Name: Diffusion of Distances
Brand: Wai-Lim Yip
Price: 57.95 USD
Availability: InStock

Wai-Lim Yip

Diffusion of Distances

$57.95

In this collection of passionately argued essays, the internationally acclaimed poet and critic Wai-lim Yip calls Western scholarship to account for its treacherous representation of non-Western literature. Yip moves from Plato to Hans-Georg Gadamer, from Chuang-tzu to Mao Tse-tung, from John Donne to Robert Creeley, as he attempts to create a double consciousness that includes the state of mind of the original author and the expressive potentials of the target language. He aims, first, to expose the types of distortions that have occurred in the process of translation from one language to another and, second, to propose guidelines that will prevent this kind of linguistic violence in the future.

Sandra Kumamoto Stanley

Louis Zukofsky and the Transformation of a Modern American Poetics

$63.00

Viewing Louis Zukofsky as a reader, writer, and innovator of twentieth-century poetry, Sandra Stanley argues that his works serve as a crucial link between American modernism and post- modernism.

Like Ezra Pound, Zukofsky saw himself as a participant in the transformation of a modern American poetics; but unlike Pound, Zukofsky, the ghetto-born son of an immigrant Russian Jew, was keenly aware of his marginal position in society. Championing the importance of the little words, such as a and the, Zukofsky effected his own proletarian "revolution of the word."

Stanley explains how Zukofsky emphasized the materiality of language, refusing to reduce it to a commodity controlled by an "authorial/authoritarian" self. She also describes his legacy to contemporary poets, particularly such Language poets as Ron Silliman and Charles Bernstein.

Louis Zukofsky and the Transformation of a Modern American Poetics

Robert Creeley

Selected Poems of Robert Creeley

$29.95

Here, in a new selection of 200 poems from five decades, is the distinctive voice of Robert Creeley, reminding us of what has made him one of the most important and affectionately regarded poets of our time.

J. D. McClatchy, editor

Poets on Painters

$33.95

What are poets looking at, looking for, when they walk into a room of pictures? Poets on Painters attempts to answer this question by bringing together, for the first time, essays by modern American and British poets about painting. The poets bring to their task a fresh eye and a freshened language, vivid with nuance and color and force.

Jacqueline Vaught Brogan

Part of the Climate

$68.95

Part of the Climate convincingly redefines American modernist poetry in light of developments in modern painting, particularly cubism. The traditional separation of the verbal and visual arts is cast aside here, as Brogan encourages a re-evaluation of "modernism" itself. Moreover, readers of modern poetry and literature will find this critical work doubly useful, since the author places the poetry of well-known modernists such as Pound, Eliot, and Williams alongside the harder-to-find work of important experimentalists such as Mina Loy, Louis Zukofsky, Gertrude Stein, and George Oppen.

Jacqueline Vaught Brogan has assembled this much needed collection of experimental verse from the interwar years by going to the small magazines through which the poems reached their public. She not only shows how significantly many of these American poets of the early twentieth century were influenced by the aesthetic development of cubism in the visual arts but also argues that the cubist aesthetic, at least as it translated into the verbal domain, invariably involved political and ethical issues. The most important of these concerns was to extend the aesthetic revolution of cubism into a genuine "revolution of the word."

Brogan maintains, in fact, that the multiplicity inherent in cubism anticipates the deconstructive enterprise now seen in criticism itself. With this history of the cubist movement in American verse, she raises serious questions about the politics of canonization and asks us to consider the ethical responsibility of interpretation, both in the creative arts and in critical texts.

Blaise Cendrars

Complete Poems

$33.95

Blaise Cendrars was a pioneer of modernist literature. The full range of his poetry—from classical rhymed alexandrines to "cubist" modernism, and from feverish, even visionary, depression to airy good humor—offers a challenge no translator has accepted until now.

Here, for the first time in English translation, is the complete poetry of a legendary twentieth-century French writer. Cendrars, born Frederick Louis Sauser in 1887, invented his life as well as his art. His adventures took him to Russia during the revolution of 1905 (where he traveled on the Trans-Siberian Railway), to New York in 1911, to the trenches of World War I (where he lost his right arm), to Brazil in the 1920s, to Hollywood in the 1930s, and back and forth across Europe.

With Guillaume Apollinaire and Max Jacob he was a pioneer of modernist literature, working alongside artist friends such as Chagall, Delaunay, Modigliani, and Léger, composers Eric Satie and Darius Milhaud, and filmmaker Abel Gance. The range of Cendrars's poetry—from classical rhymed alexandrines to "cubist" modernism, and from feverish, even visionary, depression to airy good humor—offers a challenge no translator has accepted until now.

