Review The Answer Is In The Garden Asie (sheherazade) Cash The Debut (ode To Anna Moffo) Doctor Type Dog Bite Erotic And Sepulchral Epigrams From The Cinquencento: I Erotic And Sepulchral Epigrams From The Cinquencento: Ii Erotic And Sepulchral Epigrams From The Cinquencento: Iii Erotic And Sepulchral Epigrams From The Cinquencento: Iv Erotic And Sepulchral Epigrams From The Cinquencento: Ix Erotic And Sepulchral Epigrams From The Cinquencento: V Erotic And Sepulchral Epigrams From The Cinquencento: Vi Erotic And Sepulchral Epigrams From The Cinquencento: Vii Erotic And Sepulchral Epigrams From The Cinquencento: Viii Erotic And Sepulchral Epigrams From The Cinquencento: X Est-ce Que Fantasia On My Father's Gift Faust In Seersucker Shorts Fugitive Blue A History Of Private Life L'indifferent (sheherazade) La Flute Enchantee (sheherazade) The Letter (ode To Anna Moffo) The Moving Occupations The Ornate And Lovely Corner House A Professor Young And Old Relics Of The True Cross The Square Of Swan Tea Dance -- Table of Poems from Poem Finder® From Publishers Weekly In the title poem and centerpiece of this debut collection, 1989 "Discovery"/ Nation poetry award co-winner Koestenbaum writes, "Mired in low culture, / I was aching to reach the high."41 But it is precisely the low that allows him to exult in the lavish heights of the Metropolitan Opera, idolizing a diva who rises above the mundane only in her performances. Koestenbaum's own performances are formal and fluidly elegant: "I think that Anna / Moffo sings, / to this day, in a second, / parallel Met, a hologram of the original / projected in air, / where failing voices continue / to thrive amidst a system of strange geysers / and girders, cables / linking the golden prompter's box / to a sky that burns directly on the stage."45 His wit can become self-conscious, his metaphors heavy, but the unifying strength of the poems is Koestenbaum's burgeoning awareness of being gay, with all its emotional ramifications: "Thinking I was invisible, I wore the peacock / Blue and found I was too visible. I wanted to shock / My public into cheers, until I learned that they were primitives . . . / When Carla put her hand on Ricky's knee / I saw my future's blueprint. I was wearing pants of lapis lazuli."11 Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal Half operatic libretto, half slangy conversation, Koestenbaum's first book of poems interweaves sophisticated urban wit with a sense of lost happiness ("I am a landlord of a sadness"). With Anna Moffo, well-known coloratura soprano (born in 1932 in Wayne, Pennsylvania) as muse and "favorite," Koestenbaum explores role-playing, sexual identity, friendship, homoeroticism, and art as a refuge from psychic discontinuity. Through his rapid-fire digressions and formally rhyming arpeggios emerges a longing for elusive interpersonal realities "in which the secret life is fully seen." "I read/ these urgent things too quickly, as if I were not fixed/ By what occurs, as cats, cards, and elections/ Are fixed." Koestenbaum's extravagant fantasies nurse "a foolish daydream" of opera as a metaphor of life. "I mail/ this letter,/ addressed to Miss Moffo, care/ of the mind's Met, where Broadway joins forgotten avenues."-- Frank Allen, SUNY at CobleskillCopyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

For a long time, ruth weiss did not want to be known as a poet from the Beat Generation. She still thinks of herself as a "jazz poet." Jazz and bebop were essential to weiss's work. She was one of the first to read as jazz musicians played. North Beach poet Jack Hirschman says, "No American poet has remained so faithful to jazz in the construction of poetry ... others read to jazz or write from jazz. Ruth weiss writes jazz." While she once rejected the term "beat," she has come to embrace it. Her name is in lower case to show her defiance toward the sort of authority she encountered from the Nazis in her native Germany. (German nouns are capitalized.) She and her family escaped to Austria in 1933. As the Nazis moved in, her family got the last train out. In 1949, weiss hitchhiked to San Francisco, befriending Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady. She lived "on the road" for real, the three of them speeding over the hills in a car, going as fast as they could, flirting with mortality. Kerouac and weiss would write haikus to each other. She remained devoted to haiku.

This new bilingual edition of Rosalind Resnick's poetry celebrates her life, loves and adventures in New York and Italy. For romantics everywhere!

