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Poetry. In her first collection of poetry, Emily Hunt inverts the ordinary: How to bring a new figure close / was like taking a globe, turning it once / and placing it back on its pedestal. Using spare diction and imagery, Hunt imagines a new world "so close to what the world is like" that the reader might feel like a humble visitor to our planet Earth. Though often elegiac, DARK GREEN is alive, inviting its readers to deeply sense this poet's tender and singular investigations. "With incantatory wit, Emily Hunt writes poems that could be stories, or stories that might be poems. DARK GREEN starts with a farewell, but grows in power, depth and range from page to page; like snowflakes or violins, no two poems are the same, but each displays visual acuity married to a gift from a different fairy, the power to reveal under the reader's skin vast pools of hitherto untapped emotion. Reading Emily Hunt's DARK GREEN one feels things one couldn't have before imagined possible."--Kevin Killian "Like Auden's, Emily Hunt's precision and bold intelligence discover what ought to be discovered on a daily basis; her poems say what suffering is and what it does; they say we are all of us in all we do. From DARK GREEN we get a hint at how to register the almost invisible nuances that fuel our spirits, minds and heart."--Dara Wier "Emily Hunt is an accomplished lyricist, quiet ethnographer, and kooky observer of inner turbulences. She's also a remarkable poet who has written a stunning first book. Her poems are spiky, wheeling, and fierce; a voice continuously evolving, speaking directly from her own haunted yet intimate, 2000-now. DARK GREEN is a wonder and a gift."--Peter Gizzi

"A funny and surprising interaction with dailiness, including our phones--the hardware and the relationships maintained through them--and whatever else is still tactile." --Maddie Crum, VultureStranger, Emily Hunt's long-awaited follow-up to her acclaimed debut collection of poems, intimately chronicles the effects of love, labor and grief on the life and sensibility of an artist. These poems shed a shifting light on the peculiar textures of our era. Hunt treads with concision, vigor and excitement, addressing directly lived experiences--from the mundane to the profound. Whether it's her curious interactions with dating apps, 19th-century political speeches, dizzying corporate communication or emails from her schizophrenic brother, the exact details and use of language in these poems become almost elemental, making an urgent record of the present. Stranger blurs the boundary between life and art--"The things that happened / bled into the language we exchanged."--with the crystalline touch and nuance of a truly gifted writer.Emily Hunt is the author of the poetry collection Dark Green and the chapbook Company. She has also published two artist's books: Cousins, a collection of photo prints, and This Always Happens, a series of drawings and short texts. She lives in New York.

Poetry. Jane Gregory's mystifying second collection, YEAH NO, begins with a Knock knock, inviting the reader into a realmwhere Everything is a pattern / of yesses and no. Within these pages we find Gregory constructing a multivalent world--ripe with struggle, prophecy, and, by the end, a resemblance of hope. Using her highly-tuned sensibility throughout, Gregory guides us through the anxieties of this journey by inventing new and enigmatic forms filled with sonic experimentation and polyphony. YEAH NO builds upon the singular vision found within her previous collection, MY ENEMIES, and continues her elegant and challenging address to poetry. At the beginning it feels almost awkward (as well as anguished). Written in poems that are accretions containing both language that's constantly questioned and a more subtle, subterranean lyricism: 'the bower made of agitation' seems to be the form, and the book seems to be about being agitated by different impulses. Suddenly, more than mid-way, everything comes together into a new tone, and what was hesitance. is a method. 'I am against achievement, ' Jane Gregory says in obvious and thrilling mastery of poetic form. She really takes over then. and the reader's pleasure is acute. This is a terrific book to go through.--Alice Notley To take the relentless work of sensing/making/relating/judging/desiring/suffering/trying ('What? // Yes. and little else') and wrest it via language into bombs of awful hope and gorgeous despair just is poetry's job, and in YEAH NO Jane Gregory makes it fully and spectacularly hers. 'Thank what is clear / for the grimness, ' she writes, 'what the future's retrojection bore a hole right through.' Gregory's taut and particular rigor is a contagion (read: corrective) that I dearly want to spread across the present tense. Take note of what happens to your heart--I mean the organ, 'tenderer. tenderer now'--as you read this mighty book.--Anna Moschovakis

