Description

 

Three Hundred Tang Poems may very well have been the best selling, the most avidly read, and the most diligently studied, of any poetry book in history anywhere in the world, from the moment in 1763 or 1764 when it first appeared in bookshops throughout China, until well after the start of the twentieth century. Educated readers of Chinese all over the world continue to enjoy its very broad and representative selection of poets, including great names like Li Bai (Li Po), Du Fu (Tu Fu), and Wang Wei, as well as a splendid sampling of poems by the rest of the poets who helped to make the Tang the “Golden Age” of Chinese poetry.

 

The instant success of Three Hundred Tang Poems isn’t surprising, since its contents were, after all, the essence refined from the best of many earlier collections and anthologies, the finest poems from the greatest poets. If you’re an avid reader of Chinese poetry you will be delighted to find old favorites here. All the forms of poetry as it was practiced in the Tang were represented, as well as its best and its most famous poets, a fact that certainly contributed to its success among readers who were aspiring writers.

 

Reviews

Geoffrey Waters received a PhD in Classic Chinese from Indiana University and worked most of his life in international banking. He died in 2007. His other books of translation include Broken Willow: The Complete Poems of Yu Xuanji , White Crane: Love Songs of the Sixth Dalai Lama, and Three Elegies of Ch'u.

 

Michael Farman is a  retired Electronics Engineer. Early in his career he studied Mandarin at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London University, but began translating Chinese classical and ancient poetry comparatively late in life. His translations have since appeared frequently in literary and translation journals and several anthologies. His chapbook Clouds and Rain  was published by Pipers’ Ash in 2003. As an active member of ALTA, he has organized and contributed to conference panels and workshops and also published articles and book reviews in Translation Review.            

 

David Lunde is a poet and translator. His most recent books include: Blues for Port City, Heart Transplants & Other Misappropriations, Nightfishing in Great Sky River, Instead, and The Carving of Insects, Bian Zhilin's collected poems co-translated with Mary M.Y. Fung, which won the 2007 PEN USA Translation Award. He is also the translator of Breaking the Willow: Poems of Parting, Exile, Separation, and Reunion.

Accolades

“The road to Shu is hard, but harder still is to convey the spirit with which these poems were first written over a thousand years ago. And yet Geoffrey Waters has done just that.  Joined by his friends Michael Farman and David Lunde, he has given us translations that feel alive, as if they were more like a dance between poet and translator, both of whom live on through the beauty of these poems.   The night is young, and this book is full of music.” 

 

—Red Pine

 

“Three Hundred Tang Poems are three hundred gold birds singing in mountains, in mist, outside his brushwood gate. Three canny mellifluous translators, Waters, Farman & Lunde, have carried Tang song into English songs. I must pause at Geoff Waters, my favorite student, my later master in Chinese thought and verse, and now horribly disappeared in midstream. In Wang Wei, Geoff's gold birds are "singing madly in front of Five Willows' gate. On his exquisitely recreated "Mountains empty after a fresh rain," I ask, with tears, "Will you be staying longer my fine young friend?"”

—Willis Barnstone

Description

“Tzveta Sofronieva’s poetry sparkles, not in her native Bulgarian, but in German; like her compatriot Bulgarian Julia Kristeva, she changed tongues to reach a wider world. Her A Hand Full of Water is the most compelling volume in German verse since the work of Ingeborg Bachman and Hans Magnus Enzensberger. Her memories go from Homer and Dostoievski to Charlie Chaplin’s dance steps. Above all Sofrinieva is a mythological poet. Each narration is a Cavafian voyage, never completed in order to compel wonder. George Seferis wrote that a poet must find a symbolic landscape for one’s diction. She creates her visionary landscape and lexicon as she adventures through the Greek islands and the Mediterranean. The surreal is natural when she says, "She makes her bed with sheets of Pompeian red. / The sea roars in her bed." Subtly, Tzveta Sofronieva refreshes and re-jewels the German language, making it plainer and richer by her global iridescence. The lucent version by Chantal Wright captures the verve and fluid images of Sofornieva’s poetry. Though close to original song, she plays with syntax in English to convey the strength and spontaneity of the German. In the best sense her translation stands as an original book of poetry.”

                                                —Willis Barnstone

Reviews

A physicist and historian of science by training, Tzveta Sofronieva is the author of nine collections of poetry. She also writes short stories, essays and texts for the theater. Born in Sofia, Bulgaria, she settled in Berlin in 1992 but remains a frequent traveler. Sofronieva’s first collection of poetry Chicago Blues (1992, bilingual, Bulgarian and English) was written during her travels through the US and Canada in 1989 and 1990. Among her most recent publications are a collection of short prose texts entitled Diese Stadt kann auch weiß sein (2010) and the poetry art book Touch Me (2012 ,

bilingual, English and German). Her work also encompasses literary installations, the latest of which are Borrowed Pillows (Lille, France, 2011 ) and My Cyborg Identity (Boston, USA, 2012 ), and she

has edited several anthologies, including Forbidden Words (2005) and 119 Webstreaming Poetry (2010). She has translated poetry by Chris Abani, Margaret Atwood, Michael Krüger and Yoko Tawada into Bulgarian, among others. Her own work has been translated into a number of languages, among them French, Finnish, Hungarian, Polish, Serbian, Spanish and Uzbek. Tzveta Sofronieva attended a master class with Joseph Brodsky in 1992. In 1988 she was awarded a prize for poetry by the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. She has been writer-in-residence at the Academy Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart (1996), at KulturKontakt in Vienna (2003), at the Villa Aurora in Pacific Palisades (2005), and at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin (2010). In Spring 2012 , she was Max Kade Writer-in-Residence at MIT in Boston. Eine Hand voll Wasser (2008) was Tzveta Sofronieva’s first full-length collection of poetry in German. In 2009 Sofronieva was awarded the Adelbert-von-Chamisso-Förderpreis, a prize given to German writers whose cultural background is not Germanic.

