Translated from the Polish by award-winning translators John and Bogdana Carpenter, these sixty-eight verse and prose poems span forty years of Herbert's incredible life and work. The pieces are organized chronologically from 1950 to 1990, with an emphasis on the writer's early and late poems.Here Zbigniew Herbert's poetry turns from the public--what we have come to expect from this poet--to the more personal. The title poem, "Elegy for the Departure of Pen Ink and Lamp , is a three-part farewell ode to the inanimate objects and memories of childhood. Herbert reflects on the relationship between the living and the dead in "What Our Dead Do," the state of his homeland in "Country," and the power of language in "We fall asleep on words . . . " Herbert's short prose poems read like aphorisms, deceptively whimsical but always wise: "Bears are divided into brown and white, also paws, head, and trunk. They have nice snouts, and small eyes.... Children who love Winnie-the-Pooh would give them anything, but a hunter walks in the forest and aims with his rifle between that pair of small eyes."Elegy for the Departure and Other Poems confirms Zbigniew Herbert's place as one of the world's greatest and most influential poets.

    And from the beginning, her practice placed her at the vanguard of American writing. Guest's poetry, saturated in the visual arts, extended the formal experiments of modernism, and played the abstract qualities of language against its sensuousness and materiality. Now, for the first time, all of her published poems have been brought together in one volume, offering readers and scholars unprecedented access to Guest's remarkable visionary work. This Collected Poems moves from her early New York School years through her more abstract later work, including some final poems never before published. Switching effortlessly from the real to the dreamlike, the observed to the imagined, this is poetry both gentle and piercing seemingly simple, but truly and beautifully dislocating.

    Drama. Elisa Gabbert's L'HEURE BLEUE, OR THE JUDY POEMS, goes inside the mind of Judy, one of three characters in Wallace Shawn's The Designated Mourner, a play about the dissolution of a marriage in the midst of political revolution. In these poems, Gabbert imagines a back story and an emotional life for Judy beyond and outside the play. Written in a voice that is at once intellectual and unselfconscious, these poems create a character study of a many-layered woman reflected in solitude, while engaging with larger questions of memory, identity, desire, surveillance, and fear.

    A Bulgarian immigrant, Dimitrov writes as both observer of and fervent participant in this "American Youth," as his speakers navigate both the physical and emotional landscapes of desire, intimacy, and longing--whether for a friend, a lover, or a self, "Saint or stranger, I still recklessly seek you."

    Awake chronicles Laux's coming to terms with a childhood darkened by violence and sexual abuse--a struggle at once to embrace and to forgive the past.

    Poetry. Asian American Studies. Women's Studies. Trisha Low is just another feminist, confessional writer trying to find a good way to deal with all her literary dads. She siphons the remix culture of social media into the binge and purge cycle of an engrossing read, with the emphasis on gross. She reads the diaries of teenage girls, their blog comments and love letters; she dresses like one in performance then throws up fake blood on herself. She once surveyed the reactions of Catholic fathers to scripted confessionals she made regarding rough sex with men, secretly recorded the conversations, and transcribed the tapes. The results were anthologized by a major university press. Her first book, THE COMPLEAT PURGE, consists of the last will testament of one Trisha Low, who seems to commit suicide annually; the legal documents accumulate into a coming of age story. It goes on to chronicle the sexual fantasies of indie rock fangirls, who may or may not be exorcising the effects of abuse through their blithe avatars (the guy from The Strokes, etc.). Then Trisha Low finds herself trapped in an 18th century romance novel in the most punishing way, but for whom--we're not really sure. "How is Poetry complicit in the urge to falsely 'heal' societal wounds into the silent fixity of It Gets Better? What better place to look than the teen girl, whose cut wrist is an abject fuck-you; whose cute Band-Aid and its artificial 'healing' is really just your sentimental fantasy.

    "While the new sentence--the prose wing of Language writing--strips narrative down to pointed sets of shifting referents, Lu, in her debut, knowingly resuscitates it, creating a precise and humorous elegy to the self, and to its self-subversions. This quasi-bildungsroman charts the emergence of an 'I' (not 'P' and not 'Pamela, ' though the three characters do appear together) into a 20-something Bay Area, with memories of a suburban childhood close on her heels.... This is a book of extraordinary philosophical subtlety and clarity, one that manages to tell a beautiful story in spite of itself"--Publishers Weekly.

    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.

    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.

    In acclaimed poet Suzanne Buffam's second collection, her unusual range, formal rigor, and imaginative force are on full display as we are introduced to the wry meditations of a literary "irrationalist" who pursues her own poetic logic beyond the bounds of reason. Throughout the collection, in resolutely modern, rueful and eccentric lyrics, Buffam investigates the shifting grounds of knowledge while refusing to take any philosophical authority too seriously. Together, these poems compose a swift, durable, protean argument for the necessity of interior maps in a world that may be on the eve of extinction, but whose darkness is continually illuminated by a pyrotechnics of curiosity, candor, and wit.

    Strange Light takes us back to the docks, to drama class and prom, an undersea conversation with Jacques Cousteau, and into his famous romantic howls. The epic poem, Strange Light, anchors this collection as one of the most inventive and potent collections of modern American poetry. About.com called his 2009 collection Scandalabra, one of the best books of the year. Everything hilarious and stirring is illuminated. The power of Strange Light is waiting.

    Poemland alternates brilliantly between the deadpan, the spectacular, and the outrageous.If you open your mouth to start to complain I will fill it with whipped cream . . .There is a floating sadness nearby . . .Chelsey Minnis is the author of three previous collections. A graduate of the University of Colorado at Boulder and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she currently lives in Boulder, Colorado.

    But deeper under the surface are his observations on war, environmental degradation, language, and history, as a father—troubled by violence and human mismanagement of the world—offers advice to a newborn son.

    Whatever our feelings about établissement and French Maoism here at Commune Editions (they aren’t positive), we think the book is incredible, and expect you will too.Get it here: http://communeeditions.com/excess-the...

    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.