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In Sentences, contemporary poet Howard Nemerov adds to his distinguished work a collection of gnomic verses, declarative poems, sonnets after other poets, and sustained lyrics.

"In [Sentences], not only has Nemerov continued to accommodate himself to the literary tradition without falling back on parody; he has also . . . extended the resources of blank verse beyond what any modern practitioner, himself included, has managed to. This extension comprises more than a mere prosodic advance; it is a rhetorical and imaginative advance. 'By Al Lebowitz's Pool,' 'The Makers,' 'Monet,' and 'A Christmas Storm,' for example, are dazzling in their very naturalness. . . . No one since Frost has done as much to move blank verse from where Wordsworth and Coleridge had left it."—Mary Kinzie, Poetry

Anchored by braided and unstable narratives of young Westerners in India, the poems in Series | India explore the rich borderlands that run between the familiar and the foreign, illumination and opacity, gods and charlatans. In lyrics deeply informed by Gray’s study and experience in India, and formally characterized by shifting and juxtaposed perceptions, perspectives, and voices, we encounter a young couple seeking refuge and enlightenment in a place where the lines between the divine, the human, the gorgeous, the deadly, and the hilarious are often indistinct. How do we make meaning of our encounters with love, death, the divine, the absurd, the horrific? What and how do we actually see? How do we choose? The poems explore these hard questions with compassion, humor, and awe.

Set in Motion collects for the first time the prose writings of A. R. Ammons, one of our most important and enduring contemporary poets. Hailed as a major force in American poetry by such redoubtable critics as Harold Bloom and Helen Vendler, Ammons has reflected upon the influences of luminaries like Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Frost, Stevens, and Williams while creating a compelling style and an artistic vision uniquely his own.

Set in Motion includes essays, reviews, and interviews as well as a selection of Ammons's poems, with commentary from the author about their inspiration and effects. He takes up the questions that have been central to American poetry over the last forty years and connects them to the larger enterprise of living in a difficult, changing world. At a moment when the arts are under attack, Ammons reminds us of the crucial role poetry plays in teaching us to recognize and use sources of understanding that are irreducible to statement.

A. R. Ammons is the author of Sphere, A Coast of Trees, and Garbage and was recently the editor of The Best American Poetry 1994. His awards include the MacArthur and Guggenheim fellowships, the Bollingen Prize, two National Book Awards, and prizes from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Book Critics Circle. He is Goldwin Smith Professor of Poetry, Cornell University.

These fourteen-line poems give voice to the individual and collective experiences of women. They are windows into a stark otherworld, one filled with the raw materials of experience: sex, birth, cloth, pain. Spare and strange beauty marks the lives and worlds of these women, defined by their struggle for survival in the physical and psychological captivity of the domestic realm. The speaker moves between the singular and plural, sounding out the overlapping experiences of women as both subject and object of the domination inherent in settler colonialism.

Brazil, perhaps more than any other nation of the Americas, has placed poetry at the forefront of dialogue and debate about the limits and uses of art, the social duties of artists, and the nature of nationalism and national identity. In Seven Faces, Charles A. Perrone charts the course of Brazilian poetry in the contemporary period through the principal currents, multiple tendencies, and aesthetic tensions that have made the Brazilian lyric so creatively diverse.
Perrone introduces the most important poetic themes of the second half of this century with a look back at Brazilian modernismo and the avant-garde legacy of poets of the 1920s and 30s. Brazilian poets, the author reveals, have long drawn inspiration from the other arts, experimenting with the inclusion of music, graphic arts, and other nontraditional elements within lyric forms. Relating aesthetic concerns to cultural issues, Perrone elucidates the major poetic movements in Brazil since modernismo: concretism and vanguard poetry, politically committed verse of the 60s, youth poetry of the 70s, the lyricism of Brazil’s renowned popular music, and the rethinking of poetry through postmodernism in the final decades of this century.
Providing a window on the ways in which poetry reflects a national spirit and offers a measure of the status of culture in a consumer society, Seven Faces is the only book-length study in English of contemporary Brazilian poetry. It will be welcomed by students and scholars of Latin American literature as well as by general readers interested in poetry and its influence on culture and society.