For more information visit www.tzveta-sofronieva.de.

 

Chantal Wright is Assistant Professor of German and Translation at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. She grew up in Manchester, England, and studied at Girton College, Cambridge,

and the University of East Anglia, Norwich.

Accolades

Description

This collection introduces English-speaking readers to the hallucinatory yet lucid world that Orozco’s young narrator, Lía, inhabits and animates with her prodigious imagination and the reality of small-town life on the Argentine plains in the 1920s. It is this landscape of her childhood home that shapes her narrative voice.

 

It is the landscape of her childhood home that shapes her narrative voice. In this mirage-like world of shifting dunes, shimmering horizons, crumbling buildings and vibrating fields of sunflowers, the young girl Lía—Orozco’s alter ego—watches and wonders, acts and is acted upon. Fixed in the center of the erratic exterior world is the family home, the refuge to which the child retreats for protection and solace, but which at times resembles a space of mystery and menace. 

 

 

Reviews

Olga Orozco (1920 – 1999) is considered to be one of the major Argentine writers of the 20^th century. She won over a dozen major prizes and awards for her poetry and short stories, and has been translated into at least fifteen languages.

 

 

Mary Berg is a writer and translator. She has translated a number of books from Spanish, including I’ve Forgotten Your Name by Martha Rivera, River of Sorrows by Libertad Demitropulos, Ximena at the Crossroads by Laura Riesco,  The Landscape of Castile by Antonio Machado and The Poet and the Sea by Juan Ramon Jimenez. She teaches at Harvard Extension and Brandeis University.

 

Melanie Nicholson is Associate Professor of Spanish at Bard College.  She is the author of Evil, Madness, and the Occult in Argentine Poetry (2002).  Her articles on Latin American poetry have appeared in Latin American Literary Review, Letras  Femeninas, Crítica Hispánica, and Studies in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature, among others. She has published translations in Yale Review, Puerto del Sol, and Denver Quarterly.

 

Accolades

Orozco’s stories portray, in impressionistic, and dreamy language, a childhood spent in a small town on the Argentine pampa.

 

“This is a gem of a collection of Olga Orozco stories, beautifully rendered into English. This wise selection of stories reveals Orozco's lyrical as well as mysterious prose. The translators provide an excellent introduction to Orozco's haunting and illuminating saga of childhood on the Argentine pampa.”

— Marjorie Agosin, Wellesley College

 

“A Talisman in the Darkness presents, for the first time in English, the spell-binding short stories of Olga Orozco (1920-1999), the Argentine surrealist poet, astrologer, and student of Gnosticism. The stories reconstruct scenes from a childhood on the pampas while drawing the reader into an intensely paradoxical universe of mysterious signs and omens, alternately enchanting and unnerving. At the core of the narratives is a girl child who, though episodes of unsought illumination, encounters for the first time aspects of both the visible and the hidden worlds.”

—Naomi Lindstrom

Description

 

The “us” of Frost’s title evokes both the intimacy of lovers and the anonymity of strangers, the negotiations of domestic life and the chance encounters that shape our daily, public lives.  Throughout the narratives in All of Us, miscommunication threatens havoc, as time and again, these poems present misfires of communication, gaps in memory, and the simple limitations of language that cause frustration and isolation. The title poem explores a cityscape where community is vertically compressed, and strangers – who are also neighbors – appear eye-to-eye at the peep holes of their locked doors.  What is the nature of what Ezra Pound called “commerce” between us? Frost explores this question with passion, humor and pathos.  

 

Reviews

 

Elisabeth Frost is the author of The Feminist Avant-Garde in American Poetry and co-editor of Innovative Women Poets: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry and Interviews (both from Univ. of Iowa Press). Her chapbook, Rumor, is available from Mermaid Tenement Press. She is Associate Professor of English and Women's Studies at Fordham University.

 

Accolades

“The persistence of bad dreams, the meaning of illness, the acquaintances and the distractions of apartment life ("the stairs in the walk-up ringing"), erotic attachment and filial attention energize the elegant poems, mostly in prose paragraphs, of this debut. Frost already has some reputation as a critic of difficult poetry, but those who expect provocative, frame-breaking poems will not get them. Mostly, Frost's work is more straightforward. Her people view the ordinary life course--birth, growth, health; parenthood, illness, death--with a tenacious combination of fear and devotion. A grandmother holds her first grandchild "as if she had always known how," and a "tall man in his sixties" recovers almost completely from amnesia: "He remembered everything except how he had gotten to where he was after boarding the train. It hardly mattered, now his life was back." One couple tries to decide whether to have children, whether to devote their lives "to the well-being of another, unformed and vaguely like oneself." Another couple watches a medical show together and then decide "They ought to watch less TV. It seems too much to hope for, health, now that they've seen it up close."”

 

—Publishers Weekly

 

 

“Frost’s debut collection, All of Us, uses the seemingly narrative prose poem to turn the unconscious conscious. What is unseen but seen and what is unspoken but spoken becomes apparent, as quotidian moments create layers to a voice that probes its own resonance only to find itself to be in all of us. Through the deep intelligence of these poems, Frost has composed transparent channels into our own lives―a stunning achievement.” 

―Claudia Rankine 

 

“In the white space out beyond Elisabeth Frost’s cropped tales, subtle situations, plausible and bizarre fantasias, you may sense the ghosts of Kafka and Borges strolling. But these delicious, low-key, disturbing and always surprising prose poems, with their train of lyric elegance, are a world unto themselves. All of Us is a compulsively readable book.” 

―Alicia Ostriker 

 

“Reading Elisabeth Frost’s extraordinary debut collection, All of Us, we enter a postmodern scene edged with irony, precise and elegiac. . . . Frost refuses the artifice (and comforts) of closure, observing that ‘All talk is slippery.’ The ground of these brilliant poems slips from caustic wit to still-palpable mourning, and All of Us opens to a tender and finally capacious vision.” 

