Silvina Ocampo


Silvina Ocampo - 2015
    Remarkably, this is the first collection of Ocampo’s poetry to appear in English. From her early sonnets on the native Argentine landscape, to her meditations on love’s travails, to her explorations of the kinship between plant and animal realms, to her clairvoyant inquiries into history and myth and memory, readers will find the full range of Ocampo’s “metaphysical lyricism” (The Independent) represented in this groundbreaking edition.

The Widening Spell of the Leaves


Larry Levis - 1991
    He seems to be writing the poems we all need to read right now." --Antioch Review Larry Levis was born in Fresno, California, in 1946. His first book of poems, Wrecking Crew, won the United States Award from the International Poetry Forum, and was published in the Pitt Poetry Series in 1972. His second book, The Afterlife, won the Lamont Award from the American Academy of Poets in 1976. In 1981, The Dollmaker's Ghost was a winner of the Open Competition of the National Poetry Series. Among his other awards were three fellowships in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Larry Levis died in 1996.

The Winged Energy of Delight: Selected Translations


Robert Bly - 2005
    The poetry he chose supplied qualities that were lacking from the literary culture of this country. For the first time Robert Bly’s brilliant translations, from several languages, have been brought together in one book. Here, in The Winged Energy of Delight, the poems of twenty-two poets, some renowned, others lesser known, are brought together.At a time when editors and readers knew only Eliot and Pound, Robert Bly introduced the earthy wildness of Pablo Neruda and Cesar Vallejo and the sober grief of Trakl, as well as the elegance of Jiménez and Tranströmer. He also published high-spirited versions of Kabir and Rumi, and Mirabai, which had considerable influence on the wide culture of the 1970s and 1980s. Bly’s clear translations of Rilke attracted many new readers to the poet, and his versions of Machado have become models of silence and depth. He continues to bring fresh and amazing poets into English, most recently Rolf Jacobsen, Miguel Hernandez, Francis Ponge, and the ninteenth-century Indian poet Ghalib. As Kenneth Rexroth has said, Robert Bly “is one of the leaders of a poetic revival which has returned American literature to the world community.”

3 Summers


Lisa Robertson - 2016
    What is form's time? Here the form of life called a poem speaks with the body's mortality, its thickness, its play. The 10 poem-sequences in 3 Summers inflect a history of textual voices — Lucretius, Marx, Aby Warburg, Deleuze, the Sogdian Sutras — in a lyricism that insists on analysis and revolt, as well as the pleasures of description. The poet explores the mysterious oddness of the body, its languor and persistence, to test how it shapes the materiality of thinking, which includes rivers and forests. But in these poems' landscapes, the time of nature is inherently political. Now only time is wild, and only time — embodied here in Lisa Robertson’s forceful cadences — can tell.‘Robertson proves hard to explain but easy to enjoy. . . . Dauntlessly and resourcefully intellectual, Robertson can also be playful or blunt. . . . She wields language expertly, even beautifully.’—The New York Times‘Robertson makes intellect seductive; only her poetry could turn swooning into a critical gesture.’— The Village VoiceLisa Robertson's books include Cinema of the Present, Debbie: An Epic, The Men, The Weather, R's Boat and Occasional Works and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture. Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip was named one of The New York Times' 100 Notable Books. She lives in France.

A Hunger


Lucie Brock-Broido - 1988
    . . A violently skewed portrait of the female poet and her Muse, a hyped-up version of Stevens and his interior paramour, locked in a soliloquy 'in which being there together is enough' . . . Something in Brock-Broido likes stealth, toxicity, wildness, neon--'perfect mean lines' . . . The poems lead off the page." --Helen Vendler, The New Yorker"These poems are out of Stevens in the abundance, glitter, and seductiveness of their language, out of Browning in the authority of their inhabiting, and out of Plath in the ferocity and passion of their holding on--to feeling, to life, and to us . . . An astonishing first book." --Cynthia Macdonald"Brock-Broido's brilliant nervosity and taste for the fantastic impel her to explore the obscure corners of the psyche and the fringes of ordinary human experience . . . The poems in A Hunger are original, strange, often unsettling, and mostly beautiful." --Stanley Kunitz

The Orchard


Brigit Pegeen Kelly - 2004
    Her poetic strength lies in her ability to cast poems as modern myths and allegories. Propelled by patterned repetitions and lush cadences, the poems move the reader through a landscape where waking and dream consciousness fuse.Brigit Pegeen Kelly teaches creative writing at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her poetry collections are Song (BOA Editions), the 1994 Lamont Poetry Selection of The Academy of American Poets and a finalist for the 1995 Los Angeles Times Book Award, and To the Place of Trumpets, selected by James Merrill for the 1987 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize.

The Centaur in the Garden


Moacyr Scliar - 1980
    It is only now that Guedali is able to revel in memories of glorious times past. Born a centaur--a mythical creature half-horse, half-human--Guedali describes his family's flight from Russia to Brazil at the turn of the century, the shock of his birth, the loving care of his parents and his sisters, the mounting resentment of his brother, and his extraordinary experiences being raised as a Jew. Torn between his deep attachment to his family and his natural instincts to roam wild, Guedali searches for a place where his startling duality is accepted and embraced. He joins a traveling circus, only to be discovered in an intimate encounter with the lion tamer. Guedali finds himself on the run again, and meets his life companion--a centauress. Together they embark on a journey to create a place where the human and the wild can live in peaceful coexistence.

