E. Cummings's biographer, include his most popular poems, spanning his earliest creations, his vivacious linguistic acrobatics, up to his last valedictory sonnets. Also featured are thirteen drawings, oils, and watercolors by Cummings, most of them never before published.The selection includes most of the favorites plus many fresh and surprising examples of Cummings's several poetic styles. The corrected texts established by George J. Firmage have been used throughout.

    Fleeing the chaotic,  ruined city, he instinctively travels north toward a frozen, desolate sanctuary he is certain will assure this survival--and freedom. Making his way through enemy terrain, on the lookout for both danger and  opportunity, Muldrow's journey becomes the flight of a pure predator. Moving through the darkness,  bombarded by haunting visions that consume his  imagination, every step in his violent odyssey brings  him closer to a harrowing climax that is pure  James Dickey.

    These new poems mine the rich strain of inscrutability in ordinary life, until it is hard to know what is innocent and what ominous. There is something about his work that continues to be crystal clear and yet deeply weighted with violence and mystery. Reading it is like going undercover. The face of a girl carrying a white dress from the cleaners with her eyes half-closed. The Adam & Evie Tanning Salon at night. A sparrow on crutches. A rubber duck in a shooting gallery on a Sunday morning. And someone in a tree swing, too old to be swinging and to be wearing no clothes at all, blowing a toy trumpet at the sky.

    "A perfect work like no other. (Calasso) has re-created . . . the morning of our world."--Gore Vidal. 15 engravings.

    Despite war, repression and censorship, a renaissance has taken place in Iran over the last 25 years - a renaissance hidden from Westerners since the Iranian revolution of 1979. "Strange Times, My Dear" brings the first ever translated selection of work from three generations worth of the best in Iranian writing - featuring short stories, novel extracts and poems from over 40 contributors - to the English speaking world. For thousands of years, multiple ethnicities, languages and religions have co-existed in Iran - and continue to do so despite traumatic events and the oppression of recent decades. Their literature has flourished in adversity, producing works of diverse beauty and incalculable importance. "Strange Times, My Dear" reveals a major and largely undiscovered branch of world literature for the first time.

    In this self-eulogy written in the final years of Mahmoud Darwish's life, Palestine becomes a metaphor for the injustice and pain of our contemporary moment.Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008) was one of the most acclaimed poets in the Arab world. His poetry collections include Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone? and A River Dies of Thirst (Archipelago Books). In 2001 Darwish was awarded the Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize.

    This classic selection of her work, made by her former husband Ted Hughes, provides the perfect introduction to this most influential of poets. The poems are taken from Sylvia Plath's four collections Ariel, The Colossus, Crossing the Water and Winter Trees, and include many of her most celebrated works, such as 'Daddy', 'Lady Lazarus' and 'Wuthering Heights'.

    They are superficially a study in contrasts yet share equally haunting sexual burdens carried since youth. With common secrets, they are drawn into a remarkable friendship.

    Lorca (1898-1937) is admired all over the world for the lyricism, immediacy and clarity of his poetry, as well as for his ability to encompass techniques of the symbolist movement with deeper psychological shadings. But Lorca's poems are, most of all, admired for their beauty. Undercurrents of his major influences--Spanish folk traditions from his native Andalusia and Granada, gypsy ballads, and his friends the surrealists Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel--stream throughout Lorca's work. Poets represented here as translators are as diverse as Stephen Spender, Langston Hughes, Ben Belitt, William Jay Smith, and W.S. Merwin.

    Do Angels Need Haircuts? is an extraordinary snapshot of this turning point in Reed’s career. Gathering poems, photographs and ephemera from this era (including previously unreleased audio of the 1971 St. Mark’s Church reading), and featuring a new foreword by Anne Waldman and an afterword by Laurie Anderson, this book provides a window to a little-known chapter in the life of one of the most singular and uncompromising voices in American popular culture.

    Completing it was, in the Shah's words, "a race against time." In it, he shows how the United States, once the most powerful country on earth, found itself hostage to the whims of Iran, a land few Americans knew much about. In telling his own story, the Shah shows clearly that Iran has become a battleground between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, which for over half a century has pursued goals with increasing success. In the "slide into chaos" precipitated by the Khomeini regime, the Shah saw the ultimate beneficiary being the U.S.S. R., which will reach the apogee of its strength no later than 1983, with the West facing "a decade of harrowing danger." Answer to History begins with what really happened during the Shah's period of exile in the Bahamas, Mexico, the U.S., Panama, and finally Egypt. It goes on to cover all of the momentous experiences of the Shah's reign, a book full of heroes and villains, with many surprises for the American reader as to who the villains really were and are. The Shah discloses backstage developments in today's politics of oil... The Shah show how the interplay between the Black and the Red - the 14th-century clergy and the Tudeh Party loyal to the Soviets - blocked for their own purposes his proudest achievements: the White Revolution in which the Shah introduced land reform, worked toward the liberation of women, and raised the standard of living of his people, providing disparate ethnic groups with pride in the 2,500 year-old culture of Persia. When the enemies of his reign took to the streets, the Shah felt the he reacted not too strongly, but not strongly enough.... In his Answer to History he reveals the forces that betrayed him, and left the U.S. without an economically and militarily strong ally in a critical part of the world. --- excerpts from book's dustjacket

    VERA & LINUS is a series of short sketches. The book's theme is the love between the two protagonists, Vera and Linus. They are mischief makers and tricksters of the most daring sort, and they are constantly up to no good, but the language holds them with a clear restraint, a restraint born perhaps out of the peculiar nature of their love, a love both for each other and the things of the world. Their mastery, and shifting natures allow them to compel the workaday world as they see it, but not to rule over each other, and so their game begins, as Vera struggles to outwit Linus, and Linus to outwit Vera.

    

    The much-anticipated poetry chapbook by Sam Pink, author of the cult favorites Person and I Am Going to Clone Myself Then Kill the Clone and Eat It, who the Los Angeles Review of Books called, “Simply one of the best, darkest, funniest, wildest, and [most] touching writers we’ve got.”

    This new bilingual selection brings together some two hundred poems--the largest collection of Borges' poetry ever assembled in English, including scores of poems never previously translated. Edited by Alexander Coleman, the selection draws from a lifetime's work--from Borges' first published volume of verse, Fervor de Buenos Aires (1923), to his final work, Los Conjurados, published just a year before his death in 1986. Throughout this unique collection the brilliance of the Spanish originals is matched by luminous English versions by a remarkable cast of translators, including Robert Fitzgerald, Stephen Kessler, W. S. Merwin, Alastair Reid, Mark Strand, Charles Tomlinson, and John Updike.For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.