―Cynthia Hogue 

 

“Elisabeth Frost’s poems explore romantic love, family, and the outer social realm with passion and uncanny perception. The question that sparks Frost’s creation is deeply philosophical and epistemological: how do we know each other? She asks how we read and more particularly how we read each other. . . . All of Us presents a discerning vision of possibility and hope about the way all of us stand in relation to the concrete and spiritual universe.” 

―Aliki Barnstone

Description
In Bright Body, Aliki Barnstone seeks to unite several dualities (mind and

body, spirit and matter, the individual and the body politic) each of which

circles back to the question, what can the individual do to heal global

suffering?  Many of the poems are set in Las Vegas, a monument to

materialism, where one can satisfy every desire while time-traveling a

virtual world from contemporary Paris and New York to colonial Burma and

Caesar¹s Rome. Yet Vegas is also an immigrant city, vibrant, international,

whose beautiful mountains and sky dominate every human endeavor. This city

of extremes informs Barnstone¹s vision and serves as a backdrop for her

meditations on American history, war, the environment, erotic love, and the

love of mother and child.

Accolades

"All of a sudden I understand why I like Aliki Barnstone's poems so much. They remind me of the one she has studied most - shall we call her her master - Emily Dickinson. Not in the forms, not, as such, in the music, and not in the references; but in that weird intimacy, that eerie closeness, that absolute confession of soul.... In Barnstone, too, the two worlds are intensely present, and the voice moves back and forth between them. She has the rare art of distance and closeness. It gives her her fine music, her wisdom, her form. She is a fine poet." 

— Gerald Stern

 

 

"For Aliki Barnstone, poetry seems a natural medium. The vision and cadences of these poems suggest a sensibility for which poetry is as inevitable as breathing or eating." 

 

—Robert Pinsky 

 

"Aliki Barnstone is in full bloom, silkily erotic, and radiantly intelligent." 

 

—Caroline Kizer

  

Description

Gary Young is one of the most well-known practitioners of the prose poem and his unique sinuous, brief style has a flavor all its’s own. This collection includes work selected from six previously published volumes and two unpublished sequences of new work. 

 

Reviews

Gary Young is a poet and artist whose honors include grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Vogelstein Foundation, the California Arts Council, and two fellowship grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2009 he received the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. He has received a Pushcart Prize, and his book of poems, The Dream of a Moral Life, won the James D. Phelan Award. He is the author of several other collections of poetry including Hands, Days, Braver Deeds (which won the Peregrine Smith Poetry Prize), No Other Life (winner of the William Carlos Williams Award of the Poetry Society of America), and most recently, Pleasure.

 

Accolades

 Even So: 
New and Selected Poems

Gary Young. White Pine Press (Consortium, dist.), $18 trade paper (232p) ISBN 978-1-935210-33-7

Since the 1970s, Young has been publishing almost unbelievably intimate and precise poems, most of them in brief, untitled prose blocks, about the small details of love, marriage, parenthood, and close observation of the world at hand. This retrospective gathers many of these pieces, which, despite the small scope of each one, amount to a highly ambitious body of work taken together. What happens in these pieces is hard to summarize, so here is one, quoted in full: “My son wakes screaming. His dreams are real; he’s riding a horse, and the horse falls down. He’s so young, I don’t know how to tell him all our joy is wrung from that terror. Did you like it, I ask him. Fall down, he cries, fall down. Did you like riding the horse? And he looks at me, stops sobbing, and says, yes.” As is the case in the piece above, Young writes with a unique combination of wisdom and terror, engendering a kind of sad calm, a hard-earned acceptance of life’s difficulty and openness to its beauty: “This morning I smelled freesias in the garden and closed my eyes. Suddenly I was young again, and you were still alive.” (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly 

 

 

“Gary Young has honed a sinous, brief prose-poem form that carries a flavor, uniquely its own—unflinching, strigent in beauty, austerely moving.”

—Jane Hirshfield

 

“I was struck by the wisdom of this work, a quiet wisdom that inheres in images so fully imagined that one can never forget them. The language has been so throughly purified that truth becomes, in the telling, austerely beautiful.”

—Jay Parini

 

“There’s no word for what Young does, only for what he accomplishes—the capturing of small, daily miracles.”

—Dorianne Laux

 

“Like a modern day realist’s morality tales, these poems are backed by a moral prupose as compelling and dramatic as it is instructive and wise. This is a book one must wrestle with as well as read.”

—Sherod Santos

 

 

 

Description

Most readers assume that the writing of the American prose poem began in the 1960s but in fact there is a long tradition of the prose poem in the first half of the 20th century. Much of this work appeared in literary magazines and was never collected. The anthology collects over 60 voices including such well-known figures as Sherwood Anderson, Paul Bowles, Kay Boyle, E.E. Cummings, H.D., Robert Duncan, T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Earnest Hemingway, Amy Lowell, Kenneth Patchen, Laura Riding Jackson, Gertrude Stein, Jean Toomer, Thorton Wilder  and William Carlos Williams. Margueritte Murphy's scholarly Introduction sets the stage for this collection which traces the history of American prose poetry from 1900-1950.

Reviews

 

Robert Alexander is the co-editor of the Marie Alexander Poetry Series. He is the author of two books of poetry, White Pine Sucker River and What the Raven Said; and a book of creative nonfiction, Five Forks: Waterloo of the Confederacy. He previously served as an associate editor at New Rivers Press.

 

 

Margueritte S. Murphy is the Associate Provost at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York.  She is author of A Tradition of Subversion: The Prose Poem in English from Wilde to Ashbery and Material Figures: Political Economy, Commercial Culture, and the Aesthetic Sensibility of Charles Baudelaire, and co-editor with Samir Dayal of Global Babel: Questions of Discourse and Communication in a Time of Globalization. 