Aime Cesaire

The Collected Poetry

$33.95

This edition, containing an extensive introduction, notes, the French original, and a new translation of Césaire's poetry—the complex and challenging later works as well as the famous Notebook—will remain the definitive Césaire in English.

Marta E. Sanchez

Contemporary Chicana Poetry

$28.95

In this first book-length study of the works of Chicano women writers, Marta Ester Sanchez introduces the reader to a group of Chicanas who in the 1970s began to reexamine and reevaluate their gender and cultural identity through poetic language. The term 'Chicana' refers here to women of Mexican heritage who live and write in the United States. The works of four contemporary Chicana poets---Alma Villanueva, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Lucha Corpi, and Bernice Zamora---are the focus of this volume.

Anthony Bradley, edited, introduction, & notes

Contemporary Irish Poetry, New and Revised editon

$36.95

The poems featured in this anthology are quintessentially human documents informed by humor, compassion, and a joyful and visionary element—an impulse to praise what is really life and to protect it from the naysayers—as well as by a salutary realism and irony.

This revised edition features the work of Tom Paulin, Medbh McGuckian, Paul Durcan, Aidan Carl Mathews, Anne Hartigan, Nuala ní Dhomhnaill, and others who were not included in the first edition. Moreover, the selections from those poets featured in the first edition have, in many cases, been extensively changed and updated. In total, more than half the poems published in this second edition did not appear in the first.

Contemporary Irish Poetry, New and Revised editon

César Vallejo

The Complete Posthumous Poetry

$29.95

The Translation judges for the National Book Awards--Richard Miller, Alastair Reid, Eliot Weinberger--cited Clayton Eshleman and Jose Rubia Barcia's translation of Cesar Vallejo's The Complete Posthumous Poetry as follows:

"This, the first National Book Award to be given to a translation of modern poetry, is a recognition of Clayton Eshleman's seventeen-year apprenticeship to perhaps the most difficult poetry in the Spanish language. Eshleman and his present collaborator, Jose Rubia Barcia, have not only rendered these complex poems into brilliant and living English, but have also established a definitive Spanish test based on Vallejo's densely rewritten manuscripts. In recreating this modern master in English, they have also made a considerable addition to poetry in our language."

Stéphane Mallarmé

Collected Poems of Mallarme

$30.95

Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898) is one of the giants of nineteenth-century French poetry. Leader of the Symbolist movement, he exerted a powerful influence on modern literature and thought, which can be traced in the works of Paul Valéry, W.B. Yeats, and Jacques Derrida. From his early twenties until the time of his death, Mallarmé produced poems of astonishing originality and beauty, many of which have become classics.

In the Collected Poems, Henry Weinfield brings the oeuvre of this European master to life for an English-speaking audience, essentially for the first time. All the poems that the author chose to retain are here, superbly rendered by Weinfield in a translation that comes remarkably close to Mallarmé's own voice. Weinfield conveys not simply the meaning but the spirit and music of the French originals, which appear en face.

Whether writing in verse or prose, or inventing an altogether new genre—as he did in the amazing "Coup de Dés"—Mallarmé was a poet of both supreme artistry and great difficulty. To illuminate Mallarmé's poetry for twentieth-century readers, Weinfield provides an extensive commentary that is itself an important work of criticism. He sets each poem in the context of the work as a whole and defines the poems' major symbols. Also included are an introduction and a bibliography.

Publication of this collection is a major literary event in the English-speaking world: here at last is the work of a major figure, masterfully translated.

Tada Chimako

Forest of Eyes

$95.00

One of Japan’s most important modern poets, Tada Chimako (1930–2003) gained prominence in her native country for her sensual, frequently surreal poetry and fantastic imagery. Although Tada’s writing is an essential part of postwar Japanese poetry, her use of themes and motifs from European, Near Eastern, and Mediterranean history, mythology, and literature, as well as her sensitive explorations of women’s inner lives make her very much a poet of the world. Forest of Eyes offers English-language readers their first opportunity to read a wide selection from Tada’s extraordinary oeuvre, including nontraditional free verse, poems in the traditional forms of tanka and haiku, and prose poems. Translator Jeffrey Angles introduces this collection with an incisive essay that situates Tada as a poet, explores her unique style, and analyzes her contribution to the representation of women in postwar Japanese literature.

