<P>Afzal Ahmed Syed holds a unique place among contemporary poets of the Urdu language, as an acknowledged master of both the classical and modern Urdu poetic forms. The poems in Rococo and Other Worlds explore the mythology and historical realities of South Asia and the Middle East; their bold imagery creates narratives of voluptuous perfection, which remain inseparable from the political realities that Syed witnessed as a young o ...
<P>Rae Armantrout's poetry comprises one of the most refined and visionary bodies of work written over the last forty years. These potent, compact meditations on our complicated times reveal her observant sensibility, lively intellect, and emotional complexity. This generous volume charts the evolution of Armantrout's mature, stylistically distinct work. In addition to 25 new poems, there are selections from her books Up ...
<P><B>Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (2010)</B><BR><B>Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award (2009)</B></P><P>Rae Armantrout has always organized her collections of poetry as though they were works in themselves. Versed brings two of these sequences together, offering readers an expanded view of the arc of her writin ...
<P>The distinguished poet Harvey Shapiro passed away on January 7, 2013. The poems in this book, many of them previously unpublished and discovered only after his death, are a great gift, and the final confirmation of his extraordinary talent. Edited by Shapiro's literary executor, the poet and critic Norman Finkelstein, these last poems bear an unprecedented gravitas, and yet they are as supple, jazzy, and edgy as Shapiro&apo ...
<P>What do «self» and «it» have in common? In Rae Armantrout's new poems, there is no inert substance. Self and it (word and particle) are ritual and rigmarole, song-and-dance and long distance call into whatever dark matter might exist. How could a self not be selfish? Armantrout accesses the strangeness of everyday occurrence with wit, sensuality, and an eye alert to underlying trauma, as in the poem «Price Points» where a m ...
<P><B>Winner of the Nebraska Book Award for Poetry (2002)</B></P><P>This elegant and moving collection documents Hilda Raz's experience with breast cancer. The journey, from diagnosis to chemotherapy to mastectomy, from denial to humor to grief and rage, is ultimately one of courage and creativity. The poems themselves are accessible and finely wrought. They are equally t ...
<P><B>Winner of the Griffin Poetry Trust's International Poetry Prize (2014)</B><BR><B>Runner-up for the Northern California Book Reviewers Northern California Book Award (2014)</B></P><P>Fire— its physical, symbolic, political, and spiritual forms—is the fourth and final subject in Brenda Hillman's masterful series on the el ...