Accolades

“I thought the last thing we needed was another anthology of prose poetry, but I was woefully wrong. Alexander’s choices of American prose poems between 1900 and 1950 prove  the genre, in many different guises, was preparing itself to be honed by the masters of the 1960s. If you have any doubt the prose poem was flourishing over this fifty-year period, “Hysteria” by T.S. Eliott, “Family Portrait” by Kenneth Patchen, a number of short beauties by Fenton Johnson (among many other startling entries), suggest otherwise. If you need to be further convinced , Marguerite Murphy’s excellent introduction fills a gap in prose-poem criticism that was sorely needed.  As a bonus we get Alexander’s witty afterward, tracing one’s man’s personal history writing prose poems, grappling with all the complexities of the genre. This is a book I’ll be returning to often and with pleasure, and anyone who has ever considered writing prose poetry should be familiar with it.”

—Peter Johnson

 

“Family Portrait doesn't just rewrite the history of the prose poem in America - it sets the record straight. Robert Alexander has done a great service for everyone who loves this sinewy, quirky, delicious form. Margueritte Murphy's scholarly Introduction sets the stage for a book that traces the history of American prose poetry from 1900-1950. Simply put, this collection belongs on every poet's - and poetry lover's - bookshelf. From here forward, no one will be able to write about the prose poem without referencing Family Portrait." 

 

—Peter Conners

 

“Once again, we have Robert Alexander to thank for expanding our vision of the tradition of American prose poetry. Fifteen years ago, his co-edited anthology The Party Train demonstrated a tradition that pre-dated the poetic experimentations of the1960s and the 1976 publication of Michael Benedikt’s The Prose Poem: An International Anthology, long considered the gateway to contemporary interest in the form in English.

In Family Portrait, Alexander’s vision is solidified, clearly demonstrating the roots of prose poetry taking hold in the early years of American Modernism. This volume offers an invaluable selection of prose poems by a broad array of writers born before 1925, including William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, Sherwood Anderson, Kay Boyle, Laura Riding and Kenneth Patchen. As importantly, Margueritte Murphy’s introduction and Alexander’s afterword provide the aesthetic framework and historical context for the poems, together making a solid case for the importance of prose poetry to the American literary canon. 

The prose poems of these Modernist writers illuminate not only the particularly supple strength of American language, but also how the form itself, “the child of two worlds” (in Alexander’s words), “serves to bring together, at long last, the sacred and mundane.””

— Holly Iglesias

 

“Family Portrait contains a rich variety of American voices—the well-known side by side with the completely new—speaking from their shared time and their individual sensibilities in language that ranges from the straightforward folksy talk set down by William Carlos Williams to the provocative linguistic disjunctions of Gertrude Stein and e. e. cummings.  This volume provides a delightfully colorful, eye-opening, and essential addition to our library of American literature.”  —Lydia Davis

Description

Notes from the Journey Westward is a book that interrogates the idea of America—especially our westering, both historical and contemporary, our rough, rocky journeys through the vast interiors of the continent and of our own hearts. In this wild, wide-open, god-forgotten country blind grandmothers take us by the hand, and lost fathers hide in every prairie shadow, and old devils hunch and watch from craggy peaks. We are orphaned here, all of us, and so must reckon with the very foundations of us, with the myths and stories that make and remake us as people and as a nation.

 

  

“Blink and cry but this earth is all/you’ll ever see,” writes Joe Wilkins, and he is a poet who pays attention to this earth, one who looks, looks again and comes back still again to look more deeply. Like the voice in “Mission School,” Wilkins’ poems make and remember in the wide scope of human and non-human experience: “Whatever it is,/she says to me, lost again in story,/you must love it.” One way to define love is fidelity to experience, and if this is so, then Wilkins demonstrates such love over and over in his ruthless, entirely unsentimental efforts to imagine and understand the world he inhabits—and the one that inhabits him. He can say, on the one hand, “There’s nothing to be done/about hope,” and then deliver this:

 

“now I am telling you I am a small bird,

dun-colored, nervous, rising

again, slamming again

my face against the glass. See there—

blue sky. A hard world away.”

Exactly. And nothing will do but that blue sky.

 

Wilkins has a fine ear, but he uses it, rather than displays it. For all their toughness, these are wonderfully lyrical pieces. Vowels seem to bounce off one another like stones in a creek bed, but they are ordered, deliberate; subtle sound repetitions chime throughout, like bellwethers.

Wilkins slips from chore boots to house slippers to dress shoes without effort. He has range and staying power. These are the sorts of poems one keeps close by when they’re most needed, when one can feel most lost.” 

—Sam Green

 

Reviews

Joe Wilkins is the author of a memoir, The Mountain and the Fathers (Counterpoint 2012), and a previous collection of poems, Killing the Murnion Dogs (Black Lawrence Press 2011). His poems, essays, and stories have appeared in the Georgia Review, the Southern Review, Harvard Review, Ecotone, the Sun, Orion, and Slate, among other magazines and literary journals. He lives with his wife, son, and daughter in north Iowa, where he teaches writing at Waldorf College. You can find him online at http://joewilkins.org/. 

Accolades

“Moving through this book is, truly, a wondrous journey: across rugged landscapes and the vast unsettled past that WAS the west. "A hard world away." With a ferociously steely eye and equally ferociously tender heart, Wilkins surprises us at every juncture. Echoes of ancestral voices crisscross. Quiet intimate moments intersect with large socio-political issues. Spare poems, long poems, prose poems—I so admire the depth and breadth of work here, in how much Wilkins manages to pack in and carry along in our ever-onwarding little wagon.”

                         —Nance Van Winckel

 

 

“Joe Wilkins’ poems are savage and beautiful, full of hard-won lives and a godawful tenderness. In one poem the speaker says they need a myth to tell them “Be alive”, but Wilkins has written that myth, and it is called Notes from a Journey Westward. In this book Manifest Destiny is more than political rhetoric—it’s a call to find the limits of survival. The edge of America has more than an ocean. It has dust-stunned men, hardscrabble women, and a patient devil, sharpening his teeth. We’re in this world whether it belongs to God or not—alive and bearing it.”

