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No art has been denounced as often as poetry. It’s even bemoaned by poets: “I, too, dislike it,” wrote Marianne Moore.
“Many more people agree they hate poetry,” Ben Lerner writes, “than can agree what poetry is. I, too, dislike it and have largely organized my life around it and do not experience that as a contradiction because poetry and the hatred of poetry are inextricable in ways it is my purpose to explore.”
In this inventive and lucid essay, Lerner takes the hatred of poetry as the starting point of his defense of the art. He examines poetry’s greatest haters (beginning with Plato‘s famous claim that an ideal city had no place for poets, who would only corrupt and mislead the young) and both its greatest and worst practitioners, providing inspired close readings of Keats, Dickinson, McGonagall, Whitman, and others.
Throughout, he attempts to explain the noble failure at the heart of every truly great and truly horrible poem: the impulse to launch the experience of an individual into a timeless communal existence. In The Hatred of Poetry, Lerner has crafted an entertaining, personal, and entirely original examination of a vocation no less essential for being impossible.
Ben Lerner was born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1979. He has received fellowships from the Fulbright, Guggenheim, Howard, and MacArthur Foundations. His first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, won the 2012 Believer Book Award, and excerpts from 10:04 have been awarded The Paris Review’s Terry Southern Prize. He has published three poetry collections: The Lichtenberg Figures, Angle of Yaw (a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry),and Mean Free Path. Lerner is a professor of English at Brooklyn College.
The Hatred of Poetry
by Ben Lerner
Publisher: FSG Originals
First Edition (June 7, 2016)
Language : English
Paperback
96 pages
ISBN-10 : 0865478201
ISBN-13 : 978-0865478206
$ 8.99
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Award-winning poet Maya C. Popa suggests that our restless desires are inseparable from our mortality in this pressing and precise collection.
Rooting out profound meaning in language to wrench us from the moorings of the familiar and into the realm of the extraordinary, the volume asks, how do we articulate what’s by definition inarticulable? Where does sight end and imagination begin?
Lucid and musically rich, these poems sound an appeal to a dwindling natural world and summon moments from the lives of literary forbearers—John Milton’s visit to Galileo, a vase broken by Marcel Proust—to unveil fresh wonder in the unlikely meetings of the past. Popa dramatizes the difficulties of loving a world that is at once rich with beauty and full of opportunities for grief, and reveals that the natural arc of wonder, from astonishment to reflection, more deeply connects us with our humanity.
Maya C. Popa is the author of American Faith, recipient of the 2020 North American Book Prize. Her poems have appeared in the Nation, Poetry, and the Paris Review, among other publications. She lives in New York City.
Wound Is the Origin of Wonder
by Maya C. Popa
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (November 8, 2022)
Language: English
Hardcover: 96 pages
ISBN-10: 1324021365
ISBN-13: 978-1324021360
Price $26.95
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A fascinating blend of poetry and science, Ben-Oni’s poems are precisely crafted, like a surgeon sewing a complicated stitch, moving through the multiverses of family, religion and discovery itself.
The book culminates in an ancient Jewish Idea about “Efes,” which is Modern Hebrew for “zero” but also in mystical texts, means “nullification” and “concealment.”
Ultimately, Efes becomes a process of transformation for the speaker, revealing as well that the closer humanity gets to understanding this mysterious force, it inevitably changes the riddle– and us along with it.
Rosebud Ben-Oni
is the winner of the 2019 Alice James Award for If This Is the Age We End Discovery, forthcoming in 2021, and the author of turn around, BRXGHT XYXS (Get Fresh Books, 2019).
She is a recipient of fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) and CantoMundo. Her work appears in POETRY, The American Poetry Review, POETS.org, The Poetry Review (UK), Tin House, Guernica, Black Warrior Review, Prairie Schooner, Electric Literature, TriQuarterly, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Journal ,Hunger Mountain, The Adroit Journal, The Southeast Review, North American Review, Salamander, Poetry Northwest, among others.
Her poem “Poet Wrestling with Angels in the Dark” was commissioned by the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in New York City, and published by The Kenyon Review Online. Rosebud Ben-Oni writes for The Kenyon Review blog. She is currently editing a special chemistry poetry portfolio for Pleiades, and is finishing a series called The Atomic Sonnets, in honor of the Periodic Table’s 150th Birthday. Find her at 7TrainLove.org
If This Is the Age We End Discovery
by Rosebud Ben-Oni
Publisher: Alice James Books (March 9, 2021)
Language: English
Poetry
Paperback: 100 pages
ISBN-10 : 1948579154
ISBN-13 : 978-1948579155
$14.89
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Gustave Roud, perhaps the most beloved poet of Swiss Romandy, is widely considered the founder of modern francophone Swiss literature, along with Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz.
