A new volume of fluidly feminist verse by the author of Presentation Piece who continues to display a command of poetic technique and structure as well as a richly ripening vision

In 1923, Monroe Wheeler enjoyed publishing a magazine about poetry. Each issue featured a different poet. Manikin Number One was about Janet Lewis. Manakin Number Two, subtitled "Go Go", featured William Carlos Williams. Only 150 copies were made. This little magazine / pamphlet included nine previously-published poems by Williams along with the new one (to print) "The Hermaphroditic Telephones". It was 16 pages long in total, and bound with a string wrap. Enjoy this fresh paperback version of a literary classic!

"Following the alphabet and using a variety of poetry forms such as free verse, haiku, and ode, elements of the beach and seaside life are celebrated"--

Poetry. "MOODS is amazing." Heather Christle "Rachel, these poems are awesome." Blake Butler "I have many mood rings " Dorothea Lasky "

Poetry. Winner of the 2005 Pen Oakland-Josephine Miles Literary Award for Poetry. From Los Angeles to San Francisco, from 1953 to now--Neeli Cherkovski uses bar scenes, cafe insights, family confessions, heartbreak and redemption, meditations on morality and the acceptance of self to transform memory, time and myth into an intimate poetic-memoir. He creates a window to the past and explores how time has shaped who he has become. It is here--the power of Cherkovski's talent surfaces. It is here he finds himself, like an old friend in a warm embrace, LEANING AGAINST TIME.

Muriel Rukeyser's previously unpublished play presents the captivating life of Harry Houdini, one of our country's most intriguing celebrities. The play is magical, sexy, and provocative-presenting Houdini's life from his Brooklyn childhood and tricks (picking up pins with his eyelids) and his young romance with wife Bess, to his relationship with his mother; from picking the lock of a jail and releasing his circus companions to Houdini's Congressional Hearing and his famous escape acts. Part biography, part fantasy, Rukeyser explores issues that tap into desire, race, family, and politics. "Houdini" was performed once in Lenox, Massachusetts in the early 70's, with Christopher Walken playing the lead. This lost drama will appeal to theater people, Houdini fans, poets, magicians, and anyone interested in the interplay between reality and the imagination. How much of our lives do we conjure? Rooted in the early 70's, but timeless in its underlying theme, "Houdini" joins the Rukeyser resurgence that is well underway.Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980) is one of our country's most influential, yet neglected writers. She published fifteen collections of poetry, translations, childrens books, and several works of nonfiction. Her "toys of fame" include the Yale Younger Poets Award, the Copernicus Award from the Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Shelley Memorial Award. She served as president of P.E.N. American Center from 1975 to 1976.

Marilyn Hacker's voice is unique in its intelligence, urbanity, its deployment of an elegiac humor, its weaving of literary sources into the fabric and vocabulary of ordinary life, its archaeology of memory. Desesperanto refines the themes of loss, exile, and return that have consistently informed her work. The title itself is a wordplay combining the Spanish word esperanto, signifying "hope," and the French desespoir , meaning "to lose heart." Des-esperanto , then, is a universal language of despair -despair of the possibility of a universal language. As always in Hacker's poetry, prosodic measure is a catalyst for profound feeling and accurate thought, and she employs it with a wit and brio that at once stem from and counteract despair. Guillaume Apollinaire, June Jordan, and Joseph Roth are among this book's tutelary spirits, to whom the poet pays homage as she confronts a new, dangerous century.

Early American Poets is a beautiful anthology of the poetry that helped define the American literary tradition. Louis Untermeyer has curated a selection of works from the likes of Whitman, Longfellow, and Poe, as well as many lesser-known poets. This book provides a fascinating glimpse into the early days of American poetry, and is sure to delight poetry lovers of all ages. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

House Crossing is a book of 32 poems about where we live or, more properly, dwell, with each poem entitled by a different attribute of domestic architecture as it is commonly known: Cupola, eaves, attic, beams, etc. Such might lend itself to description, but--reminiscent in part of Ronald Johnson's oeuvre ( The Foundations , The Spires and The Ramparts )--in the vision of poet and scholar Laurie Patton each component becomes alive to an actuality beyond physical construct: The poetics of how we hold our ground, even if it is in flux--or as she writes, "A river runs... below the house." The instigation for this poetic cycle is Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space , with this collection a homage to that classic phenomenological analysis. As she writes in her introduction, House Crossing arose as "a straightforward observation about the endurance of Bachelard's work: if a poetics is good enough, and I believe Bachelard's is, then it does not only comment on poetry, but can give rise to poetry as well." What Patton gives rise to is in part an opportunity for us each to live more evocatively in our days and nights in each our own place, building a being, as "Noah's ark stands / at the end of our hallway."