Poetry. THE STRUGGLERS is Norman Fischer's fourth book of poetry with Singing Horse Press. Divided into six poetic sequences, Norman Fischer's new poems--including a rhetorically stunning series after Mandelstam--make you stop and think--about everyday life and its sampled commodifications--about global turbulence and local pleasure. These poems create a path for reflection as a means for intensified sensation and transformation. 'No end to ending, no beginning to beginning, no beginning to ending, no ending to beginning.' Start here now.--Charles Bernstein

Post-modern American Poetry, 108 pp. "Mitch Corber, a stalwart member & chronicler of NYC's poetry community for decades, explores/reveals in this his first major volume of work 'veiled moons, ' 'creaky cabinets, ' 'weekend binges' & so much more -- with dark, humorous, romantic & experimental, at times cut-up/random-seeming verses infused with internal rhyme & wordplay connecting the commonplace with the metaphysical through meditative 'sporadic nibbling' & 'a mosaic of moods.'" -Steve Dalachinsky "Poet Mitch Corber's 'Weather's Feather' is "raw testimony" to love, desire, loss and rage that exists within "the sum of forgiveness." A steadfast and creative presence in New York's downtown poetry scene, Mitch Corber knows the mercurial intensities of its liaisons and its allures. Its passions are his: 'Gentle me a symmetry of delayed/desire lit by a clientele of electricity.' Workdays become occasions where 'fond flowers fish for a wish, ' and the whims of climate and ardor are enhanced by 'shy resurfacings.'" -Star Black "Mitch Corber is a Dylan Thomas for the Hip Hop generation. 'I lace words' is his throwdown, and he ain't kidding around. "Weather's Feather" is a unique contribution to post-Beat poetry as Corber is tapping into the experimental poetics of The Beats as found in Kerouac's 'Old Angel Midnight, ' Ray Bremser's bop prosody, Burroughs' cut-up experiments and Corso's 'Gasoline.' I'll toast this new volume with the author's favorite drink: 'a sinkful of gladdened magnets.'" -Joel Lewis "Mitch Corber dances on a poetic highwire gleaning meaning from the verbal swarm that envelops us. Brawn and beauty mix it up in balletic bouquets of "seething" syntax fusions. Sinuous verse pulses with mystery and affirmation, aspiration and defeat. Beguiling and edgy, Corber's voice is authentic, complex and heady, like a grandy brandy that's been aged in a hollowed-out dictionary. Between sparkling bon mots and startling juxtapositions, Mitch seeks and finds the fine line where the personal meets the communal. -Jeffrey Cyphers Wright "Corber was introduced to poetry through nursery rhymes. He took off from there and never looked back. His flights of fancy display love, loneliness, impermanence, the joys of imagination, and unexpected ascents and descents. No one ever knows where one of his poems will land. And no two trips are alike. This is a book for worldly travelers who never tighten their seatbelts." -George Spencer "Mitch Corber, grassroots documentarian of East Village poetry scene for decades, here shows that his vérité eye goes bongo gonzo when flipped into his interior abyss. He asks, 'Have you seen my pesky porcupine, /her spiny tingle, those naughty needles?' and while everybody else might just say Noooo, for Mitch it's an everyday experience. What's in those needles? Surrealist syringes, jazz bops and verbal nonstops...! Teddy B (Berrigan) puts in an appearance (on Avenue C) - he is La Bohème, with Corber strutting like Lord Buckley to get hiperama. His are the Beatles of 'The Eggman.' Take two poems and call him in the morning. Name a poem 'Pyrex Bowl.' Don't take an answer for an answer. Goo goo ga-joob. Mitch Corber is the Mad Taxidermist, and language is his prey.-Bob Holman "Mitch Corber comes to us from out of nowhere, yet very much from out of somewhere. He can write love 'in the proxy of praxis'- where lovemaking is akin to poesis. A sensitive ear to assonance and rhyme, and love of the unsettling word, fuels Corber's lyric metric. He does not so much explore as navigate. He seems to dwell in the metaphysic, rather than the street, though his sense of human, and particularly romantic, relation is vivid. His metaphysic is a valuable tool for living, existing as it must in what he terms 'the lethal diamond dream.'" -Vincent Katz

"Reflecting on her long and celebrated career in poetry, Linda Pastan was struck by the number of dogs that have appeared in her poems, whether as the primary subject or in the briefest of allusions. Dogs run through these poems, so to speak. The poems span the lighthearted to the serious, from the antics of training a recalcitrant dog to the grief at a beloved dog's death. With warmth, dignity, and quiet power, Pastan explores the many roles of these devoted animals, from household pet to Argos, Pluto, and the Dog Star. ENVOI We're signing up for heartbreak, We know one day we'll rue it. But oh the way our life lights up The years a dog runs through it"--

