Bøker i New California Poetry-serien

Geoffrey G. O'Brien's third collection opens with a set of lyric experiments whose music and mutable syntax explore the social relations concealed in material things. O'Brien's poems measure the "e;vague cadence"e; of daily life, testing both the value and limits of art in a time of vanishing publics and permanent war. The long title poem, written in a strict iambic prose, charts the disappearance of the poetic into the prosaic, of meter into the mundane, while reactivating the very possibilities it mourns: O'Brien's prosody invests the prose of things with the intensities of verse. In the charged space of this hybrid form, objects become subjects and sense pivots mid-sentence into song: "e;The sun revolves around the earth revolves around the sun."e;

These poems are about gardens, particularly the seventeenth-century French baroque gardens designed by the father of the form, Andre Le Notre. While the poems focus on such examples as Versailles, which Le Notre created for Louis XIV, they also explore the garden as metaphor. Using the imagery of the garden, Cole Swensen considers everything from human society to the formal structure of poetry. She looks in particular at the concept of public versus private property, asking who actually owns a garden? A gentle irony accompanies the question because in French, the phrase "e;le notre"e; means "e;ours."e; Whereas all of Le Notre's gardens were designed and built for the aristocracy, today most are public parks. Swensen probes the two senses of "e;le notre"e; to discover where they intersect, overlap, or blur.

An exploration of the rhythms and forms of memory. It is set in the border regions between natural and cultivated states, childhood and adulthood, past and present.

The poems in Writing the Silences represent more than 60 years of Richard O. Moore's work as a poet. Selected from seven full-length manuscripts written between 1946 and 2008, these poems reflect not only Moore's place in literary history-he is the last of his generation of the legendary group of San Francisco Renaissance poets-but also his reemergence into today's literary world after an important career as a filmmaker and producer in public radio and television. Writing the Silences reflects Moore's commitment to freedom of form, his interest in language itself, and his dedication to issues of social justice and ecology.

Internationally recognized as one of the most innovative writers in America today, Leslie Scalapino persistently challenges the boundaries of many forms in which she works-poetry, prose, plays, and more. This outstanding volume includes work from sequential and serial poems written over thirty-two years. The poems demonstrate ideas and inventions in writing, and how one writing invention leads to the next. Three series are selected from the long poem way, about which Philip Whalen said, "e;She makes everything take place in real time, in the light and air and night where all of us live, everything happening at once."e; Recent poems, such as those from "e;DeLay Rose,"e; appear to leave the page itself as a single infinite line in which the actions of individuals and occurrences in the outside world are synonymous, mysterious, and simultaneous. It's go in horizontal is a dazzling entryway into the oeuvre of a daring and powerful writer.

This collection of new poems by one of the most respected poets in the United States uses motifs of advance and recovery, doubt and conviction-in an emotional relation to the known world. Heralded as "e;one of our most vital, unclassifiable writers"e; by the Voice Literary Supplement, Fanny Howe has published more than twenty books and is the recipient of the Gold Medal for Poetry from the Commonwealth Club of California. In addition, her Selected Poems received the 2001 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for the Most Outstanding Book of Poetry Published in 2000 from the Academy of American Poets.The poems in Gone describe the transit of a psyche, driven by uncertainty and by love, through various stations and experiences. This volume of short poems and one lyrical essay, all written in the last five years, is broken into five parts; and the longest of these, "e;The Passion,"e; consecrates the contradictions between these two emotions. The New York Times Book Review said, "e;Howe has made a long-term project of trying to determine how we fit into God's world, and her aim is both true and marvelously free of sentimental piety."e; With Gone, readers will have the opportunity to experience firsthand Howe's continuation of that elusive and fascinating endeavor.

Myung Mi Kim's Commons weighs on the most sensitive of scales the minute grains of daily life in both peace and war, registering as very few works of literature have done our common burden of being subject to history. Abstracting colonization, war, immigration, disease, and first-language loss until only sparse phrases remain, Kim takes on the anguish and displacement of those whose lives are embedded in history.Kim's blank spaces are loaded silences: openings through which readers enter the text and find their way. These silences reveal gaps in memory and articulate experiences that will not translate into language at all. Her words retrieve the past in much the same way the human mind does: an image sparks another image, a scent, the sound of bombs, or conversation. These silences and pauses give the poems their structure.Commons's fragmented lyric pushes the reader to question the construction of the poem. Identity surfaces, sinks back, then rises again. On this shifting ground, Kim creates meaning through juxtaposed fragments. Her verse, with its stops and starts, its austere yet rich images, