A stunning and considered collection of poetry and writings by one of the most intriguing and accomplished voices in contemporary literature. Paul Auster's penetrating and charged verse resembles little else in recent American poetry. This collection of Auster's poetry, translations, and composition notes from early in his career do much to reinforce the idea that Paul Auster is, indeed, a unique and masterful figure in the literary world. Taut, densely lyrical, and everywhere informed by a powerful and subtle music, this selection of writings begins with the compact verse fragments of Spokes (written when Auster was in his early twenties) and Unearth, continues on through the more ample meditations of Wall Writing, Disappearances, Effigies, Fragments From the Cold, Facing the Music, and White Spaces, then moves further back in time to include Auster's revealing translations of many of the French poets who influenced his own writing, as well as the provocative and previously unpublished "Notes From A Composition Book" (1967). An introduction by Norman Finkelstein connects biographical elements to a consideration of the work, and takes in Auster's early literary and philosophical influences. Powerful, haunting, and precise, this view from the past to the present will appeal to those unfamiliar with this aspect of Auster's work, as well as those already acquainted with his poetry.

Winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Practical Gods is the eighth collection by Carl Dennis, a critically acclaimed poet and recent winner of one of the most prestigious poetry awards, the Ruth Lilly Prize. Carl Dennis has won acclaim for "wise, original, and often deeply moving" poems that "ease the reader out of accustomed modes of seeing and perceiving" (The New York Times) . Many of the poems in this new book involve an attempt to enter into dialogue with pagan and biblical perspectives, to throw light on ordinary experience through metaphor borrowed from religious myth and to translate religious myth into secular terms. While making no claims to put us in touch with some ultimate reality, these clear, precise, sensitive poems help us to pay homage to the everyday household gods that are easy to ignore, the gods that sustain life and make it rewarding.

Double Agent is a watershed in the recent revival of interest in the role of the public critic and intellectual who writes about culture, politics, and the arts for an intelligent general audience. Offering acute portraits of critics both famous and neglected, Dickstein traces the evolution of cultural criticism over the last century from Matthew Arnold to New Historicism. He examines the development of practical criticism, the rise and fall of literary journalism, and the growth of American Studies, and rereads the work of critics like Arnold, Walter Pater, I.A. Richards, Roland Barthes, Edmund Wilson, R.P. Blackmur, Lionel Trilling, Alfred Kazin, and George Orwell. In essays and books that are themselves works of literature, these writers made criticism central to the public sphere, balancing social and literary values, politic commitment and aesthetic judgment. Though marginalized or ignored by academic histories of criticism, their example has proved immensely valuable for younger critics eager to find a personal voice and reach a wider public. Dickstein concludes with a lively and provocative dialogue that weighs the claims of recent literary theory and the importance of renewing public culture.

The poems in Raised by Humans are about surviving childhood and colonization. Childhood did not agree with Deborah Miranda, mostly because the adult humans in charge of her life were not prepared to manage their own lives, let alone the life of a human-in-training. Humans raised Deborah, but it wasn't a humane childhood. This poetry collection is also about how indigenous people survive civilization and become readers and writers of the same alphabet that colonized their culture. The complexity of being forced to find her way into relationship with the very people or cultures that have hurt/raised Miranda is a paradox at the heart of her poetry, which pushes language past what Miranda calls the "alphabet of walls."

Philip Levine's new collection of poems (his first since The Simple Truth was awarded the Pulitzer Prize) is a book of journeys: the necessary ones that each of us takes from innocence to experience, from youth to age, from confusion to clarity, from sanity to madness and back again, from life to death, and occasionally from defeat to triumph.

From Pulitzer Prize–winner Mark Strand comes an exquisitely witty and poignant series of prose poems. Sometimes appearing as pure prose, sometimes as impure poetry, but always with Strand’s clarity and simplicity of style, they are like riddles, their answers vanishing just as they appear within reach. Fable, domestic satire, meditation, joke, and fantasy all come together in what is arguably the liveliest, most entertaining book that Strand has yet written.