Poetry. In his debut collection, RIDDLES, ETC., Geoffrey Hilsabeck proves himself adept at paradox, a poet who reaches toward the largeness of the cosmos in order to bring its essence closer to us. Approaching his subjects with the difficult task of describing their spirit without naming it directly, this collection is also a love letter—Dear citizen stargazer—to the known and unknown. A singular imagination is at work here, writing toward the unique and peculiar qualities of things and beings, displaying the relative similarities of all phenomena. Reader, let me ask you a riddle: What holds its breath in another's mouth? What hides wind in leaves? What takes apart the Delphic know yourself and admits I don't know? I don't know. His riddles, etc., recognize that basic bewilderment which knowledge cannot rescue us from, and then he makes for us the world again, not by defining it, but by singing the wild, innocent song.—Dan Beachy-Quick These riddles are poems 'fearfully, and wonderfully made, ' unabashedly lyrical—they've been hanging on, like psalms and rivers, 'strange and unnecessary' as the poet's life. They ask the comfortably urgent questions that, back in the day, John Ashbery asked (with echoes of David Schubert): the kind that need no answer but are open to any. When you get past the making, perhaps all poems worth the name are really riddles, as only the tongue may turn back the clock so we may reconsider of what it is made.—Matvei Yankelevic

Fiction. When the spinster Miss Helen Campbell sets off in a motorcar called The Comet with four high school girls, their cross-country car ride promises to fulfill their singular dreams of grand vistas. Unprepared for the ensuing plane crash, stolen car, a trip to The Singing Ranch, and encounters with cryptic individuals, a painting by Henri Rousseau, a train robber on the lam, an Italian village located in California, and a talking door, and with the assistance of cowboys, Blaise Cendrars, Indians, and mountain outlaws who turn into statues, the redoubtable Motor Maids are compelled to dream even larger. More than fifty years in the making, Ron Padgett's novella, MOTOR MAIDS ACROSS THE CONTINENT, is an altered version of a novel for adolescent girls originally published in 1911. A mix of Harold Lloyd, Tom Mix, and Max Ernst, Padgett's tale is by turns comic, visionary, and strangely touching.

Poetry. Jewish Studies. Lionel Ziprin (1924-2009), Jewish mystic, poet, and artist, was born and died on the Lower East Side of New York City. Together with his wife, Joanne, he formed the nucleus of a hidden group of creators, beginning in the early 1950s, who had a foundational influence on what was to come. For over half a century, Lionel was deeply esteemed by associates ranging from Harry Smith and Bruce Conner to Thelonious Monk and Bob Dylan. (Per Ira Cohen, He was much larger than a poet... He was one of the big secret heroes of the time.) A prolific author, Ziprin did not write for publication, and only a fragmentary handful of his literary writings saw print while he was alive. This book of nearly 300 profound verses, limericks, and esoteric rhymes is startlingly fresh and innovative though written nearly six decades ago, and is accompanied by supplemental materials that provide valuable context for this unheralded genius. A fantabulous treasure trove of magic poetry and mystical limericks from downtown legend Lionel Ziprin. Charming, surreal, and marked with a profound wisdom, these vexing miniatures will transport you directly into his living room--where he sat in his beloved rocking-chair-time-machine weaving immortal tales of ancient Kabbalah scrolls, biblical puzzles, occult secrets, and counter-culture esoterica. Long awaited, this is a classic tome out of the rich underground culture of Downtown New York.--John Zorn I find this joyful irreverent book of wordplay, humorous surrealism, and limerick wisdom a perfect choice to begin to reveal the amazing unpublished writings of the legendary New York Lower East Side recluse sage, Lionel Ziprin, who T.S. Eliot once conceded was a better poet than himself.--Jonas Mekas SONGS FOR SCHIZOID SIBLINGS is a newly revealed American terma, and Philip Smith's meticulously researched supporting materials significantly further Lionel Ziprin's reception. Smith draws upon his inspired engagement with mid-century bohemia, occultism, poetry, and popular culture to playfully describe, with sympathy and subtlety, a figure whose presence upends established narratives of the postwar avant- garde.--Carol Bove There is a poet's poet and there is Lionel Ziprin (1924-2009). In addition to being a poet, Ziprin was a Kabbalist and founder of a greeting card company that counted among its employees some of the greatest independent filmmakers of the past fifty years: Jordan Belson, Bruce Conner, and Harry Smith. Born on Manhattan's Lower East Side, Ziprin was the grandson of Rabbi Nuftali Zvi Margolies Abulafia, who was a living storehouse of Jewish liturgical music dating back centuries. The name Abulafia itself has a long and rich history stretching to 13th-century Spain and Abraham ben Samuel Abulafia, one of the earliest Kabbalists. Ziprin possessed a vast knowledge of the hidden. He dwells in that domain of angelic verse that counts William Blake, Helen Adam, and Alfred Starr Hamilton, among its other tenants. In the poetry of these visionaries, nursery rhymes, limericks, ballads, and lists propel them toward the aether.--John Yau

