Introduction by Harold Bloom.
“Botts is a celebrated and critically respected painter devoted to the American Sublime. These writings gathered from his journals and notes, attest that he is a remarkable poet as well.”
—Library Journal
Sources, Devin Johnston’s third book of poetry, returns ad fontes: to sources in Greek and Latin, secret derivations, wellsprings of feeling, and forces of nature. Sonically alert, these poems attend to the world with restless curiosity: “Pacing rugs/ or battered roads / we wait for what / we know we know.” Charged with expectation, they often take place on thresholds and sills, coming and going between house and street, private involutions and common life, past and present, human and animals, friends and strangers.
Shortlisted for a National Book Critics Circle Award
In Richard Howard’s new collection, voices of myth and memory prevail, if only by means of prevarication: the voice of Medea’s mother trying to explain her daughter’s odd behavior to an indiscreet interviewer; or first and last the voice of Henry James, late in life, faced with the disputed prospect of meeting L. Frank Baum and then, later on, “managing” not only Maeterlinck’s Blue Bird but his own unruly cast of characters, including Mrs. Wharton and young Hugh Walpole.
Richard Howard’s honors include the Pulitzer Prize, the PEN Medal for Translation, and grants from the Guggenheim and MacArthur foundations.
What It Is Like, Charles North’s tenth book of poems, contains new work as well as a generous selection from his previous books. North’s poetry has received high praise from a wide variety of aesthetic camps. Among his awards are a Foundation for Contemporary Arts grant, two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, four Fund for Poetry Awards and a Poets Foundation Award. Additionally, this book of poems was named one of the year’s best poetry books by National Public Radio.
“North is a younger compatriot of O’Hara and Ashbery, and his nonchalance aspiring to greatness finds the same ‘risks inside art’ that the other New York School poets found in the city. Juggling a satiric self-consciousness with a ‘strange mischief,’ North pulls death-defying propositions and playful mockeries from thin air.”
— Publishers Weekly
“The business of examining exactly what one means is central to North’s concept of the role of the poet, and he is especially alert to the way particulars and ideas interact in our constructions of meaning. The urge to hold out ‘particulars’ to the reader is mediated through an alert, sophisticated consciousness insistently aware of convention and genre.”
— Mark Ford
“The challenge of writing about the sensual qualities of New York City which seems so tired, by North’s pen becomes transcendent again. And that’s only one of the things his poetry accomplishes. He is witty when wit seems all but lost, gorgeous when gorgeousness is supposed to have crawled off to wherever Frank O’Hara’s odes come from.”
— Ange Mlinko
Selected for several year-end Top Ten Books of the Year
Richard Howard has written some fifteen books of poetry — “some” implying that those fifteen have been knotted and relaxed into several further collectanea, but the poet pledges, with Progressive Education, that this work is quite fresh and free-handed, an avouchment the more readily made since the new book’s contents involve the disciplines and exemptions, as well as the vocabulary and, of course, the dramatis personae, of his own schooling.
Things are falling apart in upstate New York’s Beardon County. Mysterious disappearances. Uncanny antigravity pockets. Repeat visitors from “beyond.” New York City’s not much better. Endless summer. An alarming uptick in the mortalities and syndromes. Open season for rabid foragers.
Widow’s Dozen, Marek Waldorf’s mind bending, genre blending short story collection, offers eleven coruscating stories from a past that never was to a future too late to forestall. Subtle lives – nostalgia lit, lovingly textured – bridge the currents in catastrophe from impossible to remote to inevitable.
A captivating vision of America’s dismembered states – how we got here, where we’re going – that is less science-fiction than future shock treatment.