New Addresses


Kenneth Koch - 2000
    His use of it gives him yet another chance to say things never said before in prose or in verse and, as well, to bring new life to a form in which Donne talked to Death, Shelley to the West Wind, Whitman to the Earth, Pound to his Songs, O'Hara to the Sun at Fire Island.  Koch, in this new book, talks to things important in his life -- to Breath, to World War Two, to Orgasms, to the French Language, to Jewishness, to Psychoanalysis, to Sleep, to his Heart, to Friendship, to High Spirits, to his Twenties, to the Unknown. He makes of all these "new addresses" an exhilarating autobiography of a most surprising and unforeseeable kind.From the Hardcover edition.

The Serpent of Stars


Jean Giono - 1933
    The novel’s elusive narrative thread ties landscape to character to an expanse just beyond our grasp. The narrator encounters a shepherding family and glimpse by glimpse, each family member and the shepherding way of life is revealed to us. The novel culminates in a large shepherds’ gathering where a traditional Shepherd’s Play—a kind of creation myth that includes in its cast The River, The Sea, The Man, and The Mountain—is enacted. The work’s proto-environmental world view as well as its hybrid form—part play, part novel—makes The Serpent of Stars astonishingly contemporary. W.S. Merwin’s "Green Fields" begins, "By this part of the century few are left who believe in the animals for they are not there in the carved parts/of them served on plates and the pleas from slatted trucks..." This novel leaves the reader believing not only in the animals, but the terrain they are part of, the people who tend them, and the life all these elements together compose.

Adult Head


Jeff Tweedy - 2004
    In turns surreal and concrete, playful and serious, urgent and whimsical, Adult Head rewards readers with a unique prosody and deep wisdom. Culled from the same mind responsible for some of the best lyrics and music made in the past decade, this volume displays Tweedy's prodigious talent for poetry on the page. Jeff Tweedy has devoted the last twenty years of his life to songwriting and music making. As a member of the band Wilco and formerly of the band Uncle Tupelo, Tweedy and his band mates have garnered respect and praise from Rolling Stone, Spin, the New Yorker, the New York Times, and the Chicago Tribune. Tweedy lives in Chicago with his wife and two sons.

Dark Room and Other Poems


Enrique Lihn - 1963
    Gathered here is Lihn's most representative work from 1963 to 1977, drawn from his major books.

Selected Writings


Guillaume Apollinaire - 1971
    He had led migration of Bohemian Paris across the city from Montmartre to Montparnasse, he had helped formulate the principles of 'Cubism', having written one of the first books on the subject, and coined the word 'Surrealist'; and he had demonstrated in his own work those innovations we have come to associate with the most vital investigations of the avente - garde.

Chickamauga: Poems


Charles Wright - 1995
    Chickamauga is also a virtuoso exploration of the power of concision in lyric poetry--a testament to the flexible music of the long line Wright has made his own. As a reviewer in Library Journal noted: "Wright is one of those rare and gifted poets who can turn thought into music. Following his self-prescribed regimen of purgatio, illuminato, and contemplatio, Wright spins one lovely lyric after another on such elemental subjects as sky, trees, birds, months, and seasons. But the real subject is the thinking process itself and the mysterious alchemy of language: 'The world is a language we never quite understand.'"

Selected Poems


René Char - 1992
    In making their selections, the editors have chosen the voices of seventeen poets and translators (Paul Auster, Samuel Beckett, Cid Corman, Eugene Jolas, W.S. Merwin, William Carlos Williams, and James Wright, to name a few), in homage to a writer long held in highest esteem by the literary avant-garde.

With Deer


Aase Berg - 1997
    Filling each page with fluids and viscera she plunges into the palpable, pulsating center of our psyche--pulling up fistfuls of nightmares at once strange and familiar. To read this book is to glimpse the ecstasy you always suspected lay at the heart of every rapturous horror.With Deer [Hos rådjur] was Berg's first full-length book of poetry, originally published in Sweden in 1997.

The Fatalist


Lyn Hejinian - 2003
    It offers humorous reflection upon our species' endless attempts to transmit insight regarding our human condition.