 

—Traci Brimhall

 

“For Joe Wilkins, the American West is no theme park or romantic diorama. Notes from the Journey Westward offers an earnest glimpse into past and present landscapes that are real and imagined, mourned and celebrated and witnessed—for these, to borrow the words of Nazim Hikmet, are human landscapes. Wilkins isn’t the kind of poet to offer answers or satisfy himself with quaint definitions of self or place. He’s the kind of poet whose writing is as ambitious as it is beautiful, as honest as it is lyrical. The unflinching poems in this collection are a delight.” 

 

—Michael McGriff

 

Description

RED RADIO HEART’S central persona is Carnelia. The poems are narrated in the third person, a strategy which allows the poet to deeply explore Carnelia’s longing, irony, the great joy Carnelia experiences in living and the loss she encounters as she survives. These are poems of physical and emotional fracture, of intense love, of aging, and a simultaneous joy in the world and interrogation of its cruelty. The imagery is visceral. Carnelia’s heart is a ‘red radio’ broadcasting terror and the rhapsodic.

Reviews

 

Jane Lunin Perel has published four books of verse poetry: The Lone Ranger and the Neo American Church,1975, The Fishes: A Graphic/ Poetic Essay with artist/ photographer James Baker, Providence College Press,1977, Blowing Kisses to the Sharks, Copper Beech Press, 1978, and The Sea Is Not Full, Le’ dory Press, 1990.

She is a professor of English and Women’s Studies at Providence College where her  courses include Creative Writing in Poetry, Gender and Genocide: A Study of Holocaust Literature,  Women in Literature, Race, Class, and Gender in American Writing, and Searching for Venus: Exploring  Ideals of Female Beauty and Love in History, Psychology  and Literature. She is a grant recipient of the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts and has had a residency at the MacDowell Colony. She lives in Warwick, R.I. with her husband, Dr. Morton Perel.

 

 

Accolades

“The Muse for Jane Lunin Perel’s new book of poems is Artemis of Ephesus, mother and goddess of fertility living in exile in the scorched 21st century.  The Muse comes through the voice of a woman, Carnelia, who speaks both of the corporeal, the metaphysical, and the personal as she interrogates the age.  The voice is generous and lavish, funny and piercing.  The book’s power comes from its exquisite pains and aching pleasures.  Not only is the book a great sensory spectacle of rose gold and purple, but also it’s a book informed of heart and a skeptical, wind-ranging, blazing mind.”

-- Bruce Smith, author of Songs for Two Voices, University of Chicago Press

 

... ( but whereas)in  Jane Lunin Perel’s verse  poetry she   corrals and shapes emotion through careful use of line breaks, in Red Radio Heart she cuts lose. I am reminded of Baudelaire’s dream of a poetic prose “supple and rugged enough to adapt itself to the lyrical impulses of the soul, the undulations of reverie, the jibes of conscience.” What a perfect description of Red Radio Heart.

-- Peter Johnson, author of Rants and Raves: Selected and New Prose Poems, White Pine Press

 

“In Red Radio Heart, Jane Lunin Perel has given us a brilliant collection of  prose poems. Whether celebrating the mundane, recounting the estrangement between mother and daughter, contemplating sex and religion, or grieving the loss of a loved one, poem after poem is imbued with nerve, wit, grace - and heart. We need more poetry like this, poetry that is as profound and poignant as it is bold and lyrical. Quite simply, Red Radio Heart is a gift.”

 

-- Mary A. Koncel, author of You Can Tell the Horse Anything, Tupelo Press

 

Description

Sarah E. Truman had a life-long affinity with China and Guanyin – the Buddhist Bodhisattva of Compassion. She believed that Guanyin actually lived in China (although her common sense and just about everyone she knew told her that Guanyin was NOT a historical figure or physical being.) She decided to visit China and see what Guanyin was (or was not) and to find out how Guanyin's millions of devotees have endured the great political, economic and social upheavals of the last century: Has Buddhism survived in China? Does the philosophy and spirit of a great intellectual and spiritual tradition still influence a country gone mad with the turmoil of war, revolution and now the spoils of so-called economic miracles?

 

Through two years of countrywide travels and unexpected encounters - including Sanlin the statue maker, Mrs. Wu and her Kungfu master son, the grotesque luminosity of Yes Bar, and finally the wisdom of a Chan monk - Sarah E. Truman found what she was looking for.

 

The book is a collection of stories that portray China as a country where life is rooted in raw, street level survival, and where Guanyin can only be experienced after all concepts, preconceived notions, and spiritual illusions are abandoned. 

Reviews

 

 

Accolades

“Sarah Truman's closely observed jaunt in China and Tibet offers some priceless scenes, from trying to hilarious. How lucky she is to be watched over in her travels by the gentle, lively Bodhisattva of Compassion Kwan Yin.”

            Sandy Boucher, author of Discovering Kwan Yin: Buddhist Goddess of Compassion

Description

"If the best of T.S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent”—the revolutionary or perhaps evolutionary part—engendered a book of poems, that book would be Alexander Long’s Still Life, whose title resonates in its myriad possible meanings. For example, history might be life stilled but it is still life. Long listens with his acutely tuned ear and hears, as he writes in his poem about Celan, “Eternity’s chirping din in the birches again,” his call throughout Still Life, to move back and forth across the borders between chronological and eternal time, art and life, the present and the past. He is our seasoned traveler, our tour guide who keeps his extra-ordinary sense of wonder. In the Harrowing of Hell icons, with all his strength, Rabbi Jesus is pulling Adam and Eve bodily from their tombs. Similarly, Long raises from the grave and embodies in his words an astonishing cast of characters who speak in a new lexicon: vernacular and formally playful, learned and down-to-earth, utterly American and deliciously foreign. In Still Life we readers walk—there’s a lot of walking in this world—in intimate proximity with the likes of Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Lenny Bruce, and the Vietnam Vet, Chicken Man, in Long’s hometown, Sharon Hill. We eavesdrop on conversations between Paul Celan and Franz Kafka or Jimi Hendrix and César Vallejo on the banks of the Seine or the streets of Seattle, on Venice Beach or the paving stones beneath St. Vitus Cathedral in Prague. Still Life exemplifies Eliot’s observation that “not only the best, but the most individual parts of [the poet’s] work may be the parts in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously.” Here we have a poet who, as Eliot puts it, "writes with his own generation in his bones," as it pays homage to the ever-present past, his empathic voice unflinchingly witnessing the world’s horror and lovingly observing its beauties. He speaks for others and his own personal life, and—Hallelujah!—questions the division between the two. In our walk together Alexander Long is still singing and he sings to us—a twenty-first century Walt Whitman—that how we perceive and what we do in the broken world portrayed in Still Life still matters."