In his third full-length book of poems, Joshua Corey puts the sonnet to the test with this sequence of fractured, ventilated, and unrhymed poems written in the aftermath of 9/11 while Corey was living at a pastoral remove from war and terror in upstate New York. The tension between idyllic personal circumstances and horrific world-historical events led Corey to produce this series of layered poems, variously sardonic and sincere in tone.

In SEX DEPRESSION ANIMALS,Mag Gabbert redefines the bestiary in fiery, insistent, and resistant terms. These poems recast the traumas of her adolescence while charting new paths toward linguistic and bodily autonomy as an adult. Using dreamlike, shimmering imagery, she pieces together a fractured portrait of femininity—one that electrifies the confessional mode with its formal play and rich curiosity. Gabbert examines the origin of shame, the role of inheritance, and what counts as a myth, asking, “What’s the opposite of a man? / A woman? A wound? The devil’s image?”

Shadow Mountain is the winner of the Four Way Books Intro Series in Poetry, selected by acclaimed poet Kimiko Hahn. The first years of the 21st century have been marked by a global uneasiness over untold stories: forgotten prisoners, unjustified wars, secret decisions. In Shadow Mountain Claire Kageyama-Ramakrishnan gives voice to older, too-easily forgotten tragedies, urging us to learn a present lesson. She draws on the stories of Japanese-Americans interned at Manzanar Relocation Center, California, and on her own childhood and memories of her grandparents, examining the fault-line between family life and communal experience. Shadow Mountain is captivating in its imagery, enchanting in its sounds, and a must read for anyone interested in the history of Japanese-American citizens and their children. Ranging in her forms from sonnet to terzanelle to fragmented, obstructed free verse, Kageyama-Ramakrishnan is a heartfelt interlocutor. “A socially-conscious writer whose issues of war and passion bring us back, then forward again… Shadow Mountain, a plaintive first book, will be read by those who love poetry—and by those who will begin that love, here.” —Kimiko Hahn

Shadow of a Cloud but No Cloud, the latest collection from enigmatic prose poet Killarney Clary, is a book-length sequence of unnumbered, untitled poems, each evoking a clear moment in time. The details on which Clary chooses to focus suggest a narrative that will not resolve. The unnamed people with whom she interacts offer exchanges she is desperate to prolong, and in attempts to understand her place, she reaches beneath the fragile armor of those loved, especially those who can no longer answer her. This quietly haunting book, remarkable for its subtlety and delicacy, is Clary’s strongest, most engaging work to date and amply shows her to be a master of this lyric genre.

Borrowing the poetic language found in boxing lore and in the Rocky films, Shadowboxing pieces together a poetic portrait of Josefo, a Chicano adolescent working and becoming a poet in the farm territories of Central California. Rios confounds the relationship between author, speaker, and subject within various forms and, at times, across genre. He challenges the usefulness of poetry and stands upon oral histories to demystify California’s overlooked labor class. Rios invites the reader to enter Josefo’s world of memory, experience, and talk, of packinghouse mentors, storytelling grandmothers, parable-sharing plumbers, smooth talking truck drivers, and infinitely patient literature professors.

The first edition of Shadowed Dreams was a groundbreaking anthology that brought to light the contributions of women poets to the Harlem Renaissance. This revised and expanded version contains twice the number of poems found in the original, many of them never before reprinted, and adds eighteen new voices to the collection to once again strike new ground in African American literary history. Also new to this edition are nine period illustrations and updated biographical introductions for each poet.

