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At the heart of this collection are meditations on cultural values, Hungarian history, and the legacy of suppression and survival. Included in this collection is one of the author's most outspoken poems, "One Sentence on Tyranny," a haunting and relentless testimony to the entire Eastern European experience—a backhanded homage to all the oppressions and fears of daily life.

Winner of the 2005 Kate Tufts Discovery Award.

From the author of Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America and the National Book Award finalist Elegy for a Broken Machine: Poems, here is the first collection from award-winning poet Patrick Phillips.

A river runs through Patrick Phillips’s collection Chattahoochee, and through a family saga as powerful and poignant as the landscape in which it unfolds. Here are tales of a vanished South, elegies for the lost, and glimpses of what Flannery O’Connor called the “action of grace in territory held largely by the devil.” In language delicate and muscular, tender and raw-boned, Phillips writes of family, place, and that mythic conjunction of the two we call home.

In his latest book, Warren Ginsberg explores what he calls Chaucer's "Italian tradition," a discourse that emerges by viewing the social institutions and artistic modes that shaped Chaucer's reception of Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch. While offering a fresh look at one of England's great literary figures, this book addresses important questions about the dynamics of cross-cultural translation and the formation of tradition.
Because divergent political, municipal, and literary histories would have made the Italian cities--Genoa, Florence, and Milan--unfamiliar to an English poet from medieval London, Ginsberg argues that we must consider what Chaucer overlooked and mistook from his Italian models alongside the material he did appropriate. To make sense of premises in texts like Dante's Comedy that were peculiarly Italian, Chaucer would look to Boccaccio as a gloss; by reading these authors in conjunction with one another, Chaucer generates an "Italian tradition" that translates into the terms of his English experience works already mediated by a prior stage of transposition.
Ginsberg explores Chaucer's relationship to Italian poets not in terms of the interaction of individual talents with accredited authorities (Chaucer and Dante, Boccaccio and Petrarch, etc.). Rather, he focuses on the shifts in tension that occur when the civic engagements and disengagements of Florence's poets are brought into contact with Chaucer's growing metropolitanism and increasing reluctance to make London the locus of his poetic art.
Beyond its appeal to medievalists and those who study the Renaissance, Chaucer's Italian Tradition will be welcomed by readers interested in theoretical questions about translation and the development of tradition, including individuals who study history, literature, and the nature of the humanities.
Warren Ginsberg is Professor of English, University of Oregon.

Now considered possibly Illinois' greatest poet, Carl Sandburg (1878-1967) saw himself as a bard of the working class. Chicago Poems brought him to national attention and is one of the few Chicago classics that can also be termed an American classic. It includes such famous poems as "Chicago" and "Fog," as well as many others whose subjects range from the lives of ordinary citizens to city scenes and World War I. Written in powerful free verse, the poems are notable for their realistic portrayal of the struggle of working people and their focus on the lyric beauty of the urban environment.
 

There is a gentleness in the midst of savagery in Stuart Dischell’s fifth full-length collection of poetry. These poems are ever aware of the momentary grace of the present and the fleeting histories that precede the instants of time. Part elegist, part fabulist, part absurdist, Dischell writes at the edges of imagination, memory, and experience. By turns outwardly social and inwardly reflective, comic and remorseful, the beautifully crafted poems of Children with Enemies transfigure dread with a reluctant wisdom and come alive to the confusions and implications of what it means to be human.

This is the first paperback edition of a classic anthology of Chinese poetry. Spanning two thousand years—from the Book of Songs (circa 600 B.C.) to the chü form of the Yuan Dynasty (1260–1368)—these 150 poems cover all major genres that students of Chinese poetry must learn.
Newly designed, the unique format of this volume will enhance its reputation as the definitive introduction to Chinese poetry, while its introductory essay on issues of Chinese aesthetics will continue to be an essential text on the problems of translating such works into English. Each poem is printed with the original Chinese characters in calligraphic form, coordinated with word-for-word annotations, and followed by an English translation. Correcting more than a century of distortion of the classical Chinese by translators unconcerned with the intricacies and aesthetics of the Chinese language, these masterful translations by Wai-lim Yip, a noted and honored translator and scholar, allow English readers to enter more easily into the dynamic of the original poems. Each section of the volume is introduced by a short essay on the mode or genre of poem about to be presented and is followed by a comprehensive bibliography.

