth from the vantage point of a departed son who yearns for the integrity and coherence of that world. These deceptively simple story poems, vivid snapshots of remembered people and places, are punctuated by remarkable bilingual word play. Although they are genuinely Chicano, the poems address, with humor and insight, some of the central dilemmas of contemporary American life: tradition versus progress, belonging versus alienation, and self-fulfillment versus obligation.
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MY LIFE AND MY LIFE IN THE NINETIES

By: Hejinian, Lyn
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Lyn Hejinian is among the most prominent of contemporary American poets. Her poem My Life has garnered accolades and fans inside and outside academia. First published in 1980, and revised in 1987 and 2002, My Life is now firmly established in the postmodern canon. This Wesleyan edition includes the 45-part prose poem sequence along with a closely related ten-part work titled My Life in the Nineties. An experimental intervention into the autobiographical genre, My Life explores the many ways in which language--the things people say and the ways they say them--shapes not only their identity, but also the very world around them.
MY WAY SPEECHES & POEMS

MY WAY SPEECHES & POEMS

By: Bernstein, Charles
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"Verse is born free but everywhere in chains. It has been my project to rattle the chains." (from "The Revenge of the Poet-Critic")

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.