The first complete collection of the poetry of Delmore Schwartz, “the most underrated poet of the twentieth century" (John Berryman). When Delmore Schwartz published his first short story, “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” in Partisan Review in 1937, he became an instant literary celebrity. After the appearance of his first book (by the same name), he was inundated with praise. The famed poet Allen Tate wrote to him, “Your poetic style is beyond any doubt the first real innovation that we’ve had since Eliot and Pound,” and T. S. Eliot himself wrote Schwartz a letter asking him to compose more poetry. The brilliant start of his career is matched perhaps only by its tragic end, a lonely death after an extended period of alcoholism, depression, and derangement. Today, more than fifty years after his death in 1966, Schwartz is often remembered for the tragedy of his life rather than for the innovation and sad brilliance of his greatest work. This book brings together all of Schwartz’s poetry for the first time, from his groundbreaking debut collection to his unpublished late work, which he kept writing until his death. Accompanied by Ben Mazer’s illustrative notes and introduction, The Collected Poems of Delmore Schwartz offers readers the long-awaited opportunity to rediscover one of the most influential and original poets of the twentieth century. As Mazer writes in his introduction, “It is the poems that count now. And it is the glory of the poems that survives here, awaiting new life.”

Not quite translations--yet something much more, much richer, than mere tributes to their original versions--the poems in Imitations reflect Lowell's conceptual, historical, literary, and aesthetic engagements with a diverse range of voices from the Western canon. Moving chronologically from Homer to Pasternak--and including such master poets en route as Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Rilke, and Montale--the fascinating and hugely informed pieces in this book are themselves meant to be read as "a whole," according to Lowell's telling Introduction, "a single volume, a small anthology of European poetry."

Winner of Five Obies, now back in print after fifteen years, a stage adaptation of classic stories by Hawthorne and Melville In the three plays in The Old Glory--Endecott and the Red Cross ; My Kinsman, Major Molineux ; and Benito Cereno --the most powerful figure in postwar American poetry confronts the most haunting American fiction writers of the nineteenth century. The result is a mythical, nightmare history of three centuries in America. In Endecott and the Red Cross, Hawthorne's Puritan governor, horrified by his colony's high living, declares, "Everything in America will be Bible, blood and iron. / England will no longer exist." The other two plays, based on Hawthorne's My Kinsman, Major Molineux and Melville's Benito Cereno , take up the themes of parricide and independence: one in Boston on the eve of the Revolutionary War, the other on a merchant ship in the Caribbean in the early nineteenth century. The plays were first performed in 1964, when the poet Randall Jarrell wrote: "I have never seen a better American play than Benito Cereno , the major play in Robert Lowell's The Old Glory . . . The play is a masterpiece of imaginative knowledge."

Spring and All, a collection of poems and essays, was first published by William Carlos Williams in 1932. Williams was a true renaissance man - he was a doctor, an artist, and a poet. This collection contains many of his classics including Red Wheelbarrow. He wrote this while tending to a sick child. So much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens. Williams was well celebrated during his lifetime. He won the first National Book Award for Poetry. He was posthumously awarded a Pulitzer Prize. Be inspired by his thought-provoking works! Note that Lisa Shea will also soon have an annotated and illustrated version, for those who would enjoy having notes on each poem.

Drawing from his literary fathers Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams, Bollingen Prize-winning poet David Ignatow eschews ornamentation in favor of embracing the fierce, uncompromising truths of the human spirit in his eighteenth collection.

In her book The Regenerate Lyric, Elisa New presents a major revision of the accepted historical account of Emerson as the source of the American poetic tradition. New challenges the majority opinion that Emerson not only overthrew New England religious orthodoxy but founded a poetic tradition that fundamentally renounced that orthodoxy in favor of a secular, Romantic approach. She contends that Emerson's reinvention of the religion as a species of poetry is tested and found wanting by the very poetic innovators whom Emerson addressed and that a counter-tradition is evident in his major heirs--Whitman, Dickinson, Crane, Stevens, Frost, and Lowell. Indeed, Emerson's own poetry failed in many ways to live up to his views and instead revealed an inherent paradox: that coopting of religion by a poetic theory alienates religion from its life principle--theology--and disables the poem as well.

New Directions is proud to announce a riveting and galvanizing new book by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. At ninety-three, he shows more power than most any other poet at work today. Ferlinghetti describes his new book, Time of Useful Consciousness, as "a fragmented recording of the American stream-of-consciousness, always westward streaming; a people's poetic history in the tradition of William Carlos Williams' Paterson, Charles Olson's Maximus, Allen Ginsberg's Fall of America, and Ed Sanders' America: a History in Verse. 'Time of Useful Consciousness, is an aeronautical term denoting the time between when one loses oxygen and when one passes out, the brief time in which some life-saving action is possible."Ferlinghetti's first book since Poetry as Insurgent Art, the fierce and immediate Time of Useful Consciousness presents poetry written "in ways that those who see poetry as the province of the few and educated had never imagined" (The New York Times Book Review).