Black Mirror: The Selected Poems


Roger Gilbert-Lecomte - 1996
    The visionary, sardonic, and often outrageous poems in this bilingual edition represent the first presentation of his work in English. With René Daumal he was the founder of the literary movement and magazine "Le Grand Jeu", the essence of which he defined as "the impersonal instant of eternity in emptiness". "The glimpse of eternity in the void", writes Rattray in the Introduction, "was to send Daumal to Hinduism, the study of Yoga philosophy, and Sanskrit. It sent Lecomte on an exploration of what he called a metaphysics of absence". Rattray, a poet acclaimed for his translations of Artaud, keeps intact the power and originality of Gilbert-Lecomte's work.

Aurélia and Other Writings


Gérard de Nerval - 1855
    One of the original self-styled -bohemians, - Nerval was best known in his own day for parading a lobster on a pale blue ribbon through the gardens of the Palais-Royal, and was posthumously notorious for his suicide in 1855, hanging from an apron string he called the garter of the Queen of Sheba. This hallucinatory document of dreams, obsession, and insanity has fascinated artists such as Joseph Cornell, who cited passages from it to explain his own work; Antonin Artaud, who saw his own madness mirrored by Nerval's; and Andre Breton, who placed Nerval in the highest echelon of Surrealist heroes. Geoffrey Wagner's translation of Aurelia was first published by Grove Press in 1959, but has remained out of print for nearly 20 years. Also included in this volume are previously untranslated stories by Marc Lowenthal, and poet Robert Duncan's version of the sonnet cycle Chimeras, making this the most complete collection of Nerval's influential oeuvre ever published in English.

I Am a Beautiful Monster: Poetry, Prose, and Provocation


Francis Picabia - 2003
    Yet very little of Picabia's poetry and prose has been translated into English, and his literary experiments have never been the subject of close critical study. I Am a Beautiful Monster is the first definitive edition in English of Picabia's writings, gathering a sizable array of Picabia's poetry and prose and, most importantly, providing a critical context for it with an extensive introduction and detailed notes by the translator. Picabia's poetry and prose is belligerent, abstract, polemical, radical, and sometimes simply baffling. For too long, Picabia's writings have been presented as raw events, rule-breaking manifestations of inspirational carpe diem. This book reveals them to be something entirely different: maddening in their resistance to meaning, full of outrageous posturing, and hiding a frail, confused, and fitful personality behind egoistic bravura. I Am a Beautiful Monster provides the texts of of Picabia's significant publications, all presented complete, many of them accompanied by their original illustrations.

Accident Dancing


Keaton Henson - 2020
    accompanied by evocative illustrations, it is an intimate and unapologetically personal journey through a life the way we remember them, as Keaton puts it "chaotic, fragmented and often grammatically incorrect".

Selected Poems


Francis Ponge - 1994
    Through translations by two major contemporary poets and a scholar intimate with the Ponge canon, this volume offers selections of mostly earlier poetry —Le parti pris des choses, Pièces, Proêmes, and Nouveau nouveau recueil—as representative of the strongest work of this modern French master.

Spells


Michel de Ghelderode - 1941
    Like Ghelderode's plays, the stories are marked by a powerful imagination and a keen sense of the grotesque, but in these the author speaks to us still more directly. Written at a time of illness and isolation, and conceived as a fresh start, Spells was Ghelderode's last major creative work, and he claimed it as his most personal and deeply felt one: a set of written spells through which his fears, paranoia and nostalgia found concrete form.By turns mystical, macabre and whimsically humorous, and set in the unsettled atmosphere of Brussels, Ostend, Bruges and London, Spells conjures up an uncanny realm of angels, demons, masks, effigies and apparitions, a twilit, oppressed world of diseased gardens, dusty wax mannequins and sinister relics.Combining the full contents of both the 1941 and 1947 editions, this translation of Spells is the most comprehensive edition yet published.Michel de Ghelderode was born in Brussels in 1898. After nearly a decade of penning fiction, drama, literary journalism and puppet plays, in 1926 he began to write almost entirely for the theater and the following ten years saw the creation of most of his major plays. After 1936 he suffered from poor health and his involvement with the theater diminished. In the later 1940s, performances of his plays in Paris sparked a major awakening of interest in his work. Ghelderode died in 1962; the interior of his apartment, packed with books, pictures, puppets and masks, has been reassembled in Brussels as the Musee-Bibliotheque Michel de Ghelderode.