Literary Nonfiction. Latino/Latina Studies. Essays. Politics. Afterword by Gabriela Jauregui. PROFESSIONALS OF HOPE: THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF SUBCOMANDANTE MARCOS is an anthology by the prolific and brilliant former spokesperson and strategist for the Zapatistas, who countered the Mexican government's bloody attacks on indigenous people by staging an uprising in the name of democracy, justice, and liberty for all. And by all, Marcos really means everyone, including identities that resist ready-made categories. These poetic letters, speeches, and folktales counter oppression by challenging governments that plunder their own people, and declare the basic desire to bestow dignity upon the indigenous people of Chiapas through grass-roots revolution. By no means exhaustive, this book is meant to introduce readers to a sliver of Marcos's output and provide context for a struggle that still exists in Mexico, and whose existence is mirrored wherever tyranny flourishes. Yes, Marcos is gay. Marcos is gay in San Francisco, black in South Africa, an Asian in Europe, a Chicano in San Ysidro, an anarchist in Spain, a Palestinian in Israel, a Mayan Indian in the streets of San Cristobal, a Jew in Germany, a Gypsy in Poland, a Mohawk in Quebec, a pacifist in Bosnia, a single woman on the subway at 10pm, a peasant without land, a gang member in the slums, an unemployed worker, an unhappy student and, of course, a Zapatista in the mountains. Marcos is all the exploited, marginalised, oppressed minorities resisting and saying 'Enough.' He is every minority who is now beginning to speak, and every majority that must shut up and listen. He is every untolerated group searching for a way to speak. Everything that makes power and the good consciences of those in power uncomfortable--this is Marcos.--Subcomandante Marcos, from Social Justice E- Zine #27

Poetry. Sara Nicholson's second collection, WHAT THE LYRIC IS, is a sharp, humorous, and poignant exploration of how the lyric in poetry both fits and fails us. Conversant with dead poets, but skeptical of their conceits, Nicholson mixes lightness with melancholy in poems with titles like Dante in Arkansas: My breath's been / Doomed to harmonize with fog. WHAT THE LYRIC IS turns the pastoral tradition upside down, ever careful to remind us of the price for all this reflection and merriment--Acorns are beautiful only to those / Who've never had to clean them up. Sara Nicholson's aim is 'true poems flee' says Emily Dickinson. You see what I did there, but, more importantly, if you read the poems herein you'll hear one of my favorite writers making extraordinary word-music. Hers is the lyric as unteachable moment. She sends and receives me.--Graham Foust I love the gravely funny, imaginative poems of WHAT THE LYRIC IS. Nicholson deploys a provisional dream-logic in which all things are level with 'the goddamn oak' or 'the bladder-shaped stars' and any itinerant hope that there is a wisdom greater than 'I wanted to sing / so I stopped talking' must be laid aside or get dragged instead to the trash. Freely admitting of what they do not know, these poems act as nonpology to the world that will not read them and frank lyric to all who are bold and fortunate enough to enjoy them.--Jae Choi

