How to Be Happy Though Human: New and Selected Poems

"How to Be Happy Though Human: New and Selected Poems is Kate Camp's seventh book of poetry and the first to be published outside New Zealand. Incorporating a grouping of new, previously unpublished work and a selection of important poems from her six earlier collections, this volume introduces North American readers to poetry that has been described by critics as "fearless," "mesmerizing," and "containing a surprising radicalism and power." Camp's debut collection, Unfamiliar Legends of the Stars, won the NZSA Jessie Mackay Best First Book Award for Poetry on publication over twenty years ago. Subsequent books confirmed Camp as a leading voice of her generation: widely anthologized, studied, and cited as an influence by emerging generations of poets. Camp's work is recognized for its wide-ranging and eclectic subject matter, its technical control, and its musicality, with pop culture, high culture, the domestic confessional, close observation, and found language featured as recurring elements of style. Her fourth collection, The Mirror of Simple Annihilated Souls -- which shares a title with Belgian mystic Marguerite Porete's 1310 collection, a book that caused is author to be burned at the stake -- won the poetry award at the New Zealand Post Book Awards in 2011 and marked a turn in the poet's work towards darker and more philosophical subject matter. A timely retrospective that represents a new chapter in Camp's career, How to Be Happy Though Human promises to gain a wide readership for this thoughtful, engaging, and popular writer."--