 

 

—Aliki Barnstone

Reviews

 

 

Alexander Long's books include Vigil (New Issues Poetry & Prose, 2006) and Light Here, Light There (C & R Press, 2009).  A chapbook, also titled Still Life, was selected for the 2010 Center for Book Arts Chapbook Competition.  With Christopher Buckley, Long is the co-editor of A Condition of the Spirit: the Life & Work of Larry Levis (Eastern Washington UP, 2004).  Originally from Sharon Hill, Pennsylvania, he lives in Hoboken with his wife Marina Fedosik-Long and three cats.

Accolades

“There is nothing “still” in the remarkably visceral poems of Alexander Long’s third collection, Still Life, and nothing is at rest in these restless and edgy poems. Conversational and kinetic, these poems chart the traces left by the shifting overlays of the templates of literature, rock-and-roll, and contemporary culture. As each poem in Still Life attempts to fix a focus upon a scene or subject, the protean natures under view draw the poet into the eddies and complexities of reflection. This is a powerful and moving collection of poems.”

—  David St. John

 

“As Alexander Long writes in his remarkable new book, “Listen to history .   .   .  It can’t happen fast enough.”  This poet has forged a style which manages to seize history on the wing, even the history we think has past and gone, and set it before us on the page.  Agile, prehensile, narrative and aphoristic, these are the poems of a lively and engaged intellect and imagination and they express much of what is best in our poetry today.” 

— Mark Jarman, author of Bone Fires: New and Selected Poems

 

 

“One of Still Life's  many achievements is it's paradoxical mix of intensity and stillness.  Alexander Long's visions of landscape, identity and "History itself, a joke that no one gets"  are simultaneously meditative and  alert, restless and focused. This is a smart, compassionate poet. Still Life is a mesmerizing new book.”

 

—Terrance Hayes

Description

H.E. Sayeh is one of Iran’s most celebrated poets and the last living poet of the Iranian Renaissance. This compelling selection is the first to span fifty years of Sayeh’s bearing witness to a turbulent Iranian century, especially the national crises which followed the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and the CIA-led coup d’état of 1953. Nicknamed the “Modern Hafez” and called by some the best Iranian poet of the ghazal in the modern era, Sayeh shows tremendous range, from the inward, spare lyric to bardic incantations which roll off the tongue and resonate with the voice of the whole nation, blending traditional Persian verse in the spirit of Rumi and Hafez with issues of contemporary Iranian society. Textured and densely musical, these translations exhibit Sayeh’s shouts of political outrage and lament, love poems, philosophical meditations and elegies. Like Lorca’s Andalusian deep song, Sayeh’s poems issue from the Iranian deep image, as old as the world itself, stirred by the chords of the sitar and the sounds of gunfire, playful or romantic in one moment, grief-stricken in the next. Mojdeh Marashi and Chad Sweeney have delivered exquisite translations of this important Iranian poet.

Reviews

H.E. Sayeh (Houshang Ebtehaj) is one of the most important Iranian poets of the twentieth century. His many books exhibit a hybrid of political poetry and traditional Iranian verse in the lineage of Persian masters, Rumi and Hafiz; though in the style of modern innovator, Nima Yushij, his work emphasizes current issues of Iranian society, especially the national crises which followed the CIA led coup d’état of 1953 and the Islamic Revolution of 1979. He is a leading musicologist in Iranian classical music, and a world-renowned Hafiz scholar. Sayeh’s books of poetry include First Songs (1946), Mirage (1951), Bleak Travails (1953), Earth (1955), Pages from the Longest Night (1965), Bleak Travails II (1973), Until the Dawn of the Longest Night (1981), Memorial to the Blood of the Cypress (1981), Bleak Travails III (1985), Bleak Travails IV (1992), Mirror in Mirror, Selected Poems (Edited by M.R. shafie-Kadkani, 1995) and Bleak Travails V (1999).  Sayeh lives alternately in Cologne, Germany and in Tehran, Iran.

 

Chad Sweeney is the author of three books of poetry, Parable of Hide and Seek, Arranging the Blaze, and An Architecture. He lives in Kalamazoo with his wife, poet Jennifer K. Sweeney.

 

 

Mojdeh Marashi is a San Francisco Bay Area writer and visual artist.  Her fiction was chosen to appear in the anthology Let Me Tell You Where I’ve Been: Women of the Iranian Diaspora. She makes a living as a software designer and is currently working on a number of literary projects including a collection of short stories. 

 

Accolades

 

“[Sayeh’s poems] are of such quality and beauty that like golden coins they will immortalize Sayeh’s name in the Persian language.”       

—Mehdi Akhavan-Sales

 

 

“Sayeh’s poetry is a continuation of the aesthetics of Hafez’s poetic style. From the time that Hafez introduced his style of poetry, which has been admired by people all over the world, until now, many great poets have tried to fly in the sky of his art . . . but no one has been as successful as Sayeh. [For] more than half a century all Persian poetry lovers have filled their memories with Sayeh’s poems, and if we had a true statistic of the memories of those who know the works of all living poets of our time by heart, we would see that none can compete with Sayeh. Many of Sayeh’s verses have become current expressions . . . .”