Roud lived at his grandfather’s farm in Carrouge, Canton Vaud, for his entire life. In Air of Solitude, the first section of this two-part book, he stalks the structures and fields of his youth, composing memories out of his landscape.
The narrator appears homegrown, expressing nostalgia for what is already in front of him. Yet, like an outsider, he remains distinctly elsewhere, unable to participate in the workday rituals of the men around him—a stalking shadow of unfulfilled yearning for affection and belonging. Air of Solitude explores the rural bodies and lives of the Vaudois, returning again and again to the desired male laborer Aimé.
Between each section of Air of Solitude, Roud inserts short vignettes that provide fleeting and lyrical images that resemble allusions to half-forgotten memories. However, Roud leaves the relationship between the titled sections and the interludes ambiguous.
As the book concludes with Requiem, the remnants of narrative shatter, leaving behind only the spectral tatters of memory as Roud confronts the enigma of loss in peerless, jewel-studded elegiac prose. With these two tales, Roud revives the pastoral tradition and injects it with distinctly modernist anxiety and disillusionment.
‘Gustave Roud made all of French-speaking Switzerland dream poetically upon itself, the land that welcomed European Romanticism from Rousseau to Byron, from Lamartine to Shelley. His poetry could seem idyllic, sustained by an ethereal figure of constantly conflicted desires (more or less unspeakable, always displayed), and a moral, sacrificial figure inspired, above all, by Novalis and Hölderlin.’—Antonio Rodriguez, University of Lausanne
Gustave Roud (1897–1976) was a major Swiss poet and photographer whose neoromantic poetic prose influenced a generation of poets including Maurice Chappaz and Philippe Jaccottet. His works include Ecrits (1950) and Campagne perdue (1972). He also translated German writers including Rilke, Hölderlin and Novalis.
Gustave Roud
‘Air of Solitude’ Followed by ‘Requiem’
Translated by Alexander Dickow and Sean T. Reynolds
ISBN: 9780857426871
Pages: 172
Rights: UCP
Publication Year: 2020
Format: Hardback
Size: 5″ x 8″
Publisher: Seagull Books
£16.99
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The Golden Horde is a definitive work on the Italian revolutionary movements of the 1960s and ’70s.
An anthology of texts and fragments woven together with an original commentary, the volume widens our understanding of the full complexity and richness of this period of radical thought and practice.
The book covers the generational turbulence of Italy’s postwar period, the transformations of Italian capitalism, the new analyses by worker-focused intellectuals, the student movement of 1968, the Hot Autumn of 1969, the extra-parliamentary groups of the early 1970s, the Red Brigades, the formation of a radical women’s movement, the development of Autonomia, and the build-up to the watershed moment of the spontaneous political movement of 1977.
Far from being merely a handbook of political history, The Golden Horde also sheds light on two decades of Italian culture, including the newspapers, songs, journals, festivals, comics, and philosophy that these movements produced.
The book features writings by Sergio Bologna, Umberto Eco, Elvio Fachinelli, Lea Melandri, Danilo Montaldi, Toni Negri, Raniero Panzieri, Franco Piperno, Rossana Rossanda, Paolo Virno, and others, as well as an in-depth introduction by translator Richard Braude outlining the work’s composition and development.
Nanni Balestrini (1935–2019) was an Italian poet, experimental writer, visual artist and founding member of both the avant-garde Gruppo ’63 and the revolutionary organization Potere Operio.
Primo Moroni (1936–1998) was an Italian writer, activist and archivist. Founder of the Calusca bookshop in Milan, for decades he was a point of reference for radical movements and subcultures across Italy.
Richard Braude lives in Palermo, Italy. His translations include works by Nanni Balestrini, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Antonio Negri and Rossana Rossanda.
The Golden Horde
Revolutionary Italy, 1960–1977
by Nanni Balestrini and Primo Moroni
Translated by Richard Braude
ISBN: 9780857427465
Pages: 690
Publication Year: May 2021
Size: 6″ x 9″
Format: Hardback
Publisher: Seagull Books
£35
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Geluksvogels bevat een keuze uit Luigi Pirandello’s Novellen voor een jaar, in een blinkend nieuwe vertaling van Yond Boeke en Patty Krone.
Pirandello schreef deze opmerkelijk hoogwaardige verzameling verhalen tussen 1894 en 1936. Zijn dood belette hem het project – één novelle voor elke dag van het jaar – te voltooien.
De diversiteit van zijn verhalen, die getuigen van groot psychologisch inzicht, een buitengewoon scherp gevoel voor humor en immens mededogen, is exemplarisch voor Pirandello’s enorme veelzijdigheid als schrijver.