"Stephen is sometimes Stephanie and sometimes wonders how his past and her past are their own collective memory. Advice from the Lights is a brilliant and candid exploration of gender and identity and a series of looks at a formative past. It's part nostalgia, part confusion, and part an ongoing wondering: How do any of us achieve adulthood? And why would we want to, if we had the choice? This collection is woven from and interrupted by extraordinary sequences, including Stephanie poems about Stephen's female self; poems on particular years of the poet's early life, each with its own memories, desires, insecurities, and pop songs; and versions of poems by the Greek poet Callimachus, whose present-day incarnation worries (who doesn't?) about mortality, the favor of the gods, and the career of Taylor Swift. The collection also includes poems on politics, location, and parenthood. Taken all together, this is Stephen Burt's most personal and most accomplished collection, an essential work that asks who we are, how we become ourselves, and why we make art"--

"Sharona Muir's Heredity and Other Inventions radiate like elements discovered late at night after years of searching ... a rocket in a museum in another country is both public knowledge and family secret; a daughter's umbilical cord in her father's lab sparks questions about the uses of love; the body of an airplane holds the imagined gestures of humans in their fi nal moments of life ... Muir renders the physical world so unfl inchingly that the metaphysical blows back, in equal and opposite reaction ... these poems are an act of postmortem collaboration: daughter as witness to history, using language to weld and spark familial bonds and to summon up their mysteries." --Rebecca Klaver, author of Empire Wasted "... Muir has a gift for conjuring beauty in the least expected places, dazzling audiences with rich imagery ... While the speaker's narrative is particular to her unique experience, in many ways this chapbook's poems transcend place and time, and resonate with all who have looked to the past for a way of understanding the present." --Mary Biddinger, author of Small Enterprise

A pivotal book in Robert Lowell's groundbreaking career, Notebook is, as Seamus Heaney has written, "a massive accumulation of unrhymed sonnets, poems of immeditae, unprepossessing, blunt-edged force, which record not so much the public events of [the late 1960s] as the reactions which the events provoked in Lowell's consciousness."

Cast in the style of a vaudeville Wild West Show, this highly theatrical play explores the theme of Americas mistreatment of the indigenious tribes was a celebrated hit on Broadway starring Stacy Keach. The hero is Buffalo Bill, whose life is defined and destroyed by an unfulfilled vision. Like all tragic heroes he has a fatal character flaw: he knows and loves the Native Americans, but craves money and fame. He helps destroy the buffalo herds, reducing the Native Americans to starvation. Ultimately, ambition leads him to even greater cruelty, destroying both the tribes and himself.

Poetry. Magical transformations, enchanted mirrors, talking animals, familiar tales in unfamiliar guises, all these and more are found in the pages of THE LAST SELCHIE CHILD. Retellings of archetypal myths and fairy tales and the nature of storytelling itself are explored in this new collection of poems by Jane Yolen.

In this deeply philosophical and highly inventive new collection, John Hollander, the distinguished author of numerous books of poetry, offers profound yet playful meditations on the reflective mind and on the words with which we come to know the world. In forms as varied as sonnets, songs, and ancient odes, he muses over the ways we use (and misuse) language as “we grasp the world by ear, by heart, by head / And keep it in a soft continuingness.” Here, too, are striking verses about the passage of time as recorded by the movement of light and shadow across a surface, whether it be the face of a clock or the enclosed walls of a Hopper painting. Throughout, Hollander delights us with mirrors, palindromes, and strange and surprising reversals that keep the mind ever alert with the challenge “to make words be themselves, taking time out / From all the daily work of meaning, to / Make picture puzzles of what they’re about.” Donna Seaman has written of John Hollander, “His wise and robustly complex poems span the mind like stone aqueducts or canyon-crossing railroad bridges—awesome works of knowledge and craft, art and devotion.” In this exciting new volume, Hollander shows once again the reach of his poetic imagination.

In this imaginative collection of poetry, Jane Yolen and sixteen other poets tell the tales they find in Jason Stemple's wonderfully expressive photographs of ice in its natural settings.