Michael McClure

Of Indigo and Saffron

$57.95

This essential collection of Michael McClure's poetry contains the most original, radical, and visionary work of a major poet who has been garnering acclaim and generating controversy for more than fifty years. Ranging from A Fist Full, published in 1957, through Swirls in Asphalt, a new poem sequence, Of Indigo and Saffron is both an excellent introduction to this unique American voice and an impressive selection from McClure's landmark volumes for those already familiar with his boldly inventive work. One of the five poets who heralded the Beat movement in the 1955 Six Gallery reading in San Francisco, McClure reveals in his poetry a close kinship to Romanticism, Modernism, Surrealism, and Japanese haiku. These poems—grounded in imagination and a profound regard for the natural world—chart a poetic landscape of utter originality.

Jackson Mac Low

Thing of Beauty

$34.95

This landmark collection brings together poetry, performance pieces, "traditional" verse, prose poems, and other poetical texts from Jackson Mac Low's lifetime in art. The works span the years from 1937, beginning with "Thing of Beauty," his first poem, until his death in 2004 and demonstrate his extraordinary range as well as his unquenchable enthusiasm. Mac Low is widely acknowledged as one of the major figures in twentieth-century American poetry, with much of his work ranging into the spheres of music, dance, theater, performance, and the visual arts. Comparable in stature to such giants as Robert Creeley, John Ashbery, and Allen Ginsberg, Mac Low is often associated with composer John Cage, with whom he shared a delight in work derived from "chance operations." This volume, edited by Anne Tardos, his wife and frequent collaborator, offers a balanced arrangement of early, middle, and late work, designed to convey not just the range but also the progressions and continuities of his writings and "writingways."

Srikanth Reddy

Facts for Visitors

$26.95

Speaking in the wake of empire, of terrestrial love and of the collapse of traditional literary forms, the protagonist of this collection of poetry reconstructs a world from the language of encyclopedias, instruction manuals, and the literary legacies of Wallace Stevens, W. G. Sebald, and Joseph Conrad. The prefatory lyric, "Burial Practice," imagines the posthumous narrative of "then’s" that follows an individual's extinction; in the poem "Aria," a stagehand steps onto the floorboards to wax poetic after the curtain has dropped on an opera; and the extended sequence of "Circle" poems obliquely revisits Dante's ethical landscape of the afterlife.

Many of these poems were written while Srikanth Reddy worked for a rural literacy program in the south of India, a fact reflected in the imagined postcolonial world of lyrics such as "Monsoon Eclogue" and "Thieves’ Market." Yet the collection moves beyond the identity politics and ressentiment of postcolonial and Asian-American writings by addressing the fugitive dreams of shared experience in poems such as "Fundamentals of Esperanto." Mobilizing traditional literary forms such as terza rima and the villanelle while simultaneously exploring the poetics of prose and other "formless" modes, Facts for Visitors re-negotiates the impasse between traditional and experimental approaches to writing in contemporary American poetry.

Robert Creeley

Selected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1945–2005

$34.95

This new, compact Selected Poems offers for the first time a balanced survey of Robert Creeley's entire sixty years of poetic accomplishment. It showcases the works that made him one of the most beloved and significant writers of the past century while inviting a new recognition of his enduring commitments, fluency, and power.

Selected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1945–2005

Henia Karmel

A Wall of Two

$24.95

Buchenwald survivors Ilona and Henia Karmel were seventeen and twenty years old when they entered the Nazi labor camps from the Kraków ghetto. These remarkable poems were written during that time. The sisters wrote the poems on worksheets stolen from the factories where they worked by day and hid them in their clothing. During what she thought were the last days of her life, Henia entrusted the poems to a cousin who happened to pass her in the forced march at the end of the war. The cousin gave them to Henia's husband in Kraków, who would not locate and reunite with his wife for another six months.

This is the first English publication of these extraordinary poems. Fanny Howe's deft adaptations preserve their freshness and innocence while making them entirely compelling. They are presented with a biographical introduction that conveys the powerful story of the sisters' survival from capture to freedom in 1946.