Hij voert een breed scala aan markante personages ten tonele: van arme Siciliaanse boeren die tevergeefs strijden tegen de clerus tot wufte stedelingen die verstrikt raken in hun eigen overspel, van een wanhopige patiënt die in een New Yorks ziekenhuis uit het raam springt tot een geëxalteerde actrice die het moet opnemen tegen een vleermuis.
Pirandello laveert virtuoos tussen vlotte dialogen, van weemoed doortrokken landschapsbeschrijvingen en filosofische bespiegelingen over het aardse bestaan. Sommige verhalen blijken ook nu nog verrassend actueel.
Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936), geboren in een gegoede familie op Sicilië, kreeg in 1934 de Nobelprijs voor de Literatuur. De verfilming van zijn verhalen door Paolo en Vittorio Taviani, Kaos, werd wereldberoemd.
Geluksvogels
Novellen
Door Luigi Pirandello
Uitgeverij Van Oorschot
2022
Gebonden
832 pagina’s
ISBN 9789028213142
Prijs: € 45,00
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To create the poems in this collection, Nobel Prize–winner Herta Müller cut up countless newspapers and magazines in search of striking phrases, words, or even fragments of words, which she then arranged in a the form of a collage.
Father’s on the Phone with the Flies presents 73 of Müller’s collage poems for the first time in English translation, alongside full-colour reproductions of the originals.
Müller takes full advantage of the collage form, generating poems rich in wordplay, ambiguity and startling, surreal metaphors—the disruption and dislocation at their core rendered visible through stark contrasts in colour, font and type size.
Liberating words from conformity and coercion, Müller renders them fresh and invests them forcefully with personal experience.
Herta Müller was born in a German-speaking community in western Romania in 1953. She published her first collection of short stories in 1982. In 1987, she left Romania for West Berlin, where she continued to write and publish. She has been awarded numerous prizes, including the 2009 Nobel Prize for Literature.
Herta Müller
Father’s on the Phone with the Flies
A Selection
Translated by Thomas Cooper
ISBN: 9781803090450
Pages: 200 pages
73 colour plates
Publication Year: 2022
Format: Paperback
Size: 5 x 8
Rights: UCP
Series: The Seagull Library of German Literature
Category: Poetry
£11.99
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To live in an Alaska of the mind is to map the imagined cartography of winter on all that is physical.
To dwell perpetually in a symbolic cold, and to emerge, with grace, unscathed. This book questions what it means to live and love in such a buried season.
This Alaska interrogates all that emotional and physical intimacy cannot salvage or keep warm. Death and dreams are at the very center of this book. But life — and all it entails and circles and loses and loves — is at its heart.
Carlie Hoffman is a poet and translator from New Jersey. Her honors include a 92Y Discovery Prize and a Poets & Writers Amy Award. She is the founder and editor-in-chief of Small Orange Journal. This Alaska is her first book. She lives in New York City.
This Alaska
by Carlie Hoffman
Publisher: Four Way Books
15 september 2021
Poetry
English
Paperback
76 pages
ISBN-10: 1945588926
ISBN-13: 978-1945588921
€ 21,36
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Widely considered to be among the most important Italian poets of the twentieth century, Sandro Penna was born and raised in Perugia but spent most of his life in Rome.
Openly gay, Penna wrote verses celebrating homosexual love with lyrical elegance.
His writing alternates between whimsy and melancholia, but it is always full of light.
Juggling traditional Italian prosody and subject matter with their gritty urban opposites in taut, highly concentrated poems, Penna’s lyrics revel in love and the eruption of Eros together with the extraordinary that can be found within simple everyday life.
There is something ancient in Penna’s poetry, and something Etruscan or Greek about the poems, though the landscape is most often of Rome: sensual yet severe, sinuous yet solid, inscrutable, intangible and languorous, with a Sphinx-like and sun-soaked smile.
Penna’s city is eternal—a mythically decadent Rome that brings to mind Paris or Alexandria. And though the echoes resound—from Rimbaud, Verlaine, Baudelaire to Leopardi, D’Annunzio, Cavafy—the voice is always undeniably and wonderfully Penna’s own.
Sandro Penna (1906–77) was an Italian poet. During his life, he was awarded two of Italy’s most important literary awards, the Premio Viareggio and the Premio Bagutta. His work has been translated into many languages, including English, French, German, Japanese, and Spanish, and has appeared in numerous anthologies of Italian poetry.
Alexander Booth is a writer and translator and the recipient of a 2012 PEN Translation Fund grant for his translations of Lutz Seiler.