Shadowed Dreams features new poems by Gwendolyn Bennett, Anita Scott Coleman, Mae Cowdery, Blanche Taylor Dickinson, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Jessie Fauset, Angelina Weld Grimké, Gladys Casely Hayford (a k a Aquah Laluah), Virginia Houston, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Helene Johnson, Effie Lee Newsome, Esther Popel, and Anne Spencer, as well as writings from newly discovered poets Carrie Williams Clifford, Edythe Mae Gordon, Alvira Hazzard, Gertrude Parthenia McBrown, Beatrice Murphy, Lucia Mae Pitts, Grace Vera Postles, Ida Rowland, and Lucy Mae Turner, among others.

Covering the years 1918 through 1939 and ranging across the period’s major and minor journals, as well as its anthologies and collections, Shadowed Dreams provides a treasure trove of poetry from which to mine deeply buried jewels of black female visions in the early twentieth century.

Shahr-e-jaanaan sets out to recreate the universe of Urdu and Persian poetic tradition, its tropes both lenses and mirrors for the speaker’s reality. As she maps her romances onto legends, directing their characters perform her own tragedy, their fantastical metaphors easily lend themselves to her fluctuating mental state. Cycling between delirious grandeur and wretched despair, she is torn between two selves— the pitiable lover continually rejected, and the cruel, unattainable beloved comparable in her exaltation to a god. Shahr-e-jaanaan explores, interrogates, and distorts these dichotomies and their symbolism, calling into question the forces that elevate some to divinity even as they damn others to injustice and oppression.

In this lively study of both modern film and stage productions of Shakespeare, Samuel Crowl provides fascinating insights into the ways in which these productions have been influenced by one another as well as by contemporary developments in critical approaches to Shakespeare's plays.

Crowl’s study demonstrates the surprising resonances between Roman Polanski's 1971 film of Macbeth and Adrian Noble's heralded recent production of the play for The Royal Shakespeare Company; argues that Orson Welles's films of Othello and Cabins at Midnight are not only brilliant remaining of Shakespeare in another art form but make a powerful contribution to our contemporary understanding of performance as interpretation; and chronicles the impact of Peter Hall's creation of the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1960 on performance approaches to Shakespeare in the past thirty years.

Shakespeare Observed provides full interpretative readings of key recent Shakespeare productions in England and includes an intimate behind-the-scenes glimpse into the rehearsal process which produced Ron Daniels's emotionally charged version of Romeo and Juliet for the RSC in 1980. The final chapter uses Kenneth Branagh's highly successful film of Henry V as a summary example of the trends and influences Crowl's study traces, seeing the film as gathering its interpretative energies from both Olivier's famous film version of the play and Adrian Noble's stage production featuring Branagh as the king.

Written in a style which places a premium on capturing the vivid and often dazzling moments of stage and film performances of Shakespeare, Crowl's study will be of interest to the avid film and theatergoer as well as to the scholar and student. Shakespeare Observed joins a growing list of recent critical works which have significantly expanded and redefined the boundaries of Shakespeare studies in our time.

"Rabkin selects The Merchant of Venice, Henry V, Antony and Cleopatra, Julius Caesar, Richard III, Macbeth, Coriolanus, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest as the plays on which to build his argument, and he teaches us a great deal about these plays. . . . To convince the unbelievingthat that the plays do mean, but that the meaning is coterminous with the experience of the plays themselves, Rabkin finds a strategy more subtle than thesis and rational argument, a strategy designed to make us see for ourselves why thematic descriptions are inadequate, see for ourselves tath the plays mean more than and statement about them can ever suggest." –Barbara A. Mowat, Auburn University

"Norman Rabkin's new book is a very different kind of good book. Elegantly spare, sharp, undogmatic. . . . The relationship between the perception of unity and the perception of artistic achievement is a basic conundrum, and it is one that Mr. Rabkin has courageously placed at the center of his discussion." –G. K. Hunter, Sewanee Review

"Rabkin's book is brilliant, taut, concise, beautifully argued, and sensitively responsive to the individuality of particular Shakespeare plays." –Anne Barton, New York Review of Books

What does it mean to have an emotional response to poetry and music? And, just as important but considered less often, what does it mean not to have such a response? What happens when lyric utterances—which should invite consolation, revelation, and connection—somehow fall short of the listener’s expectations?