Rebellion in the Backlands


Euclides da Cunha - 1902
    On the primitive frontier of desert and mountain in the backwoods of Brazil, fifty-two hundred houses and every man, woman, and child who lived in them had been destroyed. The ten-month-long house-to-house battle, the agony of guerrilla warfare, the bitterness of "scorched earth" retreat was ended. The federal army of Brazil had defeated the religious mystic, the fanatic street preacher, the Messiah to thousands, who had led from December, 1986, to October, 1897, the strangest of all rebellions.Yet Antonio Conselheiro's personal war did not go unsung. Os Sertões—called Brazil's greatest epic—is Euclides da Cunha's searing, moving account of Conselheiro's struggle. It is a valiant cry of protest against oppression of the weak by the strong and a wise and compassionate record of a shocking totalitarian crime perpetrated against a handful of backwoodsmen in a little-known corner of the world.In this brilliant English translation by Samuel Putnam, Rebellion in the Backlands retains its force as a classic contribution to man's understanding of the human spirit and the human struggle.

Borges and the Eternal Orangutans


Luis Fernando Verissimo - 2000
    Vogelstein is a loner who has always lived among books. Suddenly, fate grabs hold of his insignificant life and carries him off to Buenos Aires, to a conference on Edgar Allan Poe, the inventor of the modern detective story. There Vogelstein meets his idol, Jorge Luis Borges, and for reasons that a mere passion for literature cannot explain, he finds himself at the center of a murder investigation that involves arcane demons, the mysteries of the Kaballah, the possible destruction of the world, and the Elizabethan magus John Dee's theory of the "Eternal Orangutan," which, given all the time in the world, would end up writing all the known books in the cosmos. Verissimo's small masterpiece is at once a literary tour de force and a brilliant mystery novel.

Advice from 1 Disciple of Marx to 1 Heidegger Fanatic


Mario Santiago Papasquiaro - 2013
    Fierce and visceral, Advice from 1 Disciple of Marx to 1 Heidegger Fanatic is canonical to Infrarealism, a poem that renders poetry inseparable from politics. It was published originally as part of the posthumous collection Jeta de Santo: Antología Poética, 1974–1997. This is the first widely available English translation of Santiago Papasquiaro's work.the thesis & antithesis of the world meetlike 1 white-hot meteor & 1 UFO in distress& inexplicably they greet each other:I'm the 1 who embossed on the back of his denim jacketthe sentence: The nucleus of my solar system is AdventureMario Santiago Papasquiaro founded the radical Infrarealist poetry movement with Roberto Bolaño. During his lifetime, Santiago published two books of poetry, Beso eterno (1995) and Aullido de Cisne (1996). He died in Mexico City, Mexico, in 1998.Cole Heinowitz is an associate professor of literature at Bard College.Alexis Graman is a painter and translator living in New York.

Notes from Childhood


Norah Lange - 1937
    These intimate moments serve as windows onto a world of innocent voyeurism and surreal misunderstanding, as Lange’s family learns to live with the eccentric little spy in their midst—and vice versa. Lange recalls her older sister bathing nude in the moonlight, she recalls the death of a horse, she recalls how she cried when she was lifted onto a table and dressed as a boy, and yet how she laughed when climbing onto the roof in men’s clothing to throw bricks.Through a veneer of comforting domesticity, these “notes” show us childhood at its most elemental: a laboratory of life in which strangeness, joy, terror, and eroticism combine and collide.

The Pocket Sappho (Shambhala Pocket Library)


Willis Barnstone - 2019
    Though her extant work consists only of a collection of fragments and a handful of complete poems, the passionate elegance of her musings on life and death, loss and longing, desire, and nature speak volumes.Willis Barnstone’s vivid, contemporary translation, along with his introduction and notes, sheds new light on the spirit and mystique of this ancient Greek poet.This edition is an abridgment of The Complete Poems of Sappho.

Chronicle of the Murdered House


Lúcio Cardoso - 1959
    This family’s downfall, peppered by stories of decadence, adultery, incest, and madness, is related through a variety of narrative devices, including letters, diaries, memoirs, statements, confessions, and accounts penned by the various characters.Lúcio Cardoso (1912–1968) turned away from the social realism fashionable in 1930s Brazil and opened the doors of Brazilian literature to introspective works such as those of Clarice Lispector—his greatest follower and admirer.Margaret Jull Costa has translated dozens of works from both Spanish and Portuguese, including books by Javier Marías and José Saramago. Her translations have received numerous awards, including the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. In 2014 she was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire.Robin Patterson was mentored by Margaret Jull Costa, and has translated Our Musseque by José Luandino Vieira.

The Alienist and Other Stories of Nineteenth-Century Brazil


Machado de Assis - 2013
    Accompanied by a thorough introduction to "Brazil's Machado, Machado's Brazil", these vibrant new translations of eight of Machado de Assis's best-known short stories bring nineteenth-century Brazilian society and culture to life for modern readers.

City of God


Paulo Lins - 1997
    Cicade de Deus, the City of God, is one of Rio's most notorious slums. Yet it is also a place where samba rocks till dawn, where the women are the most beautiful on earth, and where one young man wants to escape his background and become a photographer. City of God is a sprawling, magnificently told epic about gang life in Rio's favelas, based on years of research and Pualo Lins's firsthand experience growing up in Cicade de Deus. A book that gives voice to the dispossessed of multiethnic Brazil, City of God will earn Paulo Lins more well-deserved international acclaim.