Collected poems, 1967-2012 From the Foreword by Jack Hirschman, former Poet Laureate of San Francisco: "I think I can say a few words about what makes American poetry tick..., and by way of that indicate the importance of this book and John Curl in the pantheon of revolutionary poets... it is 'transform, transform' that John Curl is forever sounding and resounding with his depth charges... We're talking about transforming a society totally in which process poetry serves as a beaconing forward. Curl's signature achievement linguistically, it seems to me, is to have developed a language where lines of images often are contrary to one another and that friction or opposition does more than 'surrealize' the lines (Curl knows the techniques of all the avant-garde poetry movements of the 20th century)-what he is writing is often a poetry of dialectical motion itself. The singular intent behind John's writing is to actualize in poetry the urgent need for working-class consciousness, ... and Curl succeeds in so many poems and in so many imaginings in this book that one realizes that Revolutionary Alchemy is a book of major importance. John Curl... has earned a place-with this book of poems-among the foremost revolutionary American poets since the end of WW2." From Sharon Doubiago, National Book Award nominee: "John Curl's Revolutionary Alchemy is a magnificent account of a radical poet's work, the lifetime of poems, the inner story of an important generation, its psyche, the history. What deep and meaningful pleasure to read this alchemy, mix of love with the bombs. 'I cried when I heard the war was over and/ when I remember/the war still rages on/ I cry again...To resolve my pain I/must resolve yours....'" From Art Goodtimes, Poet Laureate of the Western Slope: "The procreative force, the cosmic sensibility, the oracular insight Curl brings to the reader is constantly astonishing. These poems help define and give rise to a verse of the surreal poetarian vision of the left. Here unrealism attempts to seize and transform imperialist reality. Curl writes like the lead miner in a pit crew. As such, he is a major poet on the people's side. There is not a thing to be bought off in his poems, there is only the amazement of truth." From Mary Rudge, author of Water Planet: "A Master Poet who uses language in a remarkable, innovative way, he gives us information on contradictions in the evolving state of human consciousness. The tensile lines of these poems are a strong loom holding the strength of an interwoven theme of Social Justice making deliberate design through the poet's understanding of actions and attitudes. John Curl shows us the undersides of clouds and cultures but also shows immutable order in chaos. He can, in a single poem, give at least 15 ways of changing personal, social, political darkness, including purification by fire. Though some are seemingly surreal, strange and new, your intellect tells you each line is someone's reality at the core."

"Written with four hands, by Tom Prime and the Giller Prize and Governor General's Award shortlisted Gary Barwin, Bird Arsonist is avant-garde, tragicomic poetry at its most arresting. They say the language of birds is the closest to that of the divine. They also say poetry is the unacknowledged legislator of the world. In Bird Arsonist, Tom Prime and Gary Barwin -- like all good avant-gardists -- flip these commonplaces on their heads, showing that poetry sets alight any transparent, easy, lawful language, or is precisely what language spits out as it turns to ash. Compressed to the point of implosion, the poems that make up this volume are contorted descendants of Dadaism, Surrealism, and every other -ism."--

Gabriel Levin's fourth collection moves from the Mediterranean world that has engaged his imagination for the last thirty years, to the sombre title sequence written in the shadow of Israel's bombardment and incursion into Gaza in 2008. These striking poems and their prose commentary ( The Fathers are Watching ) navigate between the depredations of war and the mind's need to disengage itself from its surroundings. The final section of this articulate and compassionate book is a fifteen-sonnet cycle dispatched from the shores of an unnamed island, which could be everyman's abode, in search of what might lie yonder.

Gabriel Levin's second collection builds confidently on his highly praised first. In graceful, exacting lyrics, he addresses subjects wrested from a stark, natural world of fire and ash' desert tints, and its diverse, vital heritage, with a rare sensitivity to the life of things past as well as present. In Ostraca his journey through the Mediterranean and the Levant is attuned to a wide mix of voices (among them, the lone voice of a sentry, pieced together from five potsherds or ostraca') and a range of times and places, from the Sahara, Cyprus, Byzantine Mt Athos and war-torn Lebanon to his refractory, adopted Jerusalem, and an emerging Palestine. Gabriel Levin, born in France in 1948, grew up in the United States and Israel. His first collection of poems, Sleepers of Beulah, was published in 1992. His poems, essays and translations from Hebrew have appeared in literary magazines in England and the United States.

In this series of intricately related texts, internationally known poet, critic, and performance artist David Antin explores the experience of time―how it's felt, remembered, and recounted. These free-form talk pieces―sometimes called talk poems or simply talks―began as improvisations at museums, universities, and poetry centers where Antin was invited to come and think out loud. Serious and playful, they move rapidly from keen analysis to powerful storytelling to passages of pure comedy, as they range kaleidoscopically across Antin's experiences: in the New York City of his childhood and youth, the Eastern Europe of family and friends, and the New York and Southern California of his art and literary career. The author's analysis and abrasive comedy have been described as a mix of Lenny Bruce and Ludwig Wittgenstein, his commitment to verbal invention and narrative as a fusion of Mark Twain and Gertrude Stein. Taken together, these pieces provide a rich oral history of and critical context for the evolution of the California art scene from the 1960s onward.