—Shafii Kadkani

Description

The Crows Were Laughing in their Trees was started shortly after 9/11 (which is also the author’s birthday) and parallels the changes in American society since that tragedy. At turns eerie, humorous, unsettling, insightful, and downright strange, Peter Conners uses the flexibility of the prose poem form to probe the uncertainties of our new world reality. In the process, he also pushes the boundaries of prose poetry until it breaks into fragments on the last pages of the collection. Within these pages, kingdoms rise and fall inside molar teeth; spider monkeys keep their guns cocked and loaded; and “Meat Zoos” serve as windows to an uncomfortable reality sheathed just below our daily pleasantries. This is not a 9/11 book in any typical sense of the term – it cleaves much closer to the bone than that. This is a book that will be read for years to come by those wanting to “feel” and “experience” what the early 21^st century was like rather than simply gathering facts and figures. Like all important poetry, it provides an intimate experience while also revealing the world in stunning new ways.    

Reviews

 

Peter Conners is author of White Hand Society: The Psychedelic Partnership of Timothy Leary & Allen Ginsberg and the memoir, Growing Up Dead: The Hallucinated Confessions of a Teenage Deadhead. His other books include the prose poetry collection Of Whiskey and Winter and the novella Emily Ate the Wind. He is also editor of PP/FF: An Anthology which was published by Starcherone Books in April 2006. His writing appears regularly in such journals as Poetry International, Mississippi Review, Brooklyn Rail, Fiction International, Salt Hill, Hotel Amerika, Mid-American Review, The Bitter Oleander, and Beloit Fiction Journal and will be included in the Forty Under Forty poetry anthology forthcoming from Yale University Press. He is the editor/publisher of BOA Editions.

 

Accolades

 

“Fractured fairy tales, intellectual animals ("spider monkeys of tiny rebellion"), Kafka-derived anti-parables, and bracingly fast run-on sentences--somewhere between a mystical incantation and a nervous breakdown--come thick and fast in Conners's powerful new book of prose poems…Prose poems, very short fiction, hard-to-classify compact meditations are enjoying some time in the sun now, and Conners's new pages approach the best in the lot.”

—Publishers Weekly

 

“The poet is professor of the five senses, Lorca taught us, and here we find ourselves biting the pomegranate, evicting the monkeys, imagining coyotes under stream rollers, and throwing banquets while the monkeys burn all morning! The music of the hilarious is stunning in these poems, muscular and exciting in their rhythmic force, and entrancing in their sheer reveling in the English language.

     The truth is, I have been waiting a long time for a book this alive. While I first perceived him as an American cousin to Michaux, Ponge and Kharms among other patron saints of the European prose-poem tradition, Conners quickly made it clear that he, in this book, is making up a tradition very much his own—his prose poem is not just a beautiful quirky moment that gives us a glimpse of the miraculous, but also an attempt to become a myth in itself. And to succeed at that requires a great deal of verve and dare, and also some luck. That Conners seems to get it all into one book is simply amazing. What can I say? A literary master.”

 

                                                                                                             —Ilya Kaminsky

 

"No matter the occasional darkness of his subjects, In The Crows Were Laughing in Their Trees, Peter Conners writes with the playfulness and kinetic energy of an action painter. His spatters of images and fragmented narratives assume the condition of an exuberant non-sense that, in changing perspective, asserts a logic of its own."

  --Stuart Dybek

 

Description

This Side of Time is a new volume of translations of Ko Un’ short poems drawn from several of his collections in Korean and is a companion to The Three Way Tavern: Selected Poems also translated by Clare You and Richard Silberg. Ko Un is one of the most respected poets in Korea and has been nominated several times for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

He is a prolific author with over 100 volumes of poetry as well as many volumes of fiction and non-fiction in his native Korean. His work had been widely translated into many languages and he has a number of books in English translation including: Beyond Self, Ten Thousand Lives, Songs for Tomorrow, and Little Pilgrim. He was imprisoned several times and lived for a decade as a Zen Monk before returning the secular world. He has recently been a professor at Seoul National University.  

Reviews

Ko Un is one of the best-known poets in Korea and abroad, and has been nominated several times for the Nobel Prize in Literature. He is a prolific author with over 100 volumes of poetry as well as many volumes of fiction and non-fiction in his native Korean. His work has been widely translated into many languages, including a number of works in English translation such as The Three Way Tavern, Beyond Self, Ten Thousand Lives, Songs for Tomorrow, and Little Pilgrim. Ko Un was imprisoned several times during the military government in Korea and lived for a decade as a Zen Monk before returning the secular world. He is currently a professor at Seoul National University.  

 

 

Clare You, is the Chair of the Center for Korean Studies, University of California, Berkeley, and received the Korean National Silver Medal of Culture in 2003 for her work in the advancement of Korean culture. She is author of two language textbooks including College Korean.

 

Richard Silberg is the associate editor of Poetry Flash, is author of five books of poetry including The Fields, and Doubleness and the book of essays Reading the Sphere. 

Accolades

“Ko Un’s poems evoke the open creativity and fluidity of nature, and funny turns and twists of Mind. Mind is sometimes registered in Buddhist terms — Buddhist practice being part of Ko Un’s background. Ko Un writes spare, short-line lyrics direct to the point, but often intricate in both wit and meaning. Ko Un has now traveled worldwide and is not only a major spokesman for all Korean culture, but a voice for Planet Earth Watershed as well.”

 

—Gary Snyder

 

“Ko Un is a crucial poet for the twenty-first century, and this is an enormously fresh and vivid translation.”

—Robert Hass

 

“No one has done more for what is coming gradually but ever more clearly to be recognized as Korea’s literature of the twenty-first century.”

