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.

    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.

    Whether illuminating a common laborer or a legendary thinker, Dubie meets his subjects with utter compassion for their humanity and the dignity behind their creative work. In pursuit of the well-told story, his love of history is ever-present—though often he recreates his own.“With its restoration of so many out-of-print poems and its addition of new works, The Mercy Seat was one of last year’s most significant publications.” —American Book Review“The voices of Dubie’s monologues are full of astonishing intimacy.” —The Washington Post Book World

    Each of Levin's poems is an astonishing investigation of human darkness, propelled by a sensuous syntax and a desire for healing."This is the language of a prophet: Levin's art, in this book certainly, takes place in a kind of mutating day of judgment: it means to wipe a film from our eyes. It is a dare, a challenge, and, for all its considerable beauty, the opposite of the seductive...Sensuous, compassionate, violent, extravagant: what an amazing debut this is, a book of terrors and marvels."-Louise Gluck, from the IntroductionDana Levin was raised in Lancaster, California, in the Mojave Desert. She has received fellowships, grants, and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Academy of American Poets, the Vermont Arts Council, and New York University, where she received her M.F.A. She lives in New Mexico and teaches Creative Writing at the College of Santa Fe.

    Starting with Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note and concluding with recent limited-edition chapbooks and broadsides, this selection traces the more than thirty year career of a major writer who - along with Ezra Pound - may be one of the most significant, and least understood, American poets of our century. Edited by noted poet and translator Paul Vengelisti, Transbluesency offers an ample selection of works from every period of Baraka's extraordinarily innovative, often controversial struggle as a serious and ideologically committed American artist - from Beat to Black Nationist to Maxist-Leninist. This volume reveals a writer shaping a body of poetry that is well a body of knowledge; a passionate reflection upon the cultural, political, and aesthetic questions of his time.

    It is both an exciting war story and a gallery of intellectual portraits: a ruthless Bolshevik revolutionary, a disillusioned master of propaganda, a powerful Chinese pacifist, and a young anarchist. Each of these "conquerors" will be crushed by the revolution they try to control. In a new Foreword, Herbert R. Lottman discusses the political background of the book, and the extent to which Malraux invented the history he wrote about. "[The Conquerors] is a valuable introduction to Malraux himself, who would, like his fictional counterpart, become an analgam of talents as novelist, essayist, Leftist and Gaullist, Resistance hero and art critic. He was among the most 'universal' of French men of letters."—Choice "The novel can be enjoyed as a remarkable work of modernism. With images derived from the silent cinema and prose from the telegraph, it moves at a tremendous pace. Canton all comes to violent life, seen as though from a speeding car."—Kirkus "No other writer of the 20th century had the same capacity to translate his personal adventure into a meeting with history and a dialogue of civilization."—Carlos Fuentes, New York Times Book Review

    The world was 'somewhere inside his skull. And it hurt.' These poems and dramatic sketches, however, delight even when they hurt" -- ROSMARIE WALDROP"BORIS BY THE SEA was born when Aesop was reading Chekhov, and Chekhov was reading Nietzsche, and Nietzsche was watching The Brother From Another Planet. Actually Matvei Yankelevich wrote this book, but 'wrote' is incomplete... he seems more to inhabit this stateless, beautiful being who uses language to move his body or erase the sea: 'Boris looked over himself and realized there were many parts of him that he could not see. And only a small part of these parts was on the surface.' BORIS BY THE SEA could be a children's fable if it weren't so freakin' real, unreal, hyper-real: 'But people need each other to open each other up and see what is inside.' This is Boris--and he, like Pinnochio--has a clever master." -- ROBERT FITTERMANMatvei Yankelevich's first full-length book, BORIS BY THE SEA, is a work of existential theater that destroys the distance between puppeteer and puppet, between ego and id, between what is real and what is absurd. Consisting of prose, poems, and plays, the book creates its own world and then confronts the loneliness of having to exist within one's own creation. Like Daniil Kharms, Yankelevich has written a children's book for only the bravest of adults.

    The result is a poetry that upends the deeply and dangerously assumed concepts of such a culture—that new knowledge is always better knowledge, that history is a steady progress, that humans are in control of the natural order. Nick Lantz’s poems hurtle through time from ancient theories of physics to the CIA training manual for the practice of torture, from the history of the question mark to the would-be masterpieces left incomplete by the deaths of Leonardo da Vinci, Nikolai Gogol, Bruce Lee, and Jimi Hendrix. Selected by Linda Gregerson for the esteemed Bakeless Prize for Poetry, We Don’t Know We Don’t

    In his poems, he gave voice to his private sentiments and spiritual aspirations in the plain style of New England speech. Now, The Library of America brings together these indispensable works in one authoritative volume.Spanning his entire career, the 27 essays gathered here vary in style from the ambling rhythm of "Natural History of Massachusetts" and "A Winter Walk" to the concentrated moral outrage of "Slavery in Massachusetts" and "A Plea for Captain John Brown". Included are "Civil Disobedience", Thoreau's great exploration of the conflict between individual conscience and state power that continues to influence political thinkers and activists; "Walking", a meditation on wildness and civilization; and "Life Without Principle", a passionate critique of American materialism and conformity. Also here are literary essays, including pieces on Homer, Chaucer, and Carlyle; the travel essay "A Yankee in Canada"; the three speeches in defense of John Brown; and essays such as "Autumnal Tints", "Wild Fruits", and "Huckleberries" that explore natural phenomena around Concord.Seven poems are published here for the first time, and others are presented in new, previously unpublished versions based on Thoreau's manuscripts.

