This first full-length study of Susan Howe illuminates the historical, autobiographical, and theoretical influences that underlie the work of this enigmatic and important contemporary American poet. In Led by Language , poet and scholar Rachel Tzvia Back offers a close and detailed reading of Susan Howe's provocative and powerful poetry. Howe's work is dense, often difficult, but always distinctive, and Back's volume explains a number of features crucial to understanding her poems. In this complete survey of Howe's major work, from 1978's Secret History of the Dividing Line to 1999's Pierce-Arrow , Back highlights the key strategies underlying Howe's work: linguistic experimentation, historical motifs, autobiographical references, and visual experimentation with types, fonts, and images. One of the book's most compelling arguments is Back's case for reading Howe's work autobiographically. An obsession with history characterizes Howe's poetry--historical figures from Mary Magdalene to Melville haunt her work--and Back deftly demonstrates the intensely personal nature of much of the historical terrain Howe traverses. This study debunks the myth of Howe's impenetrability, making her work accessible to a wide range of readers. Back has created a thorough guide to reading and understanding this important poet, and her book will be welcomed by students and scholars of contemporary poetry, American literature, literary theory, and cultural studies.

Featuring: Caribbean Poetry Includes: over 600 pages of poems from around the world. Read portfolios by Anna Swir and Amy Gerstler, new translations of Paul Celan, Bertolt Brecht, and more, and a Caribbean poetry feature, edited by Ishion Hutchinson.

From the distinguished polymath George Steiner comes a profound and illuminating vision of the inseparability of Western philosophy and its living language. With his hallmark forceful discernment, George Steiner presents in The Poetry of Thought his magnum opus: an examination of more than two millennia of Western culture, staking out his claim for the essential oneness of great thought and great style. Sweeping yet precise, moving from essential detail to bracing illustration, Steiner spans the entire history of philosophy in the West as it entwines with literature, finding that, as Sartre stated, in all philosophy there is “a hidden literary prose.” “The poetic genius of abstract thought,” Steiner believes, “is lit, is made audible. Argument, even analytic, has its drumbeat. It is made ode. What voices the closing movements of Hegel’s Phenomenology better than Edith Piaf’s non de non, a twofold negation which Hegel would have prized? This essay is an attempt to listen more closely.”

From Publishers Weekly Spin Cycle: Selected Essays and Reviews 1989-2001, the first prose collection from poet Chris Stroffolino (Stealer's Wheel), eschews literary criticism as a method of canonization or categorization and argues against theory-based dissections of texts, preferring a kind of generative criticism that, in his own introductory words, might "further the discussion of contemporary poetry and its relation to culture." Thus it makes sense that he discusses, in 23 essays, everyone from James Tate and John Yau to Erica Hunt, John Godfrey, Jennifer Moxley and Barrett Watten writers who choose to explore and explode the boundaries of and between genre, narrative, identity and social critique. Stroffolino is suspicious of the notion of literary lineage, believing it to be a heavy handed method of academic and avant-garde side-choosing. He portrays ideas of writing and, just as crucially, living with writing as a series of examinable choices. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc. Product Description Stroffolino, Chris, Shakespeare scholar, tackles unknown, younger American poets in a unique collection of essays and reviews. Review Read these essays with pleasure for Spin Cycle is anecdotal, wide in reference, shaped by interest and desire rather than argument. -- —Juliana SpahrThe first prose collection from poet Chris Stroffolino (Stealer's Wheel), eschews literary criticism as a method of canonization or categorization -- Publishers WeeklyThis is a unique and extremely valuable work of criticism. -- —Charles Altieri About the Author Chris Stroffolino was born in Reading, PA, where he lived (aside from a short stint in Washington serving on the staff of two failed Presidential candidates) until he received his BA in English/Philosophy from Albright College in 1986. He received a MA in English from Temple University in 1988 and a Ph.D from SUNY-Albany in 1998. Stroffolino has taught at NYU, Rutgers University, LIU, Touro College, The University of Massachusetts, Peirce Jr. College and Drexel University. He is currently Distinguished Visiting Poet at St. Mary's College (2001-2002).

Text: English, German (translation)

"The Poetry Lesson is a must-have manual for emerging poetry-monsters; a book of caveats for the peddlers of "creative" snake oil; an archaeo-psychological scan of instantly obsolete technology; the memoir of a professor relectantly abandoning his sex fantasies; the collected portrait of deluded youth about to find out something horrific; an affectionate treatise on poetry as a cure of hubris; and a de profundis moan of flesh turning into fortune cookies" --Cover, p. 4.

Peter Levi, who died in 2000, was elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford University in 1984. Until 1977 he was a Jesuit priest. He was a classicist whose writing includes three books on modern Greece, Afghanistan, and the English landscape. This title includes his early books, pamphlets and other uncollected poems.