Un Ko

The Three Way Tavern

$24.95

Ko Un, the preeminent Korean poet of the twentieth century, embraces Buddhism with the versatility of a master Taoist sage. A beloved cultural figure who has helped shape contemporary Korean literature, Ko Un is also a novelist, literary critic, ex-monk, former dissident, and four-time political prisoner. His verse—vivid, unsettling, down-to-earth, and deeply moving—ranges from the short lyric to the vast epic and draws from a poetic reservoir filled with memories and experiences ranging over seventy years of South Korea's tumultuous history from the Japanese occupation to the Korean war to democracy. This collection, an essential sampling of his poems from the last decade of the twentieth century, offers in deft translation, as lively and demotic as the original, the off-beat humor, mystery, and mythic power of his work for a wide audience of English-speaking readers. It showcases the work of a man whom Allen Ginsberg has called "a magnificent poet, a combination of Buddhist cognoscente, passionate political libertarian, and naturalist historian," who Gary Snyder has said is "a real-world poet!" who "outfoxes the Old Masters and the young poets both," and who Lawrence Ferlinghetti has described as "no doubt the greatest living Korean Zen poet today."

Nicole Brossard

$34.95

“Pleasure,” Jennifer Moxley writes in her introduction to this volume, “is the word that first comes to mind at the mention of Nicole Brossard's poetry.” This volume provides English-language readers with an overview of the life and work of Nicole Brossard, poet, novelist, and essayist, who is widely recognized in her native Québec and throughout the French-speaking world as one of the greatest writers of her generation. Brossard's poetry is rooted in her investigations of language, her abiding commitment to a feminist consciousness, and her capacity for renewing meaning as a virtual space of desire. The reader enters a poetic world in which the aesthetic is joined with the political, and the meaning of both is enriched in the process. The selections in this volume include translations of some of Brossard's best-known works-Lovhers, Ultra Sounds, Museum of Bone and Water, Notebook of Roses and Civilization-along with short prose works, an interview with Brossard, and a bibliography of works in French and English, and constitute the most substantial English-language sampling published to date of one of Canada's greatest living poets.

Sarah Gridley

Weather Eye Open

$26.95

The windmill's labor is contingent upon the weather, upon what air masses, at any given time, overlie its landscape. Anticipatory in mood, Weather Eye Open adopts the emblem of the windmill, seeking what Merleau-Ponty calls the "inspiration and expiration of Being." The windmill serves as analogue to the perceiving subject, to the poet, whose consciousness, though rooted and partial, is yet always receptive to being energized, turned. Like open sails, the perceiver ushers the weather indoors, converting one motion, the wind, to another, the grinding burrstones. The poems in this collection pursue a similar transmutation through language, a staying open to its various weather (and whether) systems. For Sarah Gridley, language strikes at the "X" of experience: part presence and part absence, part spirit and part matter, part home and part homesickness, part harnessed and part wild. In the face of such weather, the stance of the poet is both rapacious and passive, searching and struck still.

Nicole Brossard

$95.00

“Pleasure,” Jennifer Moxley writes in her introduction to this volume, “is the word that first comes to mind at the mention of Nicole Brossard's poetry.” This volume provides English-language readers with an overview of the life and work of Nicole Brossard, poet, novelist, and essayist, who is widely recognized in her native Québec and throughout the French-speaking world as one of the greatest writers of her generation. Brossard's poetry is rooted in her investigations of language, her abiding commitment to a feminist consciousness, and her capacity for renewing meaning as a virtual space of desire. The reader enters a poetic world in which the aesthetic is joined with the political, and the meaning of both is enriched in the process. The selections in this volume include translations of some of Brossard's best-known works-Lovhers, Ultra Sounds, Museum of Bone and Water, Notebook of Roses and Civilization-along with short prose works, an interview with Brossard, and a bibliography of works in French and English, and constitute the most substantial English-language sampling published to date of one of Canada's greatest living poets.

Richard O. Moore

Writing the Silences

$26.95

The poems in Writing the Silences represent more than 60 years of Richard O. Moore’s work as a poet. Selected from seven full-length manuscripts written between 1946 and 2008, these poems reflect not only Moore’s place in literary history—he is the last of his generation of the legendary group of San Francisco Renaissance poets—but also his reemergence into today’s literary world after an important career as a filmmaker and producer in public radio and television. Writing the Silences reflects Moore’s commitment to freedom of form, his interest in language itself, and his dedication to issues of social justice and ecology.