Although Emily Dickinson copied and bound her poems into manuscript notebooks, in the century since her death her poems have been read as single lyrics with little or no regard for the context she created for them in her fascicles. Choosing Not Choosing is the first book-length consideration of the poems in their manuscript context. Sharon Cameron demonstrates that to read the poems with attention to their placement in the fascicles is to observe scenes and subjects unfolding between and among poems rather than to think of them as isolated riddles, enigmatic in both syntax and reference. Thus Choosing Not Choosing illustrates that the contextual sense of Dickinson is not the canonical sense of Dickinson.

Considering the poems in the context of the fascicles, Cameron argues that an essential refusal of choice pervades all aspects of Dickinson's poetry. Because Dickinson never chose whether she wanted her poems read as single lyrics or in sequence (nor is it clear where any fascicle text ends, or even how, in context, a poem is bounded), "not choosing" is a textual issue; it is also a formal issue because Dickinson refused to chose among poetic variants; it is a thematic issue; and, finally, it is a philosophical one, since what is produced by "not choosing" is a radical indifference to difference. Extending the readings of Dickinson offered in her earlier book Lyric Time, Cameron continues to enlarge our understanding of the work of this singular American poet.

In her first book, Chord Box, Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers envisions a world where each place is best known by its sound. Weaving complex junctions between music, speech, the body, and sexuality, these poems trace the arc of adolescence and early adulthood, rooting themselves in gritty landscapes of the South and Appalachia, China and its borderlands. Part narrative and part lyric, Rogers's poems make use of the whole field of the page, assembling an innovative poetic vocabulary that includes word, character, and symbol. By calling on figures from the recent as well as the distant past, this coming-of-age collection asks us to consider history, both personal and political. Whether struggling to make vibrato on the guitar or stringing together her first sentences in Mandarin, the speaker of these poems assumes the role of the eager student, edging her way toward an understanding with both fierceness and a sense of humility. Chord Box is exquisitely crafted and rich with feeling, a dazzling debut collection. Chord Box is part of the University of Arkansas Press Poetry Series, edited by Enid Shomer.

Readers do not always take into account how books that combine image and text make their meanings. But for the Pre-Raphaelite poet Christina Rossetti, such considerations were central.

Christina Rossetti and Illustration maps the production and reception of Rossetti’s illustrated poetry, devotional prose, and work for children, both in the author’s lifetime and in posthumous twentieth-century reprints.

Lorraine Janzen Kooistra’s reading of Rossetti’s illustrated works reveals for the first time the visual-verbal aesthetic that was fundamental to Rossetti’s poetics. Her exhaustive archival research brings to light new information on how Rossetti’s commitment to illustration and attitudes to copyright and control influenced her transactions with publishers and the books they produced. Janzen Kooistra also tracks the poet’s reception in the twentieth century through a complex web of illustrated books produced for a wide range of audiences.

Analyzing an impressive array of empirical data, Janzen Kooistra shows how Rossetti’s packaging for commodity consumption—by religious presses, publishers of academic editions and children’s picture books, and makers of erotica and collectibles—influenced the reception of her work and her place in literary history.

Christina Rossetti was considered the ideal female poet of her time. Her poetry was devo­tional, moral, and spoke of frustrated affection.

Dolores Rosenblum presents a fresh reading of Rossetti’s works and places them in the con­text of her life. Rosenblum shows that what was ostensibly devotional, moral, and loveless, was actually what Luce Irigaray calls “mimetism,” a subtle parody and subversion of the male tra­dition of literature.

Only with the coming of feminist criticism can Rossetti be meaningfully re-evaluated. Rosenblum calls Rossetti’s works the “poetry of endurance,” stating that it is similar, and at times identical, to the female “sentimental” tradition in literature. Rossetti endured the con­straints of the Victorian female artistic spirit by becoming a “watcher.” Within this self-accepted role, Rossetti was able to carefully and deliber­ately choose artistic self-protection. In her reli­gious poetry, Rossetti transcended, by aesthetic renunciation, the alienation and immobilization forced upon her.

Rossetti’s poetry is full of paradox; it sings about silence, exposes the poet’s oblivion. From the repining Victorian poet, there emerged a “stone woman.” Rosenblum discusses this pas­sively enduring female figure’s alienation from knowledge and power, and how the myth of self strengthened the lyric voice within her. Because she was a woman, she was denied the male use of the lyric “I.”

Rossetti’s work is unified, Rosenblum argues, because she was a deliberate poet, and by accepting the “burden of womanhood,” she played out what men only symbolized as female in their art. By her mimicry and revision of the male tradition of literature, Christina Rossetti engaged the patriarchal tradition in ways that make it usable for the female experience, and that provide a critique of male objectification of women in art.