     Worlds of achievement out of mind and remembering,           just as the poem lasts. In the concert of being present.                                                           —from “Arriving” Linda Gregg’s abiding presence in American poetry for more than thirty years is a testament to the longevity of art and the spirit. All of It Singing: New and Selected Poems for the first time collects the ongoing work of Gregg’s career in one book, including poetry from her six previous volumes and thirty remarkable new poems.

    Henriksen opens ORDINARY SUN by insisting that "an eye is not enough." Resisting solipsism, these poems negotiate that conflict between the mind and what exists outside the mind. Though pain intrinsically resides in that conflict Henriksen strives for an honest happiness, a kind of gorgeous suffering that blesses our days. To this end, these poems emerge from images of all those innumerable things that embody both visceral and ethereal beauty rocks, trees, broken glass, baseball, angels.... Here we find immediacy immersed in the image, and in the reading of these poems becomes ourselves immersed in the immediate."

    Boyhood; II. Apprenticeship; III. The Great Struggle; IV. Daybreak. Martin Andersen Nexo (1869-1954) was born in the slums of Copenhagen into extreme poverty. He was the fourth of eleven children. His father, a stone mason, was an alcoholic and his mother was a daughter of a blacksmith. When he was eight, the family moved to the town of Nexo on the island of Bornholm, whose name he adopted in 1894 as his own. His breakthrough work, the Danish classic Pelle the Conqueror, appeared between 1906 (Part I) and 1910 (Part IV). It tells the story of Pelle, a poor boy, whose life in Part I shares much similarities with Nexo's. "The great charm of the book lies in the fact that the writer knows the poor from within; he has not studied them as an outsider may, but has lived with them and felt with them, at once a participant and a keen-eyed spectator. He is no sentimentalist, and so rich is his imagination that he passes on rapidly from one scene to the next, sketching often in a few pages what another novelist would be content to work out into long chapters or whole volumes. His sympathy is of the widest, and he makes us see tragedies behind the little comedies, and comedies behind the little tragedies, of the seemingly sordid lives of the working people whom he loves." (Otto Jespersen) "Pelle" has conquered the hearts of the reading public of Denmark and of the world. The first part of the book was filmed by Bille August; in 1989 the film won the Academy Award as Best Foreign Language Film."

    Her poems comprise some of the most inviting lyrics I've found in a living poet."—Bookslut"Phrase by phrase Nguyen's work can be conversational, playful, funny, angry, acutely self-aware, and loaded with sensory information."—Anselm Berrigan, from the introductionRed Juice represents a decade of poems written roughly between 1998 and 2008, previously only available in small-run handmade chapbooks, journals, and out-of-print books. This collection of early poems by Vietnamese American poet Hoa Nguyen showcases her feminist ecopoetics and unique style, all lyrical in the post-modern tradition.[BUDDHA'S EARS ARE DROOPY TOUCH HIS SHOULDERS]Buddha's ears are droopy touch his shouldersas scarves fly out of windows and I shriekat the lotus of enlightenmentTravel to Free Street past Wacoto the hole in the Earthwearing waterI'm aiming my mouthfor apple pieBorn in the Mekong Delta and raised in the Washington, DC, area, Hoa Nguyen studied Poetics at New College of California in San Francisco. With the poet Dale Smith, Nguyen founded Skanky Possum, a poetry journal and book imprint. She is the author of eight poetry books and chapbooks and lives in Toronto, Ontario, where she teaches poetics at Ryerson University and curates a reading series.

    This volume also includes poems and translations never previously collected, and a selection of drafts that demonstrate the poet's constant drive to reimagine his work. Collected Poems at last offers readers the opportunity to take in, in its entirety, one of the great careers in twentieth-century poetry.

    Though originally published separately, these prose poems have always been intended as a loose trilogy of thought and feelingor of thought manifested as feeling. The author comments: "Just as the title Curves to the Apple combines the organic and geometry (not to mention myth and history of science) the poems navigate the conflicting, but inextricable claims of body and mind, especially the female body and feelings in a space of logic and physics. The poems could all be called dialogic, reaching out across a synaptic (sometimes humorous) gap to a possible 'you' (though it may be rhetorical, another point of view in the same mind). But while the 'I' dominates the first two volumes, the third gives both voices equal space and chance."