The poet writes, "In these poems I have been trying to speak from, and of, and to, my country. To speak a different claim from those staked by the patriots of the sword; to speak of the land itself, the cities, and of the imaginations that have dwelt here, at risk, unfree, assaulted, erased. I believe more than ever that the search for justice and compassion is the great wellspring for poetry in our time, throughout the world, though the theme of despair has been canonized in this century. I draw strength from the traditions of all those who, with every reason to despair, have refused to do so."--Back cover

Although remembered mostly for her audacious bestseller, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein was a unique literary artist of the twentieth century who left a voluminous body of work, including novels, essays, poetry, and prose. Stymied--just once--by a case of writer's block, Stein forayed into the world of mystery fiction to rediscover her path to creativity. Combining elements of free association and interior monologue that earned her reputation as an avant-garde stylist, Stein drew from a summer's worth of mysterious events at her French country home for inspiration. Blood on the Dining-Room Floor is the brilliant result. A possible murder disrupts the peaceful setting when, in a nearby village, Madame Pernollet is found on the cement courtyard of her husband's hotel. Did she fall from a window above . . . or was she pushed? Was there someone who wanted the preoccupied woman out of the way? In a departure from the typical whodunit, with nary a detective to lead the way, Stein lays out a series of crimes and clues, enticing readers to come up with their own verdict on the baffling events of one unnatural summer.

For thirty years, Rich's poetry has revealed the individual personal life—sexualities, loves, damages, struggles—as inseparable from a wider social condition, a world with others, in which the empowering of the disempowered is increasingly the source of human hope. Now her mature vision engages with the power of time itself: memory and its contradictions, the ebb and flow between parents and children, the deaths we all face sooner or later, the meaning of human responsibility in all this. "Letters in the Family," for example, is written in the voices of three women—from the Spanish Civil War, from a Jewish rescue mission behind Nazi lines, and from present-day Southern Africa. Time's Power shows Rich writing with unprecedented range, complexity, and authority.

"A play in poetry about the lives of five women who don't know one another, nor speak to each other. Rather they're telling their life stories to the audience. Each is facing some crisis in life. Erin speaks bitterly of suicide. Kate, near the end of a life in which she always overcame circumstances, is fearful of death. All the voices speak in counterpoint to one another, leaving an unspoken dialogue as they echo one another. The play moves in counterpoint and resonance until the women speak in chorus their voices exchanging scenes from a common history. Then each sees where her life has moved her. In the end these women's voices are no longer isolated, nor are their lives separate. Voices opened to great audience acclaim in New York City." --Descripción del editor.

"A wide-ranging anthology of ethnopoetry including origin texts, visionary texts, texts about death, texts about events--collected from Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe and the Ancient Near East, and Oceania."--Provided by publiher.

In this major new collection, John Hollander displays the elegance, versatility, and wit that mark him as perhaps the most urbane poet in America. "In Time and Place" features a generous offering of new verse, an extended prose piece, and a series of prose poems previously available only in a rare, privately published edition. The tightly rhymed quatrains of the new poems demonstrate once again the freedom Hollander achieves through mastery of form. The consummate control with which he writes in memoriam to a lost love and a time of absence gives him opportunities to move through dimensions most poets never see. His purgatorial mock-journal—dwelling on loss and gain, on difference and effacement, on places and the place of writing—leads into a sequence of captivating prose poems, where imagination centers on the word and language celebrates its own creation.

Poetry. "I am spending my 39th year practicing uncreativity. On Friday, September 1, 2000, I began retyping the day's NEW YORK TIMES word for word, letter for letter, from the upper left hand corner to the lower right hand corner, page by page." With these words, Kenneth Goldsmith embarked upon a project which he termed "uncreative writing", that is: uncreativity as a constraint-based process; uncreativity as a creative practice. By typing page upon page, making no distinction between article, editorial and advertisement, disregarding all typographic and graphical treatments, Goldsmith levels the daily newspaper. DAY is a monument to the ephemeral, comprised of yesterday's news, a fleeting moment concretized, captured, then reframed into the discourse of literature. "When I reach 40, I hope to have cleansed myself of all creativity"-Kenneth Goldsmith.

John Hollander's Blue Wine and Other Poems, his first collection of verse since the appearance of his new and selected poems, "Spectral Emanations," shows one of our best poetic craftsmen in America moving into a new phase in his distinguished career. Poems on painting and sculpture, in which Hollander examines the static/dynamic interaction of life and art, are balanced against a graceful lyric cycle, which is itself a commentary on the meaning of art songs. The longer poems in this volume―"Blue Wine," "Monuments," "The Train," and "Just for the Ride"―move beyond Hollander's unique blend of meditative elegance, closely observed detail, and learned wit. They explore even further the realms of mythological vision beyond the boundaries of easy irony. Of the title poem, "Blue Wine," Hollander writes, "I visited Saul Steinberg one afternoon and found that he had pasted some mock- (or rather, visionary) wine labels on bottles, which were then filled with a substance I could not identify. This poem is an attempt to make sense out of what was apparently in them."

Book by Levertov, Denise

In the sixty poems that comprise The Freeing of the Dust, Denise Levertov continued to explore the personal and public themes that threaded through her work during the disastrous American involvement in Indochina. Relations with family and close friends are depicted with unique poignancy as she pits the at times terrifying concrete image against her vision of the ideal. Here we have poems that speak out of the direct tragedy of war, the result of Ms. Levertov's visit to North Vietnam in the fall of 1972, while others reflect the anguish and the exultation of what she has called the 'inner/outer experience in America during the '60's and the beginning of the '70's.

Book by Levine, Philip

An illustrated collection of humorous poems about friends, family, and a variety of daily experiences.