Robin Blaser

The Holy Forest

$31.95

Robin Blaser, one of the key North American poets of the postwar period, emerged from the "Berkeley Renaissance" of the 1940s and 1950s as a central figure in that burgeoning literary scene. The Holy Forest, now spanning five decades, is Blaser's highly acclaimed lifelong serial poem. This long-awaited revised and expanded edition includes numerous published volumes of verse, the ongoing "Image-Nation" and "Truth Is Laughter" series, and new work from 1994 to 2004. Blaser's passion for world making draws inspiration from the major poets and philosophers of our time—from friends and peers such as Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, Charles Olson, Charles Bernstein, and Steve McCaffery to virtual companions in thought such as Hannah Arendt, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida, among others. This comprehensive compilation of Blaser's prophetic meditations on the histories, theories, emotions, experiments, and countermemories of the late twentieth century will stand as the definitive collection of his unique and luminous poetic oeuvre.

Carol Snow

The Seventy Prepositions

$23.95

Carol Snow's award-winning poetry has been admired and celebrated as "work of difficult beauty" (Robert Hass), "ever restless, ever re-framing the frame of reference" (Boston Review), teaching us "how brutally self-transforming a verbal action can be when undertaken in good faith" (Jorie Graham). In this, her third volume, Snow continues to mine the language to its most mysterious depths and to explore the possibilities its meanings and mechanics hold for definition, transformation, and emotional truth. These poems place us before, and in, language--as we stand before, and in, the world.

The Seventy Prepositions comprises three suites of poems. The first, "Vocabulary Sentences," reflects on words and reality by taking as a formal motif the sort of sentences used to test vocabulary skills in elementary school. The poems of the second suite, "Vantage," gather loosely around questions of perspective and perception. The closing suite finds its inspiration in the Japanese dry-landscape gardens known as karesansui, such as the famous rock garden at Ryoan-ji Temple in Kyoto. Here the poet approaches composition as one faces a "miniature Zen garden," choosing and positioning words rather than stones, formally, precisely, evocatively.

Keith Waldrop

Transcendental Studies

$24.95

This compelling selection of recent work by internationally celebrated poet Keith Waldrop presents three related poem sequences—"Shipwreck in Haven," "Falling in Love through a Description," and "The Plummet of Vitruvius"—in a virtuosic poetic triptych. In these quasi-abstract, experimental lines, collaged words torn from their contexts take on new meanings. Waldrop, a longtime admirer of such artists as the French poet Raymond Queneau and the American painter Robert Motherwell, imposes a tonal override on purloined materials, yet the originals continue to show through. These powerful poems, at once metaphysical and personal, reconcile Waldrop's romantic tendencies with formal experimentation, uniting poetry and philosophy and revealing him as a transcendentalist for the new millennium.

Sarah Gridley

Green is the Orator

$24.95

Green is the Orator follows on Sarah Gridley’s brilliant first collection, Weather Eye Open, in addressing the challenge of representing nature through language. Gridley’s deftly original syntax arises from direct experience of the natural world and from encounters with other texts, including the Egyptian “Book of the Dead” and the writings of Charles Darwin, Peter Mark Roget, William Morris, William James, and Henri Bergson. Gridley’s own idiom is compressed, original, and full of unexpected pleasures. This unusual book, at once austere and full of life, reflects a penetrating mind at work—one that is thinking through and re-presenting romantic and modernist traditions of nature.

David Antin

i never knew what time it was

$34.95

In this series of intricately related texts, internationally known poet, critic, and performance artist David Antin explores the experience of time—how it's felt, remembered, and recounted. These free-form talk pieces—sometimes called talk poems or simply talks—began as improvisations at museums, universities, and poetry centers where Antin was invited to come and think out loud. Serious and playful, they move rapidly from keen analysis to powerful storytelling to passages of pure comedy, as they range kaleidoscopically across Antin's experiences: in the New York City of his childhood and youth, the Eastern Europe of family and friends, and the New York and Southern California of his art and literary career. The author's analysis and abrasive comedy have been described as a mix of Lenny Bruce and Ludwig Wittgenstein, his commitment to verbal invention and narrative as a fusion of Mark Twain and Gertrude Stein. Taken together, these pieces provide a rich oral history of and critical context for the evolution of the California art scene from the 1960s onward.

Martha Ronk

Why/Why Not

$24.95

Why/Why Not presents a speaker caught in quandaries created by changing perspectives, fervors, and locales. Why do we act one way here and another there; why can't a mind stay made up; why do we hate and love at the same time; why does memory fade or insist; why does the ordinary seem so uncanny? These questions are captured in lines that collide and merge, in irreverent and offhand jibes, and in plaintive repetitions.

