Presents a complete collection of the poems written to date by the National Book Critics Circle Award and Griffin Poetry Prize finalist, in a volume that encompasses his nine anthologies as well as new and previously uncollected works.
From the winner of the PEN/Voelker Award, poems of love, terror, rage, and desire. Here I am, not a practical man, But clear-eyed in my contact lenses, Following no doubt a slightly different line than the others, Seeking sexual pleasure above all else, Despairing of art and of life, Seeking protection from death by seeking it On a racebike, finding release and belief on two wheels . . . --from "The Death of the Shah" The poems in Ooga-Booga are about a youthful slave owner and his aging slave, and both are the same man. This is the tenderest, most savage collection yet from Frederick Seidel, "the most frightening American poet ever" (Calvin Bedient, Boston Review).
By any measure, Gary Snyder is one of the greatest poets in America in the last century. From his first book of poems to his latest collection of essays, his work and his example, standing between Tu Fu and Thoreau, have been influential all over the world. Riprap, his first book of poems, was published in Japan in 1959 by Origin Press, and it is the fiftieth anniversary of that groundbreaking book we celebrate with this edition. A small press reprint of that book included Snyder's translations of Han Shan's Cold Mountain Poems, perhaps the finest translations of that remarkable poet ever made into English. Reintroducing one of the twentieth century's foremost collections of poetry, this edition will please those already familiar with this work and excite a new generation of readers with its profound simplicity and spare elegance.
An overview of Frederick Seidel's best and most famous poetry from the past five decades, showing the evolution of a master poet’s craft Frederick Seidel has been hailed as "the poet of a new contemporary form" (Dan Chiasson, The New York Review of Books) and "the most frightening American poet ever" (Calvin Bedient, Boston Review). The poems in Frederick Seidel Selected Poems span more than five decades and provide readers with some of Seidel's most powerful work. Frederick Seidel is, in the words of the critic Adam Kirsch, "the best American poet writing today."
“One of the world’s most inspired and unusual poets . . . [Seidel’s] poems are a triumph of cosmic awe in the face of earthly terror.” —Hillel Italie, USA Today Frederick Seidel has been called many things. A “transgressive adventurer,” “a demonic gentleman,” a “triumphant outsider,” “a great poet of innocence,” and “an example of the dangerous Male of the Species,” just to name a few. Whatever you choose to call him, one thing is certain: “he radiates heat” (The New Yorker). Now add to that: the poet of aging and decrepitude. Widening Income Inequality, Seidel’s new poetry collection, is a rhymed magnificence of sexual, historical, and cultural exuberance, a sweet and bitter fever of Robespierre and Obamacare and Apollinaire, of John F. Kennedy and jihadi terror and New York City and Italian motorcycles. Rarely has poetry been this true, this dapper, or this dire. Seidel is “the most poetic of the poets and their leader into hell.”
Until the late 1970s, W. D. Snodgrass was known primarily as a confessional poet and a key player in the emergence of that mode of poetry in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Snodgrass makes poetry out of the daily neuroses and everyday failures of a man—a husband, father, and teacher. This domestic suffering occurs against a backdrop of more universal suffering which Snodgrass believes is inherent in the human experience. Not for Specialists includes 35 new poems complemented by the superb work he wrote in the Pulitzer Prize winning collection, Heart’s Needle, along with poetry from seven other distinguished collections. from “Nocturnes” Seen from higher up, it makes its first move in the low creekbed, the marshlands down the valley, spreading across the open hayfields, the hedgerows with their tops still lit, laps the roadbed, flows over lawns and gardens, past the house and up the wooded hillside back behind us till only some few rays still scythe between the treetrunks from the far horizon and are gone. W. D. Snodgrass, born in Pennsylvania in 1926, is the author of more than 20 books of poetry, including The Fuehrer Bunker: The Complete Cycle (BOA, 1995); Each in His Season (BOA, 1993); and Heart's Needle (1959), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His other books include To Sound Like Yourself: Essays on Poetry (BOA, 2002), After-Images: Autobiographical Sketches (BOA, 1999) and six volumes of translation, including Selected Translations (BOA Editions, 1998), which won the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award.