Poetry. Swinging between examination and revelation, Hannah Brooks-Motl's second collection of poems, M, holds a unique place in contemporary poetry, written almost as a document to chart the act of a writer reading. By transposing lines directly from the essays of Michel de Montaigne with her own, she creates a shimmering mirage that enables two distinct voices to blend with confidence and to question the steps we take to make sense of the world. That degree of ambition requires great care and thoroughness, the ability to see the past clearly in order to invent a skillfully considered and electric present. Blowing hot and cold with the same mouth The weapon of memory shattered the sun Lift your eyes to it In the venerable tradition of mining, Hannah Brooks-Motl engages the poetics of excavation, taking Montaigne's Essays as substrate. The 'M' of the title may be far removed, but his (and her) spirit holds sway via 'the burning light of the past' in 'the little way of adjacency.' Montaigne's 'very limits of the possible' lead onto a quiet exuberance in a poem, for example, where 'Invention got big / in the world / and bigger /... I made it // Wild with making' (this, on imagination). If Brooks-Motl's subtleties sometimes defy a quick 'get, ' they also persist in their nested reference, '...like an infant wall of belief / Climbing with ivy at night.' This is the 'great fond wager' of a rich and mysterious work.--Jean Day M may be for Montaigne, the sixteenth century essayist whose humanist imagination gives Brooks-Motl permission to look elsewhere, into the past for her poetic material, but M is also for 'mind, ' a place these poems love to dwell. As readers, we get to dwell there, too, trusting Brooks-Motl to sculpt with care and patience in order to offer a world that 'blooms and moves' more generously. These ambitious and gorgeous poems are continuously surprising, pushing language into a secret landscape, or a secret history of the intellect. Every turn of phrase, every figure and gesture flickers open, making manifest the intimate and precipitous experience of reading into and with the past, alongside its fragments and tendencies.--Juliana Leslie

Marcy O'Brien writes with an eye for detail and a gift for putting you right there in the scene with her. Her deeply personal voice speaks with both wisdom and irreverent wit - the blessings of a well-lived life - evoking frequent smiles and even an occasional tear. >She is more than just funny. She's fun. Spending time with Marcy always leaves you with the lasting warmth of a visit from an old friend.

If 50 is the new 30, then why does January Ornellas need duct tape for a DIY neck lift? Why is she being mistaken for a volunteer at her first triathlon? And why is the gym sending her hate mail? Ornellas shares her unique brand of humor in this debut collection of short stories. Whether she's being held hostage at a timeshare presentation, eating an excessive amount of cookie batter, or stalking the neighborhood kid who stole her exercise ball, Ornellas' sharp wit and raw vulnerability will have you laughing out loud as she takes you on a hilarious and relatable ride through her midlife adventures.

The 'first passion' of T. S. Eliot and a major influence on Pound, the poet, translator, essayist, and travel writer Jules Laforgue has nonetheless broken through only fitfully into the Anglophone literary consciousness. If there is any justice in the world, this astute selection, in Mark Ford's deft, inventive, reader-friendly versions, will finally give the man his due.

"Telling the Truth as It Comes Up is a landmark collection of talks and essays by one of our greatest poets, Alice Notely, covering almost three decades (1991-2018)"--