Kings and Queens by Eleanor and Herbert Farjeon is a highly entertaining collection of poems about all forty-one English Kings and Queens since William I. Reissued in Puffin Poetry Kings and Queens is an authentic classic that has delighted young readers and adults alike. With wonderfully witty illustrations by Robin Jacques, history has never been so much fun! Eleanor and Herbert Farjeon were born in the 1880s into a highly literary family. Eleanor published nearly 70 books, mostly for children. Together with Herbert, her younger brother, she also wrote a children's panto, two operettas and a musical fairy story.

When she died, in 2009, Anthony Thwaite described U.A. Fanthorpe as a 'smiling subversive with a voice like bird-song'. An encouraging example to all late developers, this particular bird's voice took its time: she didn't become a poet until she was 45. But these examples of her very earliest work show the latent mastery and the rapid development of the craft that would bring her wide critical acclaim and an affectionate general readership. The mysteries of the trade gradually reveal themselves as rooted in a wide and uncensored range of subject-matter, a life-time's love of words, and an intuitive grasp of the mechanics of form and voice. Recognising her role so late, she was a woman in a hurry; there wasn't time for self-consciousness or grandiose notions of 'vocation'. 'A poet, ' she said, 'is a smuggler. He imports things clandestinely which are not supposed to have got through the customs.' Poetry 'happened to me', she would say. Her job? To listen, to pass it on.

" "Since the death of Robert Lowell in 1977, no single figure has dominated American poetry the way that Lowell, or before him Eliot, once did. But among the many writers who have come of age in our fin de siècle, none have succeeded more completely as poet, critic, and translator than Robert Pinsky." --James Longenbach, The Nation The poems in Robert Pinsky's At the Foundling Hospital consider personality and culture as improvised from loss: a creative effort so pervasive it is invisible. An extreme example is the abandoned newborn. At the Foundling Hospital of eighteenth-century London, in a benign and oddly bureaucratic process, each new infant was identified by a duly recorded token. A minimal, charged particle of meaning, the token might be a coin or brooch or thimble--or sometimes a poem, such as the one quoted in full in Pinsky's poem "The Foundling Tokens." A foundling may inherit less of a past than an orphan, but with a wider set of meanings. The foundling soul needs to be adopted, and it needs to be adaptive. In one poem, French and German appear as originally Creole tongues, invented by the rough needs of conquered peoples and their Roman masters. In another, creators from scorned or excluded groups--among them Irving Berlin, Quintus Horatius Flaccus, and W.E.B. Du Bois--speak, as does the Greek tragic chorus, in the first-person singular. In these poems, a sometimes desperate, perpetual reimagining of identity, on the scale of one life or of human history, is deeply related to music: The quest is lyrical, whether the subject is as specific as "the emanation of a dead star still alive" or as personal as the "pinhole iris of your mortal eye." "--

"From Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Maxine Kumin, a timeless memoir of life, love, and poetry. Maxine Kumin left an unrivaled legacy as a pioneering poet and feminist. The Pawnbroker's Daughter charts her journey from a childhood in the Jewish community in Depression-era Philadelphia, where Kumin's father was a pawnbroker, to Radcliffe College, where she comes into her own as an intellectual and meets the soldier-turned-Los Alamos scientist who would become her husband; to her metamorphosis from a poet of "light verse" to a "poet of witness"; to her farm in rural New England, the subject and setting of much of her later work. Against all odds, Kumin channels her dissatisfaction with the life that is expected of her as a wife and a mother into her work as a feminist and one of the most renowned and remembered twentieth-century American poets" --

"Marjorie Agosin's intensely personal long poem The Light of Desire is both a secular and sacred meditation on love and its meanings in the land of Israel. Following the tradition of the Song of Songs and the secular poetry of Sepharad, the beloved in The Light of Desire is both physical and metaphorical. The lovers' bodies are the paths, the geography, leading not only from desire to sensual pleasure, but to memory and illumination. The light on the pink stones of Jerusalem, the sunlight of Galilee, from hills to the sea, the fragrant air and "mantle of stars," all become one in this tender, rhapsodic expression of longing and desire. This is not unrequited love, but rather a reciprocal passion that brings exquisite pleasure, pain, a sense of fragility, and the hope and belief in that which is eternal."--Jacket.

Lisa Richter's Closer to Where We Began is a diverse collection of poetry that follows the speaker on a path of self-discovery. The collection navigates the tension between memory and imagination, between the personal and the political, and the primacy of sensual, sensory, lived experience. These dream-like poems not only concern themselves with the speaker, but with urban and natural environments, friends, family, and lovers, past and present. The poet explores overlapping/intersecting identities that shape and inform us, celebrating the importance of telling our stories as a means of bringing us closer to our authentic selves.

Poetry by famous actor/director of Star Trek, Leonard Nimoy (Spock).