Poetics & Polemics, 1980-2005 brings together in one volume a wide-ranging selection of essays and commentaries by one of the most significant poets, critics, and translators working with American and international poetry today. Jerome Rothenberg's work spans a period of over forty years and nearly one hundred books, and though perhaps best known as a poet, his critical and theoretical contributions to the fields of innovative, experimental poetry have become equally important facets of his work. Rothenberg's earliest critical writings concerned themselves with ethnopoetics and the poetics of performance. In the last twenty years his critical thinking has evolved to encompass more explicitly issues of modernism, postmodernism, and the avant-garde, as well as meditations on the nature of the book and writing. This volume extends and elaborates all of those interests, allowing for the first time a comprehensive glimpse of the full trajectory of his thinking. In the first section, "Poetics and Polemics," Rothenberg's essays address a range of issues with which he's become closely associated, among them the anthology as a critical and polemical tool; the intersection of poetry with art, performance, and politics, in both contemporary and traditional practice; the poetics of Jewish mysticism as a traditional form of conceptual and language poetry; and the universality of poetic discourse, particularly as seen in tribal poetry or in poetic traditions long separated from the Western literary mainstream. In "A Gallery of Poets" is Rothenberg's lively explorations of the work of other poets, as they relate to his own work, to avant-garde poetry in general, and to the poetic traditions that concern him the most. Finally, in "Dialogues and Interviews" are Rothenberg's unbridled meditations and musings on what he calls "the life of poetry" outside the bounds of book and binding, class and category, a dynamic force at the center of all that we call human.

Now available in paperback, this highly acclaimed work, hailed by The New York Times as "graceful, fluid, and extremely accessible," is a study of the ways in which poets from the biblical age to the present have addressed the subject of the nature and existence of God. The book treats such authors as Dante, the medieval Hebrew religious poets, the 17th-century religious poets, and the 18th century Nature poets, and discusses, among other topics, the influence of Calvinism and the poetry of stoicism, agnosticism, and atheism. Throughout the work, Daiches examines the tensions generated when a traditional religious belief which the poet accepts, or feels he should accept, runs counter to the hard facts of his own experience. The author also considers the particular problems which have emerged in this century for the religious poet who cannot accept any specific religious creed, and for readers who are unable to appreciate a poet's set of beliefs. God and the Poets does not set out to provide a comprehensive account of the poetic portrayals of God, but offers the reader a wealth of illuminating reflections on a subject which has obsessed poets over the ages.

After 9/11, postmodernism and irony were declared dead. Charles Bernstein here proves them alive and well in poems elegiac, defiant, and resilient to the point of approaching song. Heir to the democratic and poetic sensibilities of Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg, Bernstein has always crafted verse that responds to its historical moment, but no previous collection of his poems so specifically addresses the events of its time as Girly Man, whichfeatures works written on the evening of September 11, 2001, and in response to the war in Iraq. Here, Bernstein speaks out, combining self-deprecating humor with incisive philosophical and political thinking. Composed of works of very different forms and moods—etchings from moments of acute crisis, comic excursions, formal excavations, confrontations with the cultural illogics of contemporary political consciousness—the poems work as an ensemble, each part contributing something necessary to an unrealizable and unrepresentable whole. Indeed, representation—and related claims to truth and moral certainty—is an active concern throughout the book. The poems of Girly Man may be oblique, satiric, or elusive, but their sense is emphatic. Indeed, Bernstein’s poetry performsits ideas so that they can be experienced as well as understood. A passionate defense of contingency, resistance, and multiplicity, Girly Man is a provocative and aesthetically challenging collection of radical verse from one of America’s most controversial poets.