As a Chicano writer working in Spanish, Tino Villanueva explores experience in the tongue that was the first European language spoken in and around his Texas homeland. Villanueva voices complex and compelling historical, literary, and cultural questions as impassioned personal utterances, investing this collection with intimacy and seriousness. His eloquent, elegant work portrays American realities absent from mainstream poetry.

Churches explores the way our experience of the world is shaped through the stories we tell about ourselves. These poems braid multiple narratives that often take place in different times, or are seen through the eyes of various speakers. Here Prufer explores the interior and subjective nature of time as he engages with mortality, both as a cultural construct and a deeply personal, unarticulatable anxiety: “In this filtered light, / my brain is a nimbler thing, and strange. It loves / the slow derangements distance brings.”

An excellent introduction to the man and his thoughts on the painstaking craftsmanship involved in the art of writing poetry, Ciardi Himself includes some hard lessons, but in the hands of this master teacher, the going is easy.

Dan Beachy-Quick has produced six collections of solo or collaborative poetry and a unique prose companion to Moby Dick. In the process, this amazingly productive writer has become recognized as one of the nation’s most exciting dramatists of the mind in ferment, and of our urgent and ongoing connections with a tradition that extends back to the origins of literature.

After a series of book-length poems, Beachy-Quick’s new volume is as carefully structured as a suite of chamber music pieces, yet made of distinctly individual poems. Building upon the visceral and conceptual fascinations of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay, “Circles,” these poems trace patterned tensions to connections in existence on many levels, from molecular to millennial.

“Dan Beachy-Quick’s splendid new collection reveals the echoes between the measure of verse and the measure of time. If it is true, as Thoreau suggests, that the poem of creation is ongoing, this ambitious and prolific poet shows us that learning to listen for that music of daily life involves a lifetime. Circle’s Apprentice vividly reminds us that all our human life may be marked by ritual but is returned to us through song. ‘The minute gears mutely whir. / To put your ear / against it is to put your ear inside it.’”—Susan Howe

Now available in English for the first time, translated by the poet Jack Hirschman, this beautiful collection of poems by the Algerian poet Jean Sénac (1926–1973) was originally published when he was forty-one. Sénac represented the hope of the new generation of Algerians who were celebrating their independence from France after 130 years of colonialism, and in the tradition of René Char and the early Albert Camus, he portrayed an Algeria whose land and people would finally sing with their own voice. Sénac celebrates revolution, love, and the body, beginning with the resonant verses: “And now we’ll sing love / for there’s no Revolution without love.” He sang, as well, of beauty: “No morning without smiling. / Beauty on our lips is one continuous fruit.”

Goblets of gin, fans of feathers, war-bombed bricks, loaves of bread, soot, smoke, and paper money—such are the tangible things that touched the lives of women who worked as wage laborers during an era of Europe of cabaret and hyperinflation. The crises of modernity and capital, as well as the human experiences of women and who loved, lost, and fought against the structures of privilege that all the while aided them during a fraught stretch of time between wars, come alive in City Scattered, a chapbook of poems that invite us to experience and examine the conditions of labor that echo those of our current day.

Although the title of this sensitive collection refers to Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, City of Ash serves as a universal geography of the contemporary soul in an urban context. Through his poetry, Eugenijus Alisanka searches for personal and historical meaning within the framework of time, recognizing both the demands of the self and the impossibility of avoiding what came before, whether human or cultural.

As if convinced that all divination of the future is somehow a re-visioning of the past, Kwame Dawes reminds us of the clairvoyance of haunting. The lyric poems in City of Bones: A Testament constitute a restless jeremiad for our times, and Dawes’s inimitable voice peoples this collection with multitudes of souls urgently and forcefully singing, shouting, groaning, and dreaming about the African diasporic present and future.

As the twentieth collection in the poet’s hallmarked career, City of Bones reaches a pinnacle, adding another chapter to the grand narrative of invention and discovery cradled in the art of empathy that has defined his prodigious body of work. Dawes’s formal mastery is matched only by the precision of his insights into what is at stake in our lives today. These poems are shot through with music from the drum to reggae to the blues to jazz to gospel, proving that Dawes is the ambassador of words and worlds.

Chicago has served as touchstone and muse to generations of writers and artists defined by their relationship to the city’s history, lore, inhabitants, landmarks, joys and sorrows, pride and shame. The poetic conversations inspired by Chicago have long been a vital part of America’s literary landscape, from Carl Sandburg and Gwendolyn Brooks to experimental writers and today’s slam poets. The one hundred contributors to this vibrant collection take their materials and their inspirations from the city itself in a way that continues this energetic dialogue.

