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Poetry
Roberto Juarroz's poems focus on the interior world or the internal experience of the exterior world. We are reissuing this collection of Juarroz's earlier work as a companion to the new volume.
Mary Crow is a translator and former Colorado Poet Laureate. Her most recent collection is I Have Tasted the Apple.
Beginning with a poem about the teenage dawning of sexuality, Vertigo & Ghost pitches quickly into a fierce, electrifying, riveting sequence that exposes Zeus as a serial rapist, for whom women are prey and sex is weaponized. As unflinching, devastating poems of vulnerability and anger confront Zeus with aggressions both personal and historical, his house comes crumbling down. In its place, acclaimed poet Fiona Benson reveals a disturbing contemporary world in which violent acts against women continue to be perpetrated on a daily, even hourly, basis.
In the volume's second half, Benson shifts to an intimate and lyrical document of depression and family life. These moving poems probe the ambivalent terrain of early motherhood--its anxieties and claustrophobias as well as its gifts of tenderness and love--reclaiming the sanctuary of domestic private life and the right to raise children in peace and safety. Together, these two halves form a complex portrait of modern womanhood.
Dynamic in its range and risk, Vertigo & Ghost introduces an important British voice to an American audience, a voice that speaks out with clarity, grace, and bravery against abuse of power.
WINNER OF THE MIDWEST BOOK AWARD
The imagination of a girl, the retelling of family stories, and the unfolding of a rich and often painful history: Parneshia Jones's debut collection explores the intersections of these elements of experience with refreshing candor and metaphorical purpose.
A child of the South speaking in the rhythms of Chicago, Jones knits "a human quilt" with herself at the center. She relates everything from the awkward trip to Marshall Fields with her mother to buy her first bra to the late whiskey-infused nights of her father's world. In the South, "lard sizzles a sermon from the stove"; in Chicago, we feast on an "opera of peppers and pimento." Jones intertwines the stories of her own family with those of historical black figures, including Marvin Gaye and Josephine Baker. Affectionate, dynamic, and uncommonly observant, these poems mine the richness of history to create a map of identity and influence.
A Village Life, Louise Glück's eleventh collection of poems, begins in the topography of a village, a Mediterranean world of no definite moment or place:
All the roads in the village unite at the fountain.
Avenue of Liberty, Avenue of the Acacia Trees-
The fountain rises at the center of the plaza;
on sunny days, rainbows in the piss of the cherub.
-from "tributaries"
Around the fountain are concentric circles of figures, organized by age and in degrees of distance: fields, a river, and, like the fountain's opposite, a mountain. Human time superimposed on geologic time, all taken in at a glance, without any undue sensation of speed.
Glück has been known as a lyrical and dramatic poet; since Ararat, she has shaped her austere intensities into book-length sequences. Here, for the first time, she speaks as "the type of describing, supervising intelligence found in novels rather than poetry," as Langdon Hammer has written of her long lines-expansive, fluent, and full-manifesting a calm omniscience. While Glück's manner is novelistic, she focuses not on action but on pauses and intervals, moments of suspension (rather than suspense), in a dreamlike present tense in which poetic speculation and reflection are possible.
WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE
A dreamlike collection from the Nobel Prize-winning poet
From the author of A Cure for Suicide and Census comes a philosophical recasting of myth and legend, folklore and popular culture: a fabulist's compendium of poetry and prose.
Jesse Ball--long-listed for the National Book Award, a finalist for the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award, and named one of Granta's best young American novelists--is one of the most interesting, lyrical, fanciful, and "disturbingly original" (Chicago Tribune) writers working today. And The Village on Horseback is one of his most dazzling and varied works. These experimental pieces--including the Paris Review's Plimpton Prize-winning novella "The Early Deaths of Lubeck, Brennan, Harp & Carr"--ask the reader not to imagine the world for what it is, but for what it could be: a blank tableau on which a spirited imagination can conjure tales out of, seemingly, nothing.
The Village on Horseback is an unmissable treat, a book of voyages to be taken on journeys far and wide.
From Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbery and Adrienne Rich, to Robert Haas and Louise Glück, this anthology takes the full measure of our poetry's daring energies and its tender understandings. Other poets include:
Sylvia Plath
James Merrill
Amy clampitt
Jorie Graham
W. S. Merwin
Charles Simic
Allen Ginsberg
Frank O'Hara
Anne Sexton
Robert Creeley
Sharon Olds
Mary Oliver
Robert Pinsky
Mark Strand
Denise Levertov
Richard Wilbur
May Swenson
Michael Palmer
Mark Doty
Yusef Komunyakaa
Bangladesh--Taslima Nasrin
Chile--Pablo Neruda
China--Bei Dao, Shu Ting
El Salvador--Claribel Alegria
France--Yves Bonnefoy
Greece--Odysseus Elytis, Yannis Ritsos
India--A.K. Ramanujan
Israel--Yehuda Amichai
Japan--Shuntaro Tanikawa
Mexico--Octavio Paz
Nicaragua--Ernesto Cardenal
Nigeria--Wole Soyinka
Norway--Tomas Transtromer
Palestine--Mahmoud Darwish
Poland--Zbigniew Herbert, Czeslaw Milosz
Russia--Joseph Brodsky, Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Senegal--Leopold Sedar Senghor
South Africa--Breyten Breytenbach
St. Lucia, West Indies--Derek Walcott
I drank, alone nights at the kitchen sink,
bathrobed, my head hatching snakes,
while my baby slept in his upstairs cage
and my marriage choked to death Precise and surprising, Karr's poems "take on the bedevilments of fate and grief with a diabolical edge of their own" (Poetry). Also included is Karr's controversial and prize-winning essay "Against Decoration," in which she took aim against the verbal ornaments that too often pass for poetry these days-the "new formalism" that elevates form to an end itself.
To write what is human, not escapist, is Henri Cole's endeavor. In The Visible Man he pursues his aim by folding autobiography and memory into the thirty severe and fiercely truthful lyrics--poems presenting a constant tension between classical repose and the friction of life--that make up this exuberant book. This work, wrote Harold Bloom, persuades me that Cole will be a central poet of his generation. The tradition of Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane is beautifully extended in The Visible Man, particularly in the magnificent sequence 'Apollo.' Keats and Hart Crane are presences here, and Henri Cole invokes them with true aesthetic dignity, which is the mark of nearly every poem in The Visible Man.