As Seth Lerer shows in this pioneering book, Shakespeare’s late plays invite us to contemplate that very question, offering up lyric as a displaced and sometimes desperate antidote to situations of duress or powerlessness. Lerer argues that the theme of lyric misalignment running throughout The Tempest, The Winter’s Tale, Henry VIII, and Cymbeline serves a political purpose, a last-ditch effort at transformation for characters and audiences who had lived through witch-hunting, plague, regime change, political conspiracies, and public executions.

A deep dive into the relationship between aesthetics and politics, this book also explores what Shakespearean lyric is able to recuperate for these “victims of history” by virtue of its disjointed utterances. To this end, Lerer establishes the concept of mythic lyricism: an estranging use of songs and poetry that functions to recreate the past as present, to empower the mythic dead, and to restore a bit of magic to the commonplaces and commodities of Jacobean England. Reading against the devotion to form and prosody common in Shakespeare scholarship, Lerer’s account of lyric utterance’s vexed role in his late works offers new ways to understand generational distance and cultural change throughout the playwright’s oeuvre.
 

"Fourteen ninety-something, / something happened / and no one can pick it out of the lineup . . . "

In words drawn from urban and Navajo perspectives, Sherwin Bitsui articulates the challenge a Native American person faces in reconciling his or her inherited history of lore and spirit with the coldness of postmodern civilization.

Shapeshift is a collection of startling new poetry that explores the tensions between the worlds of nature and man. Through brief, imagistic poems interspersed with evocative longer narratives, it offers powerful perceptions of American culture and politics and their lack of spiritual grounding. Linking story, history, and voice, Shapeshift is laced with interweaving images—the gravitational pull of a fishbowl, the scent of burning hair, the trickle of motor oil from a harpooned log—that speak to the rich diversity of contemporary Diné writing.

"Tonight, I draw a raven's wing inside a circle
measured a half second
before it expands into a hand.
I wrap its worn grip over our feet
As we thrash against pine needles inside the earthen pot."

With complexities of tone that shift between disconnectedness and wholeness, irony and sincerity, Bitsui demonstrates a balance of excitement and intellect rarely found in a debut volume. As deft as it is daring, Shapeshift teases the mind and stirs the imagination.

With the Spanish conquest of Islamic Granada and the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, the year 1492 marks the exile from Europe of crucial strands of medieval culture. It also becomes a symbolic marker for the expulsion of a diversity in language and grammar that was disturbing to the Renaissance sensibility of purity and stability. In rewriting Columbus's narrative of his voyage of that year, Renaissance historians rewrote history, as was often their practice, to purge it of an offending vulgarity. The cultural fragments left behind following this exile form the core of Shards of Love, as María Rosa Menocal confronts the difficulty of writing their history.
It is in exile that Menocal locates the founding conditions for philology--as a discipline that loves origins--and for the genre of love songs that philology reveres. She crosses the boundaries, both temporal and geographical, of 1492 to recover the "original" medieval culture, with its Mediterranean mix of European, Arabic, and Hebrew poetics. The result is a form of literary history more lyrical than narrative and, Menocal persuasively demonstrates, more appropriate to the Middle Ages than to the revisionary legacy of the Renaissance. In discussions ranging from Eric Clapton's adaption of Nizami's Layla and Majnun, to the uncanny ties between Jim Morrison and Petrarch, Shards of Love deepens our sense of how the Middle Ages is tied to our own age as it expands the history and meaning of what we call Romance philology.

