<P>Turning bare description into a luxuriance, The Known World looks at the complex relationship of past and present, creating energetic juxtaposition between different historic periods to envision life at the end of our own century. Don Bogen calls the work an archeology, and uses details f life in past eras as a way of penetrating the surfaces of history. In his account, everything known is both encumbered with and defined by the ...
<P>Mr. West covers the main events in superstar Kanye West's life while also following the poet on her year spent researching, writing, and pregnant. The book explores how we are drawn to celebrities—to their portrayal in the media—and how we sometimes find great private meaning in another person's public story, even across lines of gender and race. Blake's aesthetics take her work from prose poems to lineated free v ...
<P>Alcools, first published in 1913 and one of the few indispensable books of twentieth- century poetry, provides a key to the century's history and consciousness. Champion of «cubism», Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918) fashions in verse the sonic equivalent of what Picasso accomplishes in his cubist works: simultaneity. Apollinaire has been so influential that without him there would have been no New York School of poetry and ...
<P>The world that Donald Revell ponders in these poems replete with contrarieties. The same verbal playfulness and prophetic lyricism that made Revell a 1992 Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry and a winner of National Poetry Series, Pushcart, and PEN Center USA West awards are in full force in Beautiful Shirt. Here he traverses the rocky terrain of innocence, memory, disillusion, and salvation in a voice at once haunted and elliptical: «T ...
<P>James Dickey: The Selected Poems is the first book to collect James Dickey's very best poems. Like many visionary poets of the ecstatic imagination, Dickey experimented in a wide variety of literary styles. This volume brings together the finest work from each of the periods in Dickey's extremely controversial career. For over three decades, until his death in 1997, Dickey was one of the nation's most important po ...
<P>For over three decades, James Dickey has been one of the nation's most important poets and a prominent man of letters. The Whole Motion collects his poetic oeuvre into a single volume: 235 poems from his first book, Into the Stone (1960), to The Eagle's Mile (1990), along with previously uncollected poems and unpublished «apprentice» works.</P> ...
<P>Joy Harjo is a «poet-healer-philosopher-saxophonist,» and one of the most powerful Native American voices of her generation. She has spent the past two decades exploring her place in poetry, music, dance/performance, and art. Soul Talk, Song Language gathers together in one complete collection many of these explorations and conversations. Through an eclectic assortment of media, including personal essays, interviews, and newspap ...
<P>Taking Dante and other catalogers of failure and ruin (Baudelaire, Trakl, Rimbaud) as its guiding lights, Scarecrow charts situations of extremity and madness: «Are you / insistent? Are you dead? / Are you guilty? Has your / name been lifted, a vein / of earth from earth?» It also charts the insistence of time's passing and with it the awakening to both new and foreclosed possibilities. What will remain for us after the dis ...
<P>Aim&#233; C&#233;saire's masterpiece, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, is a work of immense cultural significance and beauty. This long poem was the beginning of C&#233;saire's quest for n&#233;gritude, and it became an anthem of Blacks around the world. Commentary on C&#233;saire's work has often focused on its Cold War and anticolonialist rhetoric—material that C&a ...