Why/Why Not moves across a vivid terrain—the stage of Hamlet, Phillip Marlowe's Los Angeles, Prague, paintings and gardens—to push through a tangle of ways to make sense of the world. Martha Ronk's poetic language is that of the everyday slightly skewed, as if pieces of an ordinary sentence were missing. Ronk's poems use the repetitive and the banal to explore ways in which language is intertwined with thought and experience.

Fanny Howe

Gone

$26.95

This collection of new poems by one of the most respected poets in the United States uses motifs of advance and recovery, doubt and conviction—in an emotional relation to the known world. Heralded as "one of our most vital, unclassifiable writers" by the Voice Literary Supplement, Fanny Howe has published more than twenty books and is the recipient of the Gold Medal for Poetry from the Commonwealth Club of California. In addition, her Selected Poems received the 2001 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for the Most Outstanding Book of Poetry Published in 2000 from the Academy of American Poets.

The poems in Gone describe the transit of a psyche, driven by uncertainty and by love, through various stations and experiences. This volume of short poems and one lyrical essay, all written in the last five years, is broken into five parts; and the longest of these, "The Passion," consecrates the contradictions between these two emotions. The New York Times Book Review said, "Howe has made a long-term project of trying to determine how we fit into God's world, and her aim is both true and marvelously free of sentimental piety." With Gone, readers will have the opportunity to experience firsthand Howe’s continuation of that elusive and fascinating endeavor.

David Lau

Virgil and the Mountain Cat

$24.95

At once uncompromising and highly inventive, David Lau's poems are imbued with a musicality that lightens the dark undertones of spoliation and entropy. Many of the poems embody a nexus of interaction with historical events, films, modernist poetic texts, and works of art—but from this allusion and evocation, a multifarious voice emerges. In these pages, the electric linguistic experiment meets a new urban, postnatural poetics, one in which poetry is not just a play of signs and seemings but also a prismatic investigation of our contemporary order: "Hurry up before our factory leaves. / The first column of the Freedom Tower / traduces its ensorcellment in the facade." Here is a poetry both deeply lyrical and resistant, a poetry relentless in its invention and its stance against the apathy of convention and consumption.

Laura Walker

rimertown

$24.95

A poetic charting of Laura Walker's rural, southern hometown, Rimertown/an atlas delves into the startling landscapes created by the passage of time through people and through place; it is an atlas born of image and voice. Composed of four interwoven strands—a collection of "maps," a collection of "stories," a series of vernacular prose poems, and a fractured narrative—the volume explores various geographies: of the physical world, of the intersection of natural and peopled landscapes, of the passage of time, of leaving and returning, of human relationships, of soldiers and war. Walker asks: how is "home" carried in memory, in landscape, in story, in time? Her poems break and merge, stitching and fragmenting narrative, syntax, and image as they push toward their own geography, "a fever doll, tapered song/ engineered into dusk/ hold the watery stream, its buck and clanging."

Jerome Rothenberg

Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three

$42.95

The previous two volumes of this acclaimed anthology set forth a globally decentered revision of twentieth-century poetry from the perspective of its many avant-gardes. Now editors Jerome Rothenberg and Jeffrey C. Robinson bring a radically new interpretation to the poetry of the preceding century, viewing the work of the romantic and post-romantic poets as an international, collective, often utopian enterprise that became the foundation of experimental modernism. Global in its range, volume three gathers selections from the poetry and manifestos of canonical poets, as well as the work of lesser-known but equally radical poets. Defining romanticism as experimental and visionary, Rothenberg and Robinson feature prose poetry, verbal-visual experiments, and sound poetry, along with more familiar forms seen here as if for the first time. The anthology also explores romanticism outside the European orbit and includes ethnopoetic and archaeological works outside the literary mainstream. The range of volume three and its skewing of the traditional canon illuminate the process by which romantics and post- romantics challenged nineteenth-century orthodoxies and propelled poetry to the experiments of a later modernism and avant-gardism.

Steve Willard

Harm.

$24.95

This debut volume establishes Steve Willard as a true original, an artist whose kinetic sense of wordplay is deft, smart, and unfailingly provocative. Intended to be read in repeated passes, these poems are Cubist in feel, multifaceted in syntax, and brilliant in coloration. By turns disjunctive, narrative, plaintive, and disruptive, Harm. makes use of a wide formal range in reaching toward its ambition, which is nothing short of reclaiming lost human potentiality from current norms. Syntax flexes and the world is refigured, observed as if through a different camera's open aperture, drawing the reader to a new and transformative interior landscape.