With unrelenting yet tender honesty, She Has a Name tells the story of a young woman with autism from multiple points of view. The speakers in these poems—sisters, mother, father, teacher—seek to answer questions science can’t yet answer, seek to protect the young woman, and seek to understand what autism means to their own lives as well.

Suzette Marie Bishop teaches writing at Texas A&M International University. This will be her first full-length book, though she's published a chapbook and many individual poems in national poetry journals. Nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize, Ms. Bishop's credits include publications in Antioch Review, 13th Moon, Eratica, Aries, The Little Magazine, and many other literary journals. As a poet and writing teacher on the faculty of Texas A&M International, she gives many readings, as well as workshops for gifted children, seniors, and other writers on the US-Mexico border; she has worked with at-risk youth and with the rural Hispanic community.

Patricia Clark's poems explore not only refuge but also wonder and appreciation, as well as astonishment.
     A number of the 56 poems collected here show her grappling with loss, especially the loss of her mother, though she isn't one to indulge in misery. Instead, she goes walking. It is the harp tree in "The Poplar Adrift" that Clark imagines giving voice to sorrow, thus sparing those who stroll by—"all the grief that passes" becoming, in the tree’s very fibers, sound on the air, a wind through branches and leaves.
     Clark also finds opportunities for learning, for meditation, and for contemplation. Octavio Paz has written, "Nature speaks as though it were a lover." In many of the poems collected here, Clark listens to nature speaking and revels in this lover, aiming to capture some of the qualities of Michigan's trees, birds, and landscapes in lyric poems.
     It is Clark's particular gift to give us "tasted" as she draws her readers into the world, inhabiting the worlds of nature, head, and heart.

Here's the myth: Native Americans are people of great spiritual depth, in touch with the rhythms of the earth, rhythms that they celebrate through drumming and dancing. They love the great outdoors and are completely in tune with the natural world. They can predict the weather by glancing at the sky, or hearing a crow cry, or somehow. Who knows exactly how? The point of the myth is that Indians are, well, special. Different from white people, but in a good way.
     The four young male Native American poets whose work is brought together in this startling collection would probably raise high their middle fingers in salute to this myth. These guys and "guys" they are—don't buy into the myth. Their poems aren't about hunting and fishing or bonding with animal spirits. Their poems are about urban decay and homelessness, about loneliness and despair, about Payday Loans and 40-ounce beers, about getting enough to eat and too much to drink. And there is nothing romantic about their poetry, either. It is written in the vernacular of mean streets: often raw and coarse and vulgar, just like the lives it describes. Sure, they write about life on the reservation. However, for the Indians in their poems, life on the reservation is a lot like life in the city, but without the traffic. These poets are sick to death of the myth. You can feel it in their poems.
     These poets are bound by a common attitude as well as a common heritage. All four—Joel Waters, Steve Pacheco, Luke Warm Water, and Trevino L. Brings Plenty—are Sioux, and all four identify themselves as "Skins" (as in "Redskins"). In their poems, they grapple with their heritage, wrestling with what it means to be a Sioux and a Skin today. It's a fight to the finish.

Born and raised in Britain, Thom Gunn has lived in the United States since 1954. He is well known as a poet and is increasingly gaining recognition as a literary critic. Gunn’s main concern in Shelf Life is with twentieth-century American poets, both the famous and the obscure; he also discusses other matters, including the Elizabethans, Christopher Isherwood as man and stylist, and Gunn’s own poetry, which he touches on indirectly in the first two sections of the book and directly in the last.
 
Gunn’s criticism communicates his own enthusiasm for poetry. He tries to show his readers how to get a first foothold into the work of some of his favorite poets, whether Wyatt or Whitman, Mina Loy or Robert Creeley.
 

In Shelley and His Readers, the first full-length critical analysis of the dialogue between Shelley's poetry and its contemporary reviewers, Kim Wheatley argues that Shelley's idealism can be recovered through the study of his poetry's reception. Incorporating extensive research in major early-nineteenth-century British periodicals, Wheatley integrates a reception-based methodology with careful textual analysis to demonstrate that the early reception of Shelley's work registers the immediate impact of the poet's increasingly idealistic passion for reforming the world.