MeditationsAuthor: David AntinTitle: MeditationsPublication: Black Sparrow PressEdition: FIRST EDITIONDescription: First Edition, First Printing. Published by Black Sparrow Press, 1971. Octavo. Paperback. Book is very good. Great copy of this collection of poetry. Seller ID: 349717Subject: Poetry

Poetry. Amiri Baraka calls MIRAGE "A fine book--important on painting." Basil King attended Black Mountain College as a teenager in the 1950s, and completed his apprenticeship as an abstract expressionist painter in San Francisco and New York. Since that time, his art has taken a different turn, reaching through abstraction back to surrealism and forward into a new approach to the figure. Although he did not begin to write regularly until 1986, an involvement with poetry has always been part of his life, first in doing art to accompany poems in books and magazines, later as a book artist, now as a poet/painter. Among his many books, THE EARTH SUITE by Carl Rakowsi, with drawings by Basil King, is available from SPD.

Poetry. Award-winning poet Alison Stone draws from the tarot in her latest collection. These 78 poems range from the archetypal (The Fool, The Magician, etc.) to the everyday situations of love, work, ideas, and conflicts that make up our lives. Mythical figures from past and present appear--Prometheus and Persephone represent court cards, as do Lou Reed and Steve Jobs. By turns witty and heartbreaking, this book goes down easily enough to be devoured in one sitting yet reveals greater depths with each subsequent reading. Stone's accessible lyrics move and entertain us with the struggles and joys of what it means to be human.

"One might think of Alan Sondheim as the Joyce of our time. Too big while he?s here among us, or while we?re here among him, to get our heads around what he?s done and is doingEOn the other hand, it?s clear he doesn?t want to be our Joyce at all, in deliberate, un-scrolling process as he is of immolating himself, incinerating any last trace of canonical identity in a stupendous bonfire of poetry, code, and secret philosophy. What OJoyceO shall be left? What OSondheimO? A monk burns in full view and the blaze refuses to go out. We?re here watching, startled and baffled, contemptuous and titillated. That we don?t quite know what fuels the seemingly mystical act renders the transfiguration all the more unsettling and marvelous. -- Kent JohnsonSondheim's writing refreshes. Narrative or persistent personality the reader constructs will resist. It's funny output, coded, destabilizing. It projects, expands and redirects personal need, hunger amidst insubstantial plenty, where the real material is imaginary.Writing without purpose; purposeful writing; not delivery of contentment or white space infill. Writing as individuation of multipliers where what is familiar is parodic as it is manifested, cyborgian tenacity creating its selves in process awareness, sans merci.I is mindful of being confederated awareness. Peripheral desiring bodies remain animal, alone and palely loitering during downtime, mammals with machines, sensuous making intellects. -- Lawrence UptonAlan Sondheim is a force of nature: a Category 5 mindstorm blowing in from all points of the compass at once. Coded and plain-speaking, philosophical and emotional, artistic and banal: to read Sondheim is to fall through a wormhole into a full world. And why shouldn't a work of art be a world? His art is writing as a performance act even more direct than Allen Ginsberg speaking into his tape recorder. A storming virtuosity of ideas. Be shelled. (ksh to be specific.) Complex and simple, digital and just plain talking, Jeremiah and the static. At this time of continuing doom, the storm we need to blow us clean. -- Jim Rosenberg"

"A satiric and searing collection of poetry obsessed with television, oceans, Jewish history, and time. In Shifting Baseline Syndrome, Aaron Kreuter asks the hard questions: will the Anthropocene have a laugh track? Is it okay to marry your eighteenth cousin? How different would the world look from outside the life-frame of the human? What is it like to have an acid trip in a porta potty? Is it the end . . . of Earth? Of capitalism? Of television? Throughout Kreuter’s sophomore collection, the TV remote is never far. Shifting Baseline Syndrome is both searching and searing, veering between satire and sincerity, history and prophecy, and human and non-human worlds. As the end looms, Kreuter demonstrates why we’ll keep doing what we’ve always done: hoping, for once, that the series finale will be good."--

The Jewish, Odesa-born poet, Semyon Izrailevich Lipkin (1911-2003), was a central figure in modern Russian literature, although until recently, he was best known in the West for his role in preserving the manuscript of Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate from the KGB. As a Soviet journalist in WW2, he witnessed and wrote about the horrors of Stalingrad, which led the Nobel Laureate Josef Brodsky to refer to him as 'Russia's war poet'. Later, during the years of Stalin's deportation of ethnic groups, Lipkin translated and preserved the language and writings of Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Tatars and, in doing so, became a living repository of their culture for which he risked censure and arrest from the Soviet authorities. In this memoir, Lipkin's humanity, civic courage, and friendship with many important Russian writers - Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, Andrei Platonov, and of course, Grossman himself - shine through the reports of terror and oppression that characterized this most turbulent period of Russian history.

One of 500 limited copies.