—David McCann, Director of the Korean Studies Institute at Harvard University

Description

Vertical Poetry:  Last Poems is a bilingual selection of poems by distinguished Argentine poet Roberto Juarroz from his final three books (all of his fifteen books were titled Poesía Vertical and numbered).  A major figure in international poetry, Juarroz' poems have been translated into many languages.  They have the spareness of haiku in their economy and simplicity of language, images from nature, and often Zen-like serenity or playfulness.  However, unlike haiku, Juarroz’s poems focus on the interior world or the internal experience of the exterior world.  Juarroz saw life as fragmentary and enigmatic and the life of the spirit as "intermittent."  His goal, he has said, is "the recuperation of the instant."  

Reviews

Poet Laureate of Colorado, Mary Crow is the author of nine books, five of her own poetry and four of translation.  Her books of poetry include the full length collections, I Have Tasted the Apple (1996) and  Borders (1989) and the chapbooks, The High Cost of Living (2002), The Business of Literature (1981) and Going Home (1979).  Her books of poetry translation include Engravings Torn from Insomnia: Poems by Olga Orozco (2002), Vertical Poetry: Recent Poems by Roberto Juarroz (1992), From the Country of Nevermore: Poems by Jorge Teillier (1990), Woman Who Has Sprouted Wings: Poems by Contemporary Latin American Women Poets (1987).  

 

Accolades

“In the astonishingly beautiful tradition of Smart, Blake, Nietzsche, Machado, Kafka, and fellow Argentine Jorge Luis Borges, Roberto Juarroz has made the aphorism his “arrow piercing the universe.” His molecular thing and idea conjoin about as nakedly as pen has ever recorded them. He is a world poet in all senses. Mary Crow captures his  fluent intimacy in a masterpiece of sharp intuition. English is the most agile compact tongue around. So “Ni siquiera la eternidad es para siempre” is pure lightning in Crow’s English, “Not even eternity is forever.”  Juarroz is a natural Gnostic, one who mediates and knows. His wisdom poetry, like that of Jewish Ecclesiastes and Greek Heraclitus where the Western traditions began, penetrates and alters us. Hear  “To drink something is to understand it. / And to understand transparency is to begin / to understand the invisible”  Go to the garden of Roberto Juarroz. You will never be the same again.”

                       —Willis Barnstone -  author of Life Watch & The Restored New Testament

 

 

"A talented and loyal translator has given fresh attention to a poet who much deserves it. Juarroz had a quiet, level voice that moves you toward surprising revelations, and Mary Crow has deftly brought that voice into English."

—John Felstiner author of Can Poetry Save the Earth? A Field Guide to Nature Poems.

Description

“These are crystalline — oftentimes incandescent — translations of Juarroz’s powerful metaphysical poems where eternity and silence jut up against a world where “writing infects the landscape” and there are “more letters than leaves” — The kind of match one hopes for where both the translator and the poet are in luck; new poems which don’t leak and yet old poems in which the original passion shines.”

 

—Jorie Graham

 

“Mary Crow has the sound and pitch of the Juarroz poems”

 

—WS Merwin

 

“Mary Crow has given us a poet of miraculous lucidity and mystery at once. Her translations are marvelous in themselves and share the beauty and importance of the work. This is contemplative poetry that does not release … but compels the reader to follow the trail of the poems until the last. The poems are magnetic: engaging paradoxes and sudden bursts of light. The is a poet to compare with Octavio Paz.”

 

— David Ignatow

Accolades

 

Poet Laureate of Colorado, Mary Crow is the author of nine books, five of her own poetry and four of translation.  Her books of poetry include the full length collections, I Have Tasted the Apple (1996) and  Borders (1989) and the chapbooks, The High Cost of Living (2002), The Business of Literature (1981) and Going Home (1979).  Her books of poetry translation include Engravings Torn from Insomnia: Poems by Olga Orozco (2002), Vertical Poetry: Recent Poems by Roberto Juarroz (1992), From the Country of Nevermore: Poems by Jorge Teillier (1990), Woman Who Has Sprouted Wings: Poems by Contemporary Latin American Women Poets (1987).  

 

Description

Witness is the first collection of Benedetti’s poetry in English translation to draw on thirty of his published collections from 1948 - 2009 thereby presenting the full range of his poetic voice. Benedetti (1920 - 2009) regarded as one of Latin America’s most important writers of the 20th century, equally at home in fiction as well as poetry, is not well known in the English speaking world. 

 

Reviews

 

Mario Benedetti (1920 - 2009) regarded as one of Latin America’s most important writers of the 20th century and one of Uruguay's most prolific writers. He excelled in all literary genres: novels, short stories, poems, plays, essays, political articles, and polemical songs. Benedetti's seemingly inexhaustible creative power parallels his constant activity to improve the sociopolitical situation of his country.  

 

Louise B. Popkin resides in the Boston area, where she teaches Spanish at Harvard's Division of Continuing Education.  She also spends several months each year in Montevideo, Uruguay, and her translations of Latin American poetry, theater and fiction have appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies. Among the writers whose work she has translated are Mauricio Rosencof, Mario Benedetti, Idea Vilariño, Eduardo Del Llano, Claribel Alegría, Eduardo Galeano, Leo Masliah, Mempo Giardinelli, Amanda Berenguer, Hugo Achugar, Hiber Conteris, and Teresa Porzcekanski.

Accolades

“Louise Popkin, who spends long periods in Uruguay, knew the poet, heard him read, consulted with him, and has studied his work and entorno, gives us the first really satisfying, accurate, and deeply-felt English translations that capture Mario’s poetic voice throughout all its periods and range. She pays attention to local usage and brilliantly recreates the spoken quality of these poems. Popkin’s is a true labor of love, but it is much more than that. I believe Mario, at long last, would be thrilled. I am.”

—Margaret Randall

 

“It gives me great pleasure to see the work of Mario Benedetti, one of the great poets of our language, made available to US readers in Louise Popkin's wonderful translations.

Louise's carefully crafted adaptations of Mario's poems convey all the wisdom, nostalgia and irony that inform his verses in language that retains their musicality. Anyone who has translated poetry will appreciate what an accomplishment that represents.”

 

—Claribel Alegria