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In this anthology, Vincent Barletta, Mark L. Bajus, and Cici Malik treat the Iberian lyric in the late Middle Ages and early modernity as a deeply multilingual, transnational genre that needs to break away from the old essentialist ideas about language, geography, and identity in order to be understood properly. More and more, scholars and students are recognizing the limitations of single-language, nationalist, and period-bound canons and are looking for different ways to approach the study of literature. The Iberian Peninsula is an excellent site for this approach, where the history and politics of the region, along with its creative literature, need to be read and studied together with the way the works were composed by poets and eventually consumed by readers.

With a generous selection of more than one hundred poems from thirty-three poets, Dreams of Waking is unique in its coverage of the three main languages—Catalan, Portuguese, and Spanish—and lyrical styles employed by peninsular poets. It contains new translations of canonical poems but also translations of many poems that have never before been edited or translated. Brief headnotes provide essential details of the poets’ lives, and a general introduction by the volume editors shows how the poems and languages fruitfully intersect. With helpful annotations to the poetry, as well as a selected bibliography containing the most important editions and translations from all three of the main Iberian languages, this volume will be an indispensable tool for both specialists and students in comparative literature.

Dreamtigers has been heralded as one of the literary masterpieces of the twentieth century by Mortimer J. Adler, editor of Great Books of the Western World. It has been acknowledged by its author as his most personal work. Composed of poems, parables, and stories, sketches and apocryphal quotations, Dreamtigers at first glance appears to be a sampler—albeit a dazzling one—of the master's work. Upon closer examination, however, the reader discovers the book to be a subtly and organically unified self-revelation.

Dreamtigers explores the mysterious territory that lies between the dreams of the creative artist and the "real" world. The central vision of the work is that of a recluse in the "enveloping serenity " of a library, looking ahead to the time when he will have disappeared but in the timeless world of his books will continue his dialogue with the immortals of the past — Homer, Don Quixote, Shakespeare. Like Homer, the maker of these dreams is afflicted with failing sight. Still, he dreams of tigers real and imagined and reflects upon of a life that, above all, has been intensely introspective, a life of calm self-possession and absorption in the world of the imagination. At the same time he is keenly aware of that other Borges, the public figure about whom he reads with mixed emotions: "It's the other one, it's Borges, that things happen to."

Gathers tales from the Southwestern United States and Northern Mexico to understand the relationship between people and place in a borderland

Landscape is the space of negotiation between human beings and the physical world, and rarely are the negotiations more complex and subtle than those conducted through the desert landscape along the Mexico-U.S. border.

Dusk, Empire: New and Selected Poems 1987-2024 is a panoramic collection of Daniel Tobin’s most exemplary, ambitious, and accomplished poems from nearly forty years at work in the art. These range from his award-winning first book, Where the World is Made, through successive volumes that reveal a progressive deepening of his essential themes even as the poems evolve to an ever more refined technical risk and mastery. These themes include the unflinching encounter with time, suffering, and mortality, as well as what one earlier reviewer called “a quest for transcendence, a search for the sacred.” They seek, in short, to do, as another reviewer observed, what Yeats said was “one ideal for poetry: to hold justice and reality in a single thought.” In so doing, Tobin’s poems probe the individual life in relation to the pressures of history, including his own family’s perilous and traumatic immigration from famine in the 19th century—a backstory he explores in The Narrows, which he has called “a mural in verse.” At the same time, his “Homage to Bartolomeo de las Casas” delves into the fraught early colonial history of the Americas through the eyes of the eponymous friar, a repentant colonizer. 

These earlier works establish Tobin’s mastery of the poetic sequence, among a wide variety of other formal displays, all amply evident in the books that follow, including the lyrically meditative orchestrations of Second Things, the award-winning poems of Belated Heavens, The Net, and Blood Labors, characterized at once by their compendious erudition, their sense of intellectual and cultural history, as well as their emotional urgency and formal variousness. This generous selection from Tobin’s work is intended to be a companion volume to The Mansions, his trilogy of book-length poems that explore twentieth century history, and the counter claims of science and religion, through three exemplary lives, which reviewers said inspired genuine awe. Finally,  Dusk, Empire leads with a gripping selection of new work that engages the enormous pressures and troubles of the present historical moment, set in dialogue with Tobin’s characteristic passion for what would transcend it. Or as he asks in “The Sand Painting,” “What is that joyous singing inside the rock / Though each intricate, lovely thing will be erased?” 

This collection of poetry by the celebrated southern Iranian poet and filmmaker Roja Chamankar (b. 1981) introduces English-speaking readers to one of the most accomplished and well-loved poets of her generation. Chamankar’s work blends surrealism and the southern coastal landscape of the poet’s upbringing with everyday experiences in rapidly urbanizing Tehran. While locating herself in the modernist tradition of Iranian poets like Forugh Farrokhzad and Ahmad Shamlu through form and imagery, Chamankar infuses this tradition with concerns unique to a generation that grew up in post-revolutionary Iran and endured the effects of the Iran-Iraq war. Seascapes, love and eroticism, the disconnection of modern life, and myths and fairytales figure prominently in these vivid, lyrical poems.

In the rich miniature worlds of Chamankar’s poetry, readers become privy to a range of experiences, from desire and pain to rage and humor. Sometimes abstract, other times surreal—Chamankar’s unique poetic voice, like the sea she returns to again and again, combines and sweeps these experiences to shore with assurance, strength, and beauty.