Sandro Penna
Within the Sweet Noise of Life
Selected Poems
Translated by Alexander Booth
ISBN: 9780857427878
Format: Hardback
Pages: 96
Rights: UCP
Publication Year: March 2021
Size: 5″ x 8.5″
Publisher: Seagull Books
$19.00
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The definitive edition of selected work from a poet whose influence continues to be widely felt today, introduced by Natasha Trethewey
Engaging closely with the violence, oppression, and injustice that she witnessed in her lifetime, Muriel Rukeyser was one of the seminal poets of the mid-twentieth century.
Closely informed by issues relating to equality, social justice, feminism, and Judaism, her impassioned poetry was often seen as a mode of social protest, but it was also heralded for its deep emotional impact; its personal perspective; forthright discussion of the female experience, particularly sex and single parenthood at a time when these topics were largely taboo; and its wide-ranging exploration of genre and form.
As Adrienne Rich wrote: “Muriel Rukeyser’s poetry is unequalled in the twentieth-century United States…She pushes us…to enlarge our sense of what poetry is about in the world, and of the place of feelings and memory in politics.”
The Essential Muriel Rukeyser represents the curation of Rukeyser’s most enduring and urgent work, gathered in one volume that spans the many decades of her life and career, and with an introduction from Natasha Trethewey, one of our most important contemporary poets.
‘This posthumous collection affirms Rukeyser’s importance as a poet of witness.’ — New York Times
The Essential Muriel Rukeyser
Poems
By Muriel Rukeyser
Foreword by Natasha Trethewey
ISBN: 9780062985491
ISBN 10: 0062985493
Imprint: Ecco
2021
Trimsize: 6x7in
Pages: 224 pages
$16.99
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Austrian poet and playwright Ernst Jandl died in 2000, leaving behind his partner, poet Friederike Mayröcker—and bringing to an end a half century of shared life, and shared literary work. Mayröcker immediately began attempting to come to terms with his death in the way that poets struggling with loss have done for millennia: by writing.
Requiem for Ernst Jandl is the powerfully moving outcome.
In this quiet but passionate lament that grows into a song of enthralling intensity, Mayröcker recalls memories and shared experiences, and—with the sudden, piercing perception of regrets that often accompany grief—reads Jandl’s works in a new light.
Alarmed by a sudden, existential emptiness, she reflects on the future, and the possibility of going on with her life and work in the absence of the person who, as we see in this elegy, was a constant conversational and creative partner.
Friederike Mayröcker (1924–2021) was one of the most important Austrian poets of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. She published over eighty works, including poetry, prose, radio plays and children’s books. Her work has been honoured with many prizes, including the Georg Büchner Prize and the Peter Huchel Prize. She lived in Vienna.
#new books
Requiem for Ernst Jandl
by Friederike Mayröcker
Translated by Roslyn Theobald
ISBN: 9781803090429
Pages: 96
Rights: UCP
Publication Year: 2022
Format: Paperback
Size: 5″ x 8″
Series: The Seagull Library of German Literature
Category: Poetry
£7.99
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From award-winning writer and journalist Felicity McLean comes Red, a spirited and striking contemporary retelling of the Ned Kelly story
It’s the early 1990s and Ruby ‘Red’ McCoy dreams about one day leaving her weatherboard house on the Central Coast of New South Wales, where her best friend, Stevie, is loose with the truth, and her dad, Sid, is always on the wrong side of the law.
But wild, whip-smart Red can’t stay out of trouble to save her life, and Sid’s latest hustle is more harebrained than usual.
Meanwhile, Sergeant Trevor Healy seems to have a vendetta against every generation of the McCoys.
Told in Ruby’s vivid, inimitable voice, Red is part True Grit, part Blue Murder. It’s a story of police persecution. Of dodgy deals and even dodgier cars.
And of a family history that refuses to stay in the past. A sharp, provocative and savagely funny novel.
Felicity McLean’s debut novel, The Van Apfel Girls are Gone, has been published in more than half a dozen countries. It was a Barnes & Noble ‘Discover Great New Writers’ pick in the US, and was shortlisted for the Indie Book Awards, and longlisted for the UK’s Dagger Awards, and the Davitt. Her book, Body Lengths, co-written with Olympian Leisel Jones, was Apple Books ‘Best Biography of 2015’ and won the 2016 Australian Book Industry Awards ‘Reader’s Choice’ for Small Publisher Adult Book of the Year.
# new book
Red
by Felicity McLean
Novel
Format: Paperback
Language: English
Number Of Pages: 256
Published: 18th May 2022
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
ISBN: 9781460755099
ISBN-10: 146075509X
$21.22
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