In the late 19th century, an estimated 11 million Americans believed in something called Spiritualism. They believed in it so ardently that it came to be thought of as a religion, and it became the seventh most popular religion in the United States. It's fundamental tenet-virtually its only tenet-was that it was possible for the living to communicate with the dead. America's philosopher king William James believed in it. Thomas Edison believed. Mark Twain believed. Countless number of scholars and scientists-although always a minority-also believed. Or, at the least, they believed that the belief should be tested, not scoffed at; that it might deserve to be part of university curricula, not the raw material of derisive humor. The same was true across the Atlantic, where Spiritualism attracted Marie Curie, Queen Victoria, two British Prime Ministers, Pope Pius IX and Russia's Czar Alexander II, among numerous others. Hundreds of the smartest minds in the world-geniuses all-formed societies in New York and London to investigate the notion of conversation with the deceased. They conducted scores of experiments under the most rigid, secure and sometimes even punishing of conditions, and some of what they discovered startled them. As When the Dead Talked . . . and the Smartest Minds in the World Listened, attests, it is still startling today. "Readers fascinated by how scientists in the last half of the 19th century thought about psychic phenomena will appreciate Burns's exploration of this fascinating history." - Publishers Weekly "Eric Burns has a gift for exploring the nooks and crannies and shadows of history that seldom get illuminated. When the Dead Talked . . . and the Smartest Minds in the World Listened [is] a vastly informative and entertaining book that can't help but leave a reader wondering where reality leaves off the magic begins." - Neal Gabler, author of Winchell: Gossip, Power and the Culture of Celebrity (Time magazine best non-fiction book of the year)

Fiction. Poetry. Jewish Studies. Admired by Donald Barthelme and Lydia Davis, Mitch Sisskind is a professional satirist whose stories and poems can finally be read in one new volume. DO NOT BE A GENTLEMAN WHEN YOU SAY GOODNIGHT, a selection from the last five decades, includes an introduction from poet Amy Gerstler, who calls Sisskind "a postmodern master of the anti-epiphany," and an afterword by David Lehman. Bestowed with outlandish names, Sisskind's characters make up a cast of failures for whom grace is absent. The hilarity and sadness of many of their surprising situations have the ability to startle readers until, as in his imagined filmography of Tokyo Liscomb, "all hell breaks loose." The divine is often called upon and sometimes shows up but never in expected ways, since Sisskind, gifted with originality, unsettles all we thought we knew about this world and the next. "Mitch Sisskind's DO NOT BE A GENTLEMAN... opens the door to a world of another time, in an unusual mix of stories and poems, of solid realism and weird fantasy and wit, combining steamy sex and nostalgia, the Mickey Mouse Club and Talmudic scholarship. Sisskind gives us an unapologetically and un-politically-correct male world, but a quirky and appealing one, a world of old guys with funny names like Steve Tomato and Hub Snell--maybe you knew them? My favorite is 'Twenty Questions': a dead father, sitting in a magic chair, speaks to his son for a while about his life, and in this story, speaking from beyond the grave seems as natural as breathing, and the voice, talking about how he used to dress or eat or conduct business, completely alive." --Lydia Davis "Donald Barthelme told me, early on, that Mitch Sisskind is the funniest living writer in America--and when I read "A Mean Teacher," I was

Fiction. LGBT Studies. Like the orchids that provide their leitmotif, these interwoven stories by Kenward Elmslie are exquisite, exotic, and oneiric, as if they had been written in another world. Although each of THE ORCHID STORIES stands alone, their characters and moods recur frequently, in a swirl of visual echoes and the bewildering clarity of a dream. Even the characters themselves--Phil, the little boy gigolo; Mummers and Mummy who "adopt" him; the alluring Diana Vienna; the eccen-tric Dr. Schmidlapp and his wives who plot to capture the "Native Innards" orchid at the stroke of midnight--have an illusive reality that enhances the pleasure of these tales. The Song Cave is honored to present this new edition of Kenward Elmslie's out-of-print masterpiece, first published by Paris Review Editions in 1973. With an introduction that provides a fresh sense of Elmslie's oeuvre by Michael Silverblatt, host of KCRW's "Bookworm," this spectacular and spectacularly overlooked book is at last available to a new generation of adventurous readers.