Carl Rakosi was an Objectivist poet who earned comparisons to William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens for his humor and lyricism. After a thirty-year career as a social worker, he returned to poetry in 1967 with his collection Amulet and continued to write steadily until his death in 2004.

The Ancient Rain: Poems 1956-1978 is San Francisco poet Bob Kaufman's third collection and his first to be published since the late 1960s. One of the original Beat poets (the coinage "beatnik" is his), Kaufman's work has always been essentially improvisational, often done to jazz accompaniment. And he became something of a legendary figure at the poetry readings in the early days of the San Francisco renaissance of the 1950s. With his extemporaneous technique, akin in many ways to Surrealist automatic writing, he has produced a body of work ranging from a visionary lyricism infused with satirical, almost Dadaistic elements to a prophetic poetry of political and social protest. Born in New Orleans of mixed Black and Jewish parentage, Kaufman was one of fourteen children. During twenty years in the Merchant Marine, he cultivated an intense taste for literature on his long sea voyages. Settling in California, in the '50s, he became active in the burgeoning West Coast literary scene. Disappointment, drugs, and imprisonment led him to take a ten-year vow of complete silence that lasted until 1973. The present volume includes previously uncollected poems written prior to his pledge and newer work composed in the years 1973-1978, before the poet once again lapsed into silence.

"With a title suggestive of both the figural and abstract, this collection spans nearly fifty years of Bill Berkson's poetry in all its deftness and variety. Full of nuance, intensity, and exuberant wit, his poems engage a mix of topics and styles to create a body of work suffused with light."-- BOOK JACKET

Scores of great poems in incomparable translations by noted British "16 Songs of Courtship," "Hymn for the Fallen," "Fighting South of the Ramparts," "Ballad of Mulan," more, plus many poems by the great Po Chü-I, including "After Passing the Examination," and "Last Poem." Splendid introduction to Chinese poetry.

The poems of Anna Margolin (1887?1952), appearing here both in the original Yiddish and in English translation. Winner of the 2007 Yiddish Literature and Translation from Yiddish presented by the Helen and Stan Vine Annual Canadian Jewish Book Awards 2007 Runner Up of the National Jewish Book Award in Poetry Born Rosa Lebensboym in Belarus, Anna Margolin (1887?1952) settled permanently in America in 1913. A brilliant yet largely forgotten poet, her reputation rests on her volume of poetry published in Yiddish in 1929 in New York City. Although written in the 1920s, Margolin's poetry is remarkably fresh and contemporary, dealing with themes of anxiety, loneliness, sexual tensions, and the search for intellectual and spiritual identity, all of which were clearly reflected in her own life choices. Sensitively and beautifully translated here, the poems appear both in the original Yiddish and in English translation. Shirley Kumove's fascinating critical-biographical introduction highlights Margolin's tempestuous and unconventional life. An exceptionally beautiful and gifted woman, Margolin adopted a bohemian and an eccentric lifestyle, and threw herself into both intellectual pursuits and romantic attachments beyond her two marriages.

"A wide-ranging exploration of spirituality, sex, travel, food, holy texts, and coming of age. Poet Alicia Jo Rabins brings a searing eye for surreal beauty in everyday life with a deep knowledge of wisdom literature, and creates a modern manual for living, a fearless investigation of how we learn to live in a human body both prism and flesh."--Publisher's description.

Poetry. Latinx Studies. LGBTQIA Studies. Women's Studies. Translated from the Spanish by Cecilia Rossi. THE LAST INNOCENCE and THE LOST ADVENTURES are Alejandra Pizarnik's second and third collections of poetry. Published in Buenos Aires shortly after The Most Foreign Country, her first book of poetry (which she would later disavow), these early poems blend the real and the imaginary, demonstrating the inner torment, deep solitude and acute vulnerability that would plague Pizarnik throughout her short life. This edition includes new English-language translations of both books along with an introduction by poet, translator, and Pizarnik scholar Ana Becciu. "Pizarnik's haunting words have garnered a 40-year following, earning her a reputation as perhaps Argentina's most important female poet."--The Argentina Independent