The collection's cornerstones are two rhapsodies - long poems which combine the richness of a novel, the intimacy of a lyric, and the immediacy of a performance. At the climax of the first, the poet meets his double, a dying boy whose shameful moniker is Baldie. As if in response to this explosive confrontation, the poet dares to write a second, wilder Rhapsody - a confessional, improvisatory fantasia, virtually a book in itself, where abjection blossoms into formally-innovative extravagance. Three sequences complete the collection: Piano Life, a series of haunted meditations on music and mortality; Erotic Collectibles, a disarmingly unsentimental account of sexual awakening; and Star Vehicles, in which the poet sees his perplexities reflected in Bette Davis, Sophia Loren, Ida Lupino, and other leading ladies.

"Karl Shapiro was one of the twentieth-century's major poets. He published more than twenty books of poetry, two autobiographies, including poetry, seven collections of essays, and a novel. Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress (the position now known as the U.S. Poet Laureate), he was the winner of numerous prizes and awards, including the Contemporary Poetry prize, two Guggenheim Foundation fellowships, the Pulitzer Prize in poetry, the Shelley Memorial Prize, and the Bollingen Prize. He was also a member of the Academy of Arts and Letters and a faculty member at several universities. Active in his craft well into his late seventies, in 2000 Shapiro died at the age of 86. This collection is compiled from the unpublished poems of Karl Shapiro at the University of Texas in Austin and elsewhere. They are largely as Shapiro left them, in a desk drawer in his apartment in uptown Manhattan"--

Manas is an epic novel in free verse, an extraordinary blend of Hindu mythology and existentialism depicting in a language of enormous vigor and many voices a mesmerizing story of love, death and rebirth

Amy Levy (1861-1889) was a British poet and novelist. Levy was born in Clapham, London into a Jewish family that was mildly observant, but as an adult she no longer practised Judaism although she continued to identify with the Jews as a people. Levy wrote stories, essays and poems for periodicals, some popular and others literary. The stories Cohen of Trinity and Wise in Their Generation, both published in Oscar Wilde's magazine Women's World, are among her best. Her final book of poems, A London Plane-Tree and Other Verse (1889), contains lyrics that are among the first to show the influence of French symbolism. Her other works include Xantippe and Other Verse (1881), The Romance of a Shop (1888), Reuben Sachs (1888) and Miss Meredith (1889).

Amy Levy (1861-1889) was a British poet and novelist. Levy was born in Clapham, London into a Jewish family that was mildly observant, but as an adult she no longer practised Judaism although she continued to identify with the Jews as a people. Levy wrote stories, essays and poems for periodicals, some popular and others literary. The stories Cohen of Trinity and Wise in Their Generation, both published in Oscar Wilde's magazine Women's World, are among her best. Her final book of poems, A London Plane-Tree and Other Verse (1889), contains lyrics that are among the first to show the influence of French symbolism. Her other works include Xantippe and Other Verse (1881), The Romance of a Shop (1888), Reuben Sachs (1888) and Miss Meredith (1889).