Poetry. What exactly is an illustrated game of patience? Imagine something like group solitaire within a room full of objects, Duchamp on a TV, some great old albums, voices from a radio or the past, and a set of reverberating cymbals. In Ben Estes's ILLUSTRATED GAMES OF PATIENCE, the game involves sorting through objects and landscapes to reveal their soft hums of isolation, often in the wake of love. If there is winning involved, the rewards are hope for renewal and a faith in arranging. Filled with color and light, these poems make vivid the tender details of close observation, urging love to stretch and green. This beautiful work of late Romanticism finds Estes often roaming, sometimes making his bed in uncomfortable places, exemplifying patience, to which he at one point builds an actual broad-bodied monument. He is patient because he has the whole world and all of time at his disposal. The poems speak in riddles, impossible questions, vivid sensuous description, and, on one page, doggerel. Scent fetishists will appreciate the descriptions of crotch smells. In fact, there should be something here to satisfy hedonists of all stripes.--Aaron Kunin Ben Estes's poems, with their piquant accentuation and glorious measured sensuality, remind me a little of James Schuyler's. I also feel: bouquets not previously perceived, a style I can't fully attribute to the twentieth century or any previous. A strange new liberty quietly makes itself known.--Lucy Ives

Poetry. With patience and precision, Hannah Brooks-Motl's third collection of poems, EARTH, explores the grand themes of love, family, economy, and home with the skill of a true craftsman. As the measured compositions of these poems shift, so do their near-sculptural forms, and a feeling both classical and contemporary develops as a result. At times a paean to poetry, other times a critique of it, EARTH is a breakthrough collection by a poet whose ceaselessly sharp intellect continues to use poetry to gain insight into not only her own wants and needs, but ours, and those of poetry itself.

"This book describes and evaluates some 830 Public Acts out of the 1,671 added to the statute books during Richard Nixon's presidency. The Nixon-era Acts examined here deal with six major topics, including protection of (1) the environment, (2) workers, (3) minorities, (4) consumers, (5) veterans, and (6) the general public. This book's major premise is that significant valuable public policy was enacted during Nixon's sixty-six months in office, thanks, in part, to his finding bipartisan agreement with Democrat congressional majorities. And these momentous accomplishments should not be overlooked or forgotten within a cloud of less-favorable Nixon-era memories. Thus, the legislative study in this book provides a bit of positive substance on the scale for the tenure of President Nixon. For those who supported Nixon, this book might offer reassurance that they were not, after all, totally misguided in doing so. But regardless of where your politics or opinions stand, this fact-based book offers valuable and unique insight and lessons about the importance of "reaching across the aisle" to get things done. No matter your level of existing knowledge, if you read this book, you will learn something new about Richard Nixon and maybe even change your opinion of him"--

Poetry. LGBTQIA Studies. SMUDGY AND LOSSY, the first collection of poetry by Idaho-based poet John Myers, offers us a map to a borderless and psychedelically rural landscape--poems begin and end without notice, and the titular characters, Smudgy and Lossy, fade in and out of the rustic settings, situations, and daily chores that Myers assigns to them, "look[ing] for delicate flowers that bloom through hard sand or clay." With an expansive and textured queerness covering each page, the flat horizons of these poems sit too far away to navigate their identity with any certainty. Building continuously toward the collection's final swirling 13 pages, a 127-line list poem leaves us with one of the most exciting and bewildering poetic finales in recent memory. "Both in the characters and the way the poems emote, I become 'wrapped in' John Myers's exquisite collection of poems SMUDGY AND LOSSY; their 'roaring and wandering' lyrics that might wear 'out a blue rectangle.' I am enamored with the style: poems that hold the lyric and its reproof, granting me more of their intensity. The poems scorn and celebrate--with equal gusto--feelings and attitudes that shift, deepen, and advise. The poems hold the imagination in front of the image, glossing-over or rusting the poem's sentiment. Take for example the poem 'Lossy, ' which opens with 'laugh gorgeous and laugh shy.' Does it instruct or describe? Both. And the other poems, too, are just as gorgeous and shy. In the end these poems reveal only what they intend: to loom 'beyond Eros and ferns.'"--Prageeta Sharma

"Sara Nicholson is the author of What the Lyric Is and The Living Method, both from The Song Cave. April is her third collection of poems. She lives in Boise, Idaho"--