The cultural, ethnic, and aesthetic diversity in this gathering of poems springs from a variety of viewpoints, styles, and voices as multifaceted and energetic as the city itself. Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz: “I want to eat / in a city smart enough to know that if you / are going to have that heart attack, you might / as well have the pleasure of knowing // you’ve really earned it”; Renny Golden: “In the heat of May 1937, my grandfather / sits in the spring grass of an industrial park / with hundreds of striking steelworkers”; Joey Nicoletti: “The wind pulls a muscle / as fans yell the vine off the outfield wall, / mustard-stained shirts, hot dog smiles, and all.”

The combined energies of these poems reveal the mystery and beauty that is Second City, the City by the Lake, New Gotham, Paris on the Prairie, the Windy City, the Heart of America, and Sandburg’s iconic City of the Big Shoulders.

 In Civil Bound, Myung Mi Kim turns a keen ear to language as the mechanism by which society operates. The poems engage multiple methods to make sense of this pervasive tool, its powers, nuances, and influences over the structure of our civilizations. Through investigations of ecology, capitalism, military powers, colonialism, and supremacy, the book uncovers patterns in the ways that language is active in perpetuating inequality and binding its subjects to the will of those in positions of authority. In questioning systems of oppression, the poems also offer the hope of forging new paths through the connecting power of language. Examining our participation in social contracts, communal goals, and human desires, Kim’s poems encourage us to salvage language as a means of connection that binds us in respect and commitment to our fellow human beings.

A collection of essays by contemporary American poets on the subject of their art

Melville's long poem Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876) was the last full-length book he published. Until the mid-twentieth century even the most partisan of Melville's advocates hesitated to endure a four-part poem of 150 cantos of almost 18,000 lines, about a naïve American named Clarel, on pilgrimage through the Palestinian ruins with a provocative cluster of companions.

But modern critics have found Clarel a much better poem than was ever realized. Robert Penn Warren called it a precursor of The Waste Land. It abounds with revelations of Melville's inner life. Most strikingly, it is argued that the character Vine is a portrait of Melville's friend Hawthorne. Based on the only edition published during Melville's lifetime, this scholarly edition adopts thirty-nine corrections from a copy marked by Melville and incorporates 154 emendations by the present editors, an also includes a section of related documents and extensive discussions.

This scholarly edition is an Approved Text of the Center for Editions of American Authors (Modern Language Association of America).

These essays examine the multifaceted work of the Central American author whom Latin American literary historians consider precursor of “cultural dialogism” in poetry and fiction. As poet, essayist, journalist, novelist, and writer of “quasi–testimonio,” Alegría’s multiple discourses transgress the boundaries between traditional and postmodern political theories and practices. Her work reveals an allegory of relation and negotiation between “intelligentsia” and subaltern peoples as well as the need for a more socially extensive literature, not exclusive of more elite “magical literatures.”

The essays in the fist section frame Alegría’s discourses within sociohistorical, political, and literary contexts in order to illuminate the author’s singular place in the literary and political history of Central America. The essays in the second section engage in a feminist dialogic in which the reader encounters various critical validations and valorizations of Alegría’s many female voices. The third section involves the reader in the pursuit of extratextual or extraliterary resonances in Alegría’s work.

With a half-dozen books of poetry published to date, Kenneth Fields distills some forty years of teaching and writing about poetry into Classic Rough News, a collection of fresh sonnets and sonnet-like lyrics that attests to both Fields's skills as a writer and the inexhaustible possibilities of the form.

Classic Rough News follows a skeptical, cosmopolitan, intelligent, poetic presence aware that its carefully constructed veneer could crumble at any moment. In poems that mine interior dialogue for the discovery of great truths, Fields conveys feelings of awkwardness, incompleteness, conflict, and insanity-all in finely crafted verse. Ironic and skeptical, the voice in these poems records the flux of the mind, ruefully acknowledging how easy it is to deceive oneself with mixed emotions. Fully mature and unconcerned about impressions, Classic Rough News is grounded in erudition and humor, revealing how tradition and talent can push one another in unexpected directions.

from “Clayfeld’s Farewell Epistle to Bob Pack”
 
            Beneath this mellow harvest moon,
I can still picture you—a boy content
just fishing with his father from a ledge
above a foaming stream. The flailing trout
you caught is packed in gleaming ice;
the pink stripe all along its side
is smeared across black shiny dots
that seem to shine with their own light.
            I’m sure that you can picture me
with equal vividness, and though we’re not
identical, there is a sense
in which I am inventing you
as much as you’re inventing me.
 