Wheatley examines Shelley's poetry within the context of Romantic-era "paranoid politics," a simultaneously empowering and disabling dynamic in which the reviewers employ a heightened language of defensiveness and persecution that paints their adversaries as Satanic rebels against orthodoxy. This "paranoid style" displays a preoccupation with the efficacy of the printed word and singles out radical writers such as Shelley as sources of social contamination.

Using Shelley's Queen Mab to illustrate his early radicalism, Wheatley demonstrates that the poet, like his contemporary reviewers, is caught up in paranoid rhetoric. Failing to challenge the assumptions underlying the paranoid style-conspiracy and contagion-in this poem Shelley takes merely a defiant, oppositional stance. However, Shelley's later poems, exemplified by Prometheus Unbound and Adonais, circumvent the reviewers' rhetoric through their boldly experimental language, a process registered by the reviewers' own responses. These less explicitly political poems transcend the dynamics of cultural paranoia by shifting to an apolitical conception of the aesthetic. In collaboration with its early readers, Shelley's poetry thus moves momentarily beyond paranoid politics.

The final chapter of this study argues that the posthumous reception of Adonais uniquely replicates the elegiac moves and complex idealism of the poem, concluding with a discussion of how the Shelley circle aestheticized the poet after his death.

Shelley and His Readers offers a new approach to the question of how to recuperate Romantic idealism in the face of challenges from both deconstructive and historicist criticism. Its innovative use of reception-based analysis will make this book invaluable not only to specialists of the Romantic period but also to anyone interested in new developments in literary criticism.

Glenn O’Malley’s Shelley and Synesthesia examines a little-known aspect of Percy Shelley’s poetry, offering a history of synesthesia and engaging in close readings of Shelley’s poetry, focusing primarily on his longer works. O’Malley explores the internal structure of Shelley’s poems to concentrate on patterns of imagery and symbolism, bringing attention to Shelley’s resourcefulness and responsibility in his use of synesthesia and his development of it into a powerful creative tool. The work advances the conversation on literary synesthesia and brings fresh insights to Shelley’s poems and to poetic theory in Romanticism.

Shift traces the love between two women over several years and explores the intricacies of family relationships. Jeredith Merrin's poems, moving from ecstatic love lyrics to poems of familial affection and damage, to grave, more mature love poems, are psychologically loaded and technically sophisticated. These poems convey a wonderful sense of the sexual and social complexity of human relationships.

Departing from simple observations of the people and setting around him-- neighbors, friends, and lovers in New York City--Stephen Cramer's Shiva's Drum explores personal and familial relationships set to the rhythms of jazz in an urban landscape. Though comfortable at the edge, these poems deal with reality and move forward by transforming pain into beauty. 
 

W. S. Di Piero is one of the most capable and wide-ranging poet-critics of his generation. His essays are contemplative, analytical, and interdisciplinary, critical yet arising out of his own artistic practice. Di Piero looks at interrelations between the arts, and at the ways in which the arts express aspects of contemporary culture as well as the individual temperaments and gifts of their makers. These essays are elegant and passionate tributes to the intersection of art and self.

Even though we lived at the edge of a great rupture,
It was difficult to tell when the world broke.
—Excerpt from “Ravine”

In the world of cowboy poetry, no poet is better known or more widely appreciated than Bruce Kiskaddon. Though he died in 1950 his poems have been at the forefront of the cowboy poetry revival that began in the 1980s and have been reprinted frequently in published collections and anthologies. What is less known is that Kiskaddon during his lifetime also published stories. These humorous, realistic prose sketches of cowboy life were almost lost, but they are in their own right gems of literary Americana on a par with the poems. Originally published in the Western Livestock Journal between 1932 and 1939, the short stories drew on Kiskaddon's own experience of ranching in the Southwest and Australia to portray real life on the range. Bill Siems has recovered these stories and compiled and introduced them in this new collection, to which he has added a selection of Kiskaddon's poems and the original drawings that accompanied them, by Katherine Field, a fine, underappreciated western artist.