Raúl Zurita

Purgatory

$29.95

Raúl Zurita’s Purgatory, a landmark in contemporary Latin American poetry, records the physical, cultural, and spiritual violence perpetrated against the Chilean people under Pinochet’s military dictatorship (1973–1990) in the fiercely inventive voice of a postmodern master. This beautiful en face edition, superbly translated by Anna Deeny, brings to English-language readers an indispensable volume written by one of the most important living poets writing in Spanish today. Zurita was a 24-year-old student in Valparaíso when, on the morning of the coup, he was arrested, detained, and tortured. Conceived as the first text of a Dantean trilogy that includes Anteparaíso (Anteparadise) and La Vida Nueva (The New Life), Purgatory is his anguished response to Chile’s violent recent history.

Mark Levine

The Wilds

$24.95

In his third book of poems, Mark Levine continues his exploration of the rhythms and forms of memory. The Wilds is set in the border regions between natural and cultivated states, childhood and adulthood, past and present. "We were boys," says the speaker of the opening poem, "boyish, almost girls./Left alone on the roof, we would have dwindled." Austere and lyrical, the music of these poems resonates with echoes of poetic tradition-Wyatt, Jonson, Milton, Eliot-yet is singularly modern.

Leslie Scalapino

It’s go in horizontal

$26.95

Internationally recognized as one of the most innovative writers in America today, Leslie Scalapino persistently challenges the boundaries of many forms in which she works—poetry, prose, plays, and more. This outstanding volume includes work from sequential and serial poems written over thirty-two years. The poems demonstrate ideas and inventions in writing, and how one writing invention leads to the next. Three series are selected from the long poem way, about which Philip Whalen said, "She makes everything take place in real time, in the light and air and night where all of us live, everything happening at once." Recent poems, such as those from "DeLay Rose," appear to leave the page itself as a single infinite line in which the actions of individuals and occurrences in the outside world are synonymous, mysterious, and simultaneous. It's go in horizontal is a dazzling entryway into the oeuvre of a daring and powerful writer.

Mei-mei Berssenbrugge

I Love Artists

$28.95

Drawing on four decades of work and including new poems published here for the first time, this selection of Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s poetry displays the extraordinary luminosity characteristic of her style—its delicate, meticulous observation, great scenic imagination, and unusual degree of comfort with states of indetermination, contingency, and flux.

Joshua Clover

The Totality for Kids

$24.95

The Totality for Kids is the second collection of poems by Joshua Clover, whose debut, Madonna anno domini, won the Walt Whitman award from the Academy of American Poets. This volume takes as its subject the troubled sleep of late modernity, from the grandeur and failure of megacities to the retreats and displacements of the suburbs. The power of crowds and architecture commingles with the alienation and idleness of the observer, caught between “the brutal red dream/Of the collective” and “the parade/Of the ideal citizen.” The book’s action takes place in these gaps, “dead spaces beside the endlessly grieving stream.” The frozen tableau of the spectacle meets its double in the sense that something is always about to happen. Political furies and erotic imaginings coalesce and escape within a welter of unmoored allusions, encounters, citations, and histories, the dreams possible within the modern’s excess of signification—as if to return revolutionary possibility to the regime of information by singing it its own song.

Raul Zurita

Anteparadise, A Bilingual edition

$31.95

Here is a major work by a Chilean poet thought by many to be the most brilliant and important new voice in the Spanish language. In its first American edition, this poetry is presented in Spanish and Enlgish, so that readers of both languages may listed to Zurita's voice.

Anteparadise can be read as a creative response, an act of resistance by a young artist to the violence and suffering during and after the 1973 coup that toppled the democratically elected Allende government. Zurita thus follows the example of several Latin American pets such as the Peruvian César Vallejo and Chilean Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda, sharing their passion and urgency, but his voice is unique.

Robert Creeley

The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1975–2005

$34.95

This definitive collection showcases thirty years of work by one of the most significant American poets of the twentieth century, bringing together verse that originally appeared in eight acclaimed books of poetry ranging from Hello: A Journal (1978) to Life & Death (1998) and If I were writing this (2003). Robert Creeley, who was involved with the publication of this volume before his death in 2005, helped define an emerging counter-tradition to the prevailing literary establishment—the new postwar poetry originating with Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Louis Zukofsky and expanding through the lives and works of Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, Denise Levertov, and others. The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1975–2005 will stand together with The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1975–2000 as essential reading for anyone interested in twentieth-century American poetry.

