Book by Pinsky, Robert

Freedom from Violence and Lies is a collection of forty-one essays by Simon Karlinsky (1924-2009), a prolific and controversial scholar of modern Russian literature, sexual politics, and music who taught in the University of California, Berkeley's Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures from 1964 to 1991. Among Karlinsky's full-length works are major studies of Marina Tsvetaeva and Nikolai Gogol, Russian Drama from Its Beginnings to the Age of Pushkin; editions of Anton Chekhov's letters; writings by Russian émigrés; and correspondence between Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson. Karlinsky also wrote frequently for professional journals and mainstream publications like the New York Times Book Review and the Nation. The present volume is the first collection of such shorter writings, spanning more than three decades. It includes twenty-seven essays on literary topics and fourteen on music, seven of which have been newly translated from the Russian originals.

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This is the first book of its kind. It contains some two hundred and fifty poems by the major English and American poets from Swinburne and Hopkins to Robert Lowell; each poem is a translation of imitation of a work in a foreign tongue. Twenty-two languages are represented in this glittering collection. They range from Hebrew and classical Greek to modern Chinese, from Polish to Korean. Yeats, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, W.H. Auden, Richard Wilbur, James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald are included--each a master in his own right, but seen here as the re-creator of another poet's voice. George Steiner believes that ours is the most beautiful period of poetic translation since the Elizabethans. Here is his evidence.--Cover

Poetry. Tom Mandel grew up in Chicago and was educated in its jazz and blues clubs and at the University of Chicago where he studied on the Committee on Social Thought with Hannah Arendt and Saul Bellow. He has lived in New York, Paris, San Francisco and Washington DC, and now resides in a small town on the Atlantic coast. He has taught at the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois and San Francisco State University (where he was director of the Poetry Center). Mandel was closely associated with the rise of Language Poetry during its formative years in the 1970s and 1980s. This is is his first new book since the mid-1990s.

Poetry. "The world, as refracted through the lens of Tom Mandel's poetry, takes on the singularity of a new kind of order. His voice is fresh, astringent and altogether compelling. He is a dynamic presence" -John Ashbery.

Poetry. ABSENCE SENSORIUM. "Tom Mandel and Daniel Davidson have done what two poets are not supposed to be able to do: they have jointly written a great long poem that is seamless, where you cannot tell where one leaves off and the other takes up. The whole is much more than the sum of the parts. Two enormous poetic talents and two richly imaginative perspectives on two lives combine to make a single magnificent poem, one that 'holds the night between two pale fingers'"-George Lakoff.

Tamara Kamenszain was born in Buenos Aires and is one of Argentina's leading poets and essayists. She is the author of eight collections of poetry as well as four essay collections. She was awarded a number of prizes, such as Primer Premio Municipal de Ensayo (First Municipal Prize) and Tercer Premio Nacional (First National Prize) for her essay collections,

"The Sky Is a Sky in the Sky is a laboratory of poetic approaches and experiments. It mines the personal and imaginary lives of Stuart Ross and portraits of his grief and internal torment, while paying homage to many of the poet’s literary heroes. It contains new entries in Ross’s ongoing Razovsky poems, prose poems, a remix of an entire poetry book by dear friend Nelson Ball, a couple of collaborative poems, some one-line poems, and lots more. In an era of thematic poetry and conceptual poetry books, this collection is a celebration of possibilities and miscellany."--

Shortlisted for the ReLit Award (2008)I Cut My Finger is Stuart Ross's first full-length poetry collection since his acclaimed Hey, Crumbling Balcony! Poems New & Selected (2003). The poems here show Ross's ever-expanding breadth, from his trademark humour and surrealism, to pointedly experimental works and poems of human anguish. Here, a poet includes a letter threatening suicide in his submission of poems to a literary journal; a businessman dons flippers to swim along the sidewalk to his downtown office; the U.S. military follows a trail of red ants to glacial redemption; the writer finds profound joy in a tower of canned niblets. But beneath the slapstick exterior of so many of Ross's poems there lurk dark threats and darker pleasures.Praise for I Cut My Finger:One of Eye's "Best Reviews of 2007""Taddle Creek Recommends" Pick (Summer 2007 issue)"... Now considered to be Canada's foremost writer of the surreal, Ross is enjoying some much-deserved recognition and has taken his place as one of the cool uncles of Canadian poetry ... Absurd, surprising, topical, surreal - his new work builds on the mythic significance and brilliance of several career-long metaphors and subjects." (The Globe and Mail)"It is surrealism at its best: written not to dispel the present but to reveal it." (Arc Poetry)"A damn-fine book in every sense of the word." (Taddle Creek)

Stuart Ross's sixth poetry collection is both an experimental departure for Ross and an offering of some of his most accurate surrealistic observations to date. Gathering into one volume three discrete poetry projects -- an absurdist Baedeker of image-driven prose poems about Managua accompanied by his original photos of decomposing cars, a formally various sequence of personal, narrative poems about the claustrophobic spaces and amorphous moods of hospitals, and a selection of cubist and abstract poems where Ross shows his experimental New York School cards like never before -- all of the poems in this book are touched by Ross's unique ability to dissolve our common-sense understanding of the world, and then distill a more potent truth from the remains of sense and reason.

"The poetry in this collection explores insights that paradoxes point to in our lives, as energizing antidotes to bland generalities. What's the present, when past and future erupt into it? Can truth be found among our very errors? Can we speak beyond the limits of language? Do we all live in the same world, if different animals see it differently? There are many sorts of poems here, about love, family, farming, war, nature ... seeking a wider view of life in our age."--

"'Pete's first poetry collection is a knockout. It reveals the same keen intelligence and wry perspective he showed in his 2 memoirs, with an eloquent, unique style that lays bare the universal in the deeply personal. He can add gifted poet to his already impressive resume.'--Bonnie Raitt. 'Peter Coyote's poems are every bit as wonderful as his memoirs, rich and lively, sweet and perplexed, full of sorrow and laughter, love and lovers, soul and bodies, Zen and wild mother nature, truth, hope, disappointment, resurrection; ie, Life with a capital L.'--Anne Lamott"--

Poetry. Infused with an eerily adept understanding of Latin American history and culture dating from the 15th century to modern times, their collective duende, REFLECTIONS IN A SMOKING MIRROR will come to stand as a monumental work and as a companion piece to the epic Gabriel García Márquez novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. This collection of poems takes on the true power of myth--Wayne Atherton. REFLECTIONS IN A SMOKING MIRROR tells the story of the fall of an ancient, vibrant civilization to Spain's conquistadors under Cortez. Pines's language is intelligent and refreshing, his ideas provocative, his images striking, and his narrative--however tragic--dramatically thrilling. This book is a smoking mirror--Maurice Kenny.