Set in Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona, the stories are a loosely tied string of old timer's yarns with a continuing cast of engaging characters, whom Kiskaddon avoids reducing to cowboy stereotypes. They include, as Siems describes them, "Kiskaddon himself as the character Shorty. As a common waddy with a small man's feistiness and a young man's mischief, Shorty encounters the wicked world with a succession of companions: Bill, high-headed and a bit of an outlaw; Rildy Briggs, untamable and unstoppable young cowgirl; and Ike, an old-fashioned dandy and 'a very fortunate person.' More or less in the background is the Boss-actually a series of Bosses-generally affectionately respected as long as he remains democratic in his dealings with the waddies. Buffoonery is provided by a succession of pompous characters, from townspeople who look down their noses on wild, unwashed waddies to professors from the East who have read books on how ranches should be run."

In Show Me Your Environment, a penetrating yet personable collection of critical essays, David Baker explores how a poem works, how a poet thinks, and how the art of poetry has evolved—and is still evolving as a highly diverse, spacious, and inclusive art form. The opening essays offer contemplations on the “environment” of poetry from thoughts on physical places and regions as well as the inner aesthetic environment. Next, Baker looks at the highly distinctive achievements and styles of poets ranging from George Herbert and Emily Dickinson through poets writing today. Finally, he takes joy in reading individual poems—from the canonical to the contemporary; simply and closely.

"Jim Daniels is a poet of unique commitment and ability. He makes poetry an act of deep caring and recognition."—Robert Creeley

Within the visual arts of painting and photography, Martha Ronk finds an undeniable presence lurking: silence. This character slips into pauses, hides between images, and expertly evades the grasp of language. Ronk shows us that what is hidden just off screen in these images might just be the force that gives them power. The poems in Silences seek possibilities of how to form language from a phenomenon that so earnestly resists it. Rather than coax silence out of hiding, Ronk’s poems respond to its mysterious presence through questions and conjecture.

These poems endeavor to give a much-deserved voice to silence, addressing the power of what is not seen. While silence remains perpetually out of reach, Ronk invites us to follow the language that creeps up to its edges. The poems in this collection form an inquiry that moves through the presence of silence and reveals insights into the character of the visual art in which it lives.
 

In 1953, Yoko Ono wrote a score called “Secret Piece,” an open-ended formula for musical performance in a forest at daybreak. Beginning with this invitation to creation, and using essays, diary entries, prose maps, and verse fragments, Kazim Ali marks a path through quantum physics, sixth-century Chola Empire sculptures, the challenges of literary translation and of climate change, and destruction of a priceless set of handmade flutes by airport security. Amid shards from far-flung histories and geographies he finds the cosmos.

For the first time, the work of Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzad is being brought to English-speaking readers through the perspective of a translator who is a poet in her own right, fluent in both Persian and English and intimately familiar with each culture. Sin includes the entirety of Farrokhzad's last book, numerous selections from her fourth and most enduring book, Reborn, and selections from her earlier work and creates a collection that is true to the meaning, the intention, and the music of the original poems. Farrokhzad was the most significant female Iranian poet of the twentieth century, as revolutionary as Russia's Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva and America's Plath and Sexton. She wrote with a sensuality and burgeoning political consciousness that pressed against the boundaries of what could be expressed by a woman in 1950s and 1960s Iran. She paid a high price for her art, shouldering the disapproval of society and her family, having her only child taken away, and spending time in mental institutions. Farrokhzad died in a car accident in 1967 at the age of thirty-two. Sin is a tribute to the work and life of this remarkable poet.