It includes generous selections from the three poetic alter egos that the Portuguese writer dubbed "heteronyms" - Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis and Alvaro de Campos - and from the vast and varied work he wrote under his own name.

    Stranger Music presents a magnificent cross-section of Cohen's work--including the legendary songs Suzanne, Sisters of Mercy, Bird on a Wire, Famous Blue Raincoat, I'm Your Man, and The Future; selections from such books as Flowers for Hitler, Beautiful Losers, and Death of a Lady's Man, and eleven previously unpublished poems. This volume demonstrates definitively that Cohen is a writer of dazzling intelligence and a force that transcends genres.

    Tableaux Parisiens condemns the crushing effects of urban planning on a city's soul and praises the city's anti-heroes including the deranged and derelict. Le Vin centers on the search for oblivion in drink and drugs. The many kinds of love that lie outside traditional morality is the focus of Fleurs du Mal while rebellion is at the heart of Révolte.

    The seventeen-syllable form is rooted in a Japanese tradition of close observation of nature, of making poetry from subtle suggestion. Infused by its great practitioners with the spirit of Zen Buddhism, the haiku has served as an example of the power of direct observation to the first generation of American modernist poets like Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams and also as an example of spontaneity and Zen alertness to the new poets of the 1950s. This definitive collection brings together in fresh translations by an American poet the essential poems of the three greatest haiku masters: Matsuo Basho in the seventeenth century; Yosa Buson in the eighteenth century; and Kobayashi Issa in the early nineteenth century. Robert Hass has written a lively and informed introduction, provided brief examples by each poet of their work in the haibun, or poetic prose form, and included informal notes to the poems. This is a useful and inspiring addition to the Essential Poets series.

    Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

    Carry your sword, my prophetess. Obstinate contumacy training. Find the objective that is more draining. More strenuous tasks will make you grow. Pain upon you I bestow. I’ll take it all and nothing less. I claim it back; I repossess. Tip the scale; Turn it over. Mark the unused; What’s leftover. The main part no longer exists; Despite the reduction, it persists. Continued movement; A quest for traction. An opposite and negative reaction. Hex induced metamorphosis; Reoccur once again for us. Physically and internally changing. The process of rearranging. The alteration was so fitting. Now they’re pausing; They’re intermitting. In reaffirming the causation; Keep kempt, and maintain your original explanation. Wear our serpent, prophetess; Prior to you was profitless. The soil was sown with no reaping. Tear our hearts out for your keeping. Beyond the boundaries of what is permitted. Reward me for the sins I’ve committed. My acts were bold; Caress my flesh. I give it all and nothing less. The facsimile will shudder. Express what it is I utter. Amidst psychos and others. Among psychos and others. Live with vigor; Efficiently transfigure. Disfigure; Change his figure. Make it so; Mark the torso. Undergo; Nock the torso. Let it grow; Open the torso. Let him know; Carve the torso.

    A collection of poetry by the German poet whose parents were murdered in Nazi concentration camps and who eventually committed suicide features essays on Jewish heritage and alienation.

    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.

    a writer finds himself tossed into a chaotic world of schoolboys by a diabolical professor who wishes to reduce him to childishness. Originally published in Poland in 1937. Ferdydurke became an instant literary sensation and catapulted the young author to fame. Deemed scandalous and subversive by Nazis. Stalinists. and the Polish Communist regime in turn. the novel (as well as all of Gombrowicz's other works) was officially banned in Poland for decades. It has nonetheless remained one of the most influential works of twentieth-century European literature. Ferdydurke is translated here directly from the Polish for the first time. Danuta Borchardt deftly captures Gombrowicz's playful and idiosyncratic style. and she allows English speakers to experience fully the masterpiece of a writer whom Milan Kundera describes as "one of the great novelists of our century." "Extravagant. brilliant. disturbing. brave. funny-wonderful. . . . Long live its sublime mockery." ~ Susan Sontag. from the foreword "[A] masterpiece of European modernism. . . . Susan Sontag ushers this new translation into print with a strong and useful foreword. calling Gombrowicz's tale 'extravagant. brilliant. disturbing. brave. funny... wonderful.' And it is." ~ Publishers Weekly Witold Gombrowicz (1904-1969) wrote three other novels. Trans-Atlantyk. Pornografia. and Cosmos. which together with his plays and his three-volume Diary have been translated into more than thirty languages.

    The middle-aged hero, Wokulski, successful in business, is being destroyed by his obsessive love for a frigid society doll, Izabela. Embattled aristocrats, the new men of finance, Dickensian tradesmen, and the urban poor all come vividly to life on the vast, superbly detailed canvas against which Wokulski’s personal tragedy is played out.Unlike his Western European counterparts, Prus had to work under official censorship. In this edition, most of the smaller cuts made by the Tsarist censor have been restored, and one longer fragment is included as an appendix.

    More immediate if less polished than his later work, these poems enchant and impress with their classical learning, wit, perceptiveness and lyricism—all facets of Vikram Seth's now celebrated poetic achievement.

    Among his expansive and impressive body of work, Gitanjali is regarded as one of his greatest achievements, and has been a perennial bestseller since it was first published in 1910.

    Divided into four chapters, the book deals with the struggles of pain and healing of wounds of all sorts, finding sweetness in all the bitterness along the way. Sugar, honey, ice & tea takes readers on a journey deep into the dark corners where struggle becomes strength and pushes through all the emptiness until it reaches the light.

    

    Originally written in French, these poems collapse time into single crystallized moments then explode outward to take in the scope of human history. In Time, we see an intertwining of war and love, coffee and bombs, empathetic observation and emphatic detail taken from both memory and the present of the poem to weave a tapestry of experience in non-linear time.