"Michael Silverblatt, host of KCRW's Bookworm, the nation's premier literary radio program, has been bringing writers and readers together in close company for more than three decades. Audiences around the world tune in each week to discover new ways of thinking about books through Silverblatt's compassionate and enthusiastic conversations with contemporary writers, compelled by the surprising range of ideas and feelings that only his legendary close readings can evoke. Bookworm: Conversations with Michael Silverblatt gathers interviews with some of the most influential luminaries of our time: John Ashbery, John Berger, Octavia Butler, Joan Didion, Carlos Fuentes, William H. Gass, Toni Morrison, Grace Paley, W.G. Sebald, Stephen Sondheim, Susan Sontag, and David Foster Wallace (who notably said to Silverblatt in their first of several conversations, 'I feel like I wanna ask you to adopt me.'). Gathered together for the first time in print, these conversations span years, revealing not only the quality and character of the writers, but also the special relationship that Silverblatt developed with them during their lifetimes. This collection reveals why so many consider Silverblatt to be our greatest reader, as he allows us to see these writers at their most animated and understood."--Page 4 of cover.

Seventeen-year-old Jared leads a normal but boring life. Then, one night, an oval-shaped stone with strange markings lands in his backyard during a strange thunderstorm with green lightning. As Jared explores the power of the stone, known as an Incognal, it begins transporting him to and from a strange alternate world called the Kingdom of Onteria.

Poetry. With setting moons, talking tulips, and the peacefulness found in a horse's mane, the poems in Christian Schlegel's debut collection HONEST JAMES might be as difficult to describe as the layered notes of an ancient perfume. "A famous notion twirled and froze. I made it mine. / Again it twirled." This unabashedly lyrical collection, which never shies away from rhyme, includes various cameos, including Goethe in its second section, with the end result being what John Ashbery calls "one of the strangest books of poetry to come along in some time." "In Christian Schlegel's HONEST JAMES you'll find literary mannerism lightly wielded, gesture for its own sake, a bit of lace at the cuff. The title--a reference to Wordsworth's Prelude--reflects the antiquing and old world light in these pages. Schlegel knits his syntax to invite the savor of the micro-novelistic vignettes he evokes. Period mood is produced with snippets of Latin and German, a few variations on Goethe. Were it not for his tendency to slip into four-beat rhythm and use rhyme, one could think these poems fragments of memorable lines torn from pre-twentieth-century European fiction. Time to dim the sconces and start dreaming."--Jennifer Moxley "One of the strangest books of poetry to come along in some time, Christian Schlegel's HONEST JAMES seems to draw inspiration from the back corridors and anterooms of poetry. One senses echoes of Kipling, Browning, Landor, even Robert W. Service, and other late 19th-century hot shots, but it doesn't seem to be a question of Schlegel taking cues from other poets, rather his magpie-like attraction to bits of history imbedded in forgotten texts. In a note he tells of using a volume of 'plain prose translations' from Goethe--'consulted sparingly and departed from liberally.' Students of the archaic will find muc

The first-ever English translation of one of Norway's best-known poetsFrom one of Norway's most outstanding living poets, Helge Torvund's Seriously Well is a book-length poem that explores the characteristics and limits of poetic incantation in relation to memory and illness. With spare lines and simple language, Torvund layers intimate recollections of nature, childhood, a personal illness and ultimately his deeply affecting acceptance of death. But Seriously Well is not a poem of mourning; rather it is one of expectation, experience, and of "a confidence that told me / the very best thing to do for me / was to be where I am, / be alive / in that which is." Translated from Norwegian by its author, Seriously Well is the first full-length book of Torvund's poetry to appear in English.Helge Torvund was born in Ha, Norway, in 1951, and lives with his wife near the Southwest coast. He has pub-lished over two dozen collections of poetry, along with children's books, essays and translations. In 2018 he was awarded the Dobloug Prize from the Swedish Academy. His children's book Vivaldi (NYRB, 2019) was included in Flavorwire's 20 Most Beautiful Children's Books of All Time.

"Through a spiraling sequence of lyric poems, a cast of voices- oracles, ghosts, water- speaks to a long history of genocide, displacement, and ecological devastation."--