In Clayfeld Holds On, Robert Pack offers his readers a comprehensive portrait of his longtime protagonist Clayfeld, who is also Pack’s doppelgänger, his alternate self, enacting both the life that the poet has lived and the life he might have lived, given his proclivities and appetites. Poet and protagonist, taken together, are self and consciousness of self, the historical self and the embellished story of that literal self.
            Written with a masterly ear for rhythm, and interweaving narrative and lyrical passages, the poems recount Clayfeld’s formative memories while exploring concepts such as loyalty, generosity, commitment, as well as cosmic phenomena such as the big bang theory and black holes. Through all of this, Pack attempts to find purpose and meaning in an indifferent universe, and to explore the labyrinth of his own proliferating identity.

To be a woman in revolutionary Nicaragua meant to take an active role in reshaping a country. Daisy Zamora came out of that experience as a poet who found her own voice in the context of extraordinary popular struggle. Her Clean Slate: New & Selected Poems is a collection that embodies a spirit of personal and political liberation. These 110 poems include works written between the years 1968 and 1993.

Offering all of the extant letters exchanged by two of the twentieth century's most distinguished literary figures, Cleanth Brooks and Allen Tate: Collected Letters, 1933-1976 vividly depicts the remarkable relationship, both professional and personal, between Brooks and Tate over the course of their lifelong friendship.

An accomplished poet, critic, biographer, and teacher, Allen Tate had a powerful influence on the literary world of his era. Editor of the Fugitive and the Sewanee Review, Tate greatly affected the lives and careers of his fellow literati, including Cleanth Brooks. Esteemed coeditor of An Approach to Literature and Understanding Poetry, Brooks was one of the principal creators of the New Criticism. His Modern Poetry and the Tradition and The Well Wrought Urn, as well as his two-volume study of Faulkner, remain among the classics read by any serious student of literature. The correspondence between these two gentlemen-scholars, which began in the 1930s, extended over five decades and covered a vast amount of twentieth-century literary history.

In the more than 250 letters collected here, the reader will encounter their shared concerns for and responses to the work of their numerous friends and many prominent writers, including T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, and Robert Lowell. Their letters offer details about their own developing careers and also provide striking insight into the group dynamics of the Agrarians, the noteworthy community of southern writers who played so influential a role in the literature of modernism.

Brooks once said that Tate treated him like a younger brother, and despite great differences between their personalities and characters, these two figures each felt deep brotherly affection for the other. Whether they contain warm invitations for the one to visit the other, genteel or honest commentaries on their families and friends, or descriptions of the vast array of social, professional, and even political activities each experienced, the letters of Brooks and Tate clearly reveal the personalities of both men and the powerful ties of their strong camaraderie.

Invaluable to both students and teachers of literature, Cleanth Brooks and Allen Tate provides a substantial contribution to the study of twentieth-century American, and particularly southern, literary history.

Northwestern University Press is honored to inaugurate the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize series with Ed Roberson’s Closest Pronunciation. Here is a teacher of poets studying his own assignments, questioning and seeking the generative capacity in looking at and seeing things that ends in the realization of a poem. In a line from the brief poem "Night Writing," from which the chapbook draws its title, he writes, "The word closest in pronunciation / To an ambulance’s siren is ‘wrong.’" The collection as a whole gives voice, often quiet but always profound, to many things overlooked and neglected in culture, nature, and everyday life.

Coconut Milk is a fresh, new poetry collection that is a sensual homage to place, people, love, and lust. The first collection by Samoan writer and painter Dan Taulapapa McMullin, the poems evoke both intimate conversations and provocative monologues that allow him to explore the complexities of being a queer Samoan in the United States.  

McMullin seamlessly flows between exposing the ironies of Tiki kitsch–inspired cultural appropriation and intimate snapshots of Samoan people and place. In doing so, he disrupts popular notions of a beautiful Polynesia available for the taking, and carves out new avenues of meaning for Pacific Islanders of Oceania. Throughout the collection, McMullin illustrates various manifestations of geopolitical, cultural, linguistic, and sexual colonialism. His work illuminates the ongoing resistance to colonialism and the remarkable resilience of Pacific Islanders and queer-identified peoples.

McMullin’s Fa’a Fafine identity—the ability to walk between and embody both the masculine and feminine—creates a grounded and dynamic voice throughout the collection. It also fosters a creative dialogue between Fa’a Fafine people and trans-Indigenous movements. Through a uniquely Samoan practice of storytelling, McMullin contributes to the growing and vibrant body of queer Indigenous literature.