The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1975–2005

Ron Silliman

The Age of Huts (compleat)

$28.95

Between the Age of Innocence and the Age of Experience comes The Age of Huts. This book brings together for the first time all of the poems in Ron Silliman's Age of Huts cycle, including Ketjak, Sunset Debris, The Chinese Notebook, and 2197, as well as two key satellite texts, Sitting Up, Standing, Taking Steps, and BART. Each poem offers a radically different approach toward using language to explore the world. One of the founding works of Language Poetry, The Age of Huts is about everything, more or less literally, as each sentence, even each phrase, embarks on its own narrative, linking together to form a large polyphonic investigation of contemporary life. From Ketjak, one of the first poems to employ "the new sentence," to 2197, a serial work that scrambles the vocabulary and grammar of its sentences, The Age of Huts questions everything we have known about poetry in order to see the world anew.

Meir Wieseltier

The Flower of Anarchy

$26.95

Meir Wieseltier's verbal power, historical awareness, and passionate engagement have placed him in the first rank of contemporary Hebrew poetry. The Flower of Anarchy, a selection of Wieseltier's poems spanning almost forty years, collects in one volume, for the first time, English translations of some of his finest work. Superbly translated by the award-winning American-Israeli poet-translator Shirley Kaufman—who has worked with the poet on these translations for close to thirty years—this book brings together some of the most praised and admired early poems published in several small books during the 1960s, along with poems from six subsequent collections, including Wieseltier's most recent, Slow Poems, published in 2000.

Born in Moscow in 1941, Wieseltier spent the first years of his life, during the war, as a refugee in Siberia, then again in Europe. He settled in Tel-Aviv a few years after coming to Israel in 1949 and has lived there ever since. A master of both comedy and irony, Wieseltier has written powerful poems of social and political protest in Israel, poems that are painfully timeless. His voice is alternately anarchic and involved, angry and caring, trenchant and lyric.

Harryette Mullen

Sleeping with the Dictionary

$23.95

Harryette Mullen's fifth poetry collection, Sleeping with the Dictionary, is the abecedarian offspring of her collaboration with two of the poet's most seductive writing partners, Roget's Thesaurus and The American Heritage Dictionary. In her ménage à trois with these faithful companions, the poet is aware that while Roget seems obsessed with categories and hierarchies, the American Heritage, whatever its faults, was compiled with the assistance of a democratic usage panel that included black poets Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps, as well as feminist author and editor Gloria Steinem. With its arbitrary yet determinant alphabetical arrangement, its gleeful pursuit of the ludic pleasure of word games (acrostic, anagram, homophone, parody, pun), as well as its reflections on the politics of language and dialect, Mullen's work is serious play. A number of the poems are inspired or influenced by a technique of the international literary avant-garde group Oulipo, a dictionary game called S+7 or N+7. This method of textual transformation--which is used to compose nonsensical travesties reminiscent of Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky"--also creates a kind of automatic poetic discourse.

Mullen's parodies reconceive the African American's relation to the English language and Anglophone writing, through textual reproduction, recombining the genetic structure of texts from the Shakespearean sonnet and the fairy tale to airline safety instructions and unsolicited mail. The poet admits to being "licked all over by the English tongue," and the title of this book may remind readers that an intimate partner who also gives language lessons is called, euphemistically, a "pillow dictionary."

Edited by Mark Weiss

The Whole Island

$34.95

Cuba's cultural influence throughout the Western Hemisphere, and especially in the United States, has been disproportionally large for so small a country. This landmark volume is the first comprehensive overview of poetry written over the past sixty years. Presented in a beautiful Spanish-English en face edition, The Whole Island makes available the astonishing achievement of a wide range of Cuban poets, including such well-known figures as Nicolás Guillén, José Lezama Lima, and Nancy Morejón, but also poets widely read in Spanish who remain almost unknown to the English-speaking world—among them Fina García Marruz, José Kozer, Raúl Hernández Novás, and Ángel Escobar—and poets born since the Revolution, like Rogelio Saunders, Omar Pérez, Alessandra Molina, and Javier Marimón. The translations, almost all of them new, convey the intensity and beauty of the accompanying Spanish originals. With their work deeply rooted in Cuban culture, many of these poets—both on and off the island—have been at the center of the political and social changes of this tempestuous period. The poems offered here constitute an essential source for understanding the literature and culture of Cuba, its diaspora, and the Caribbean at large, and provide an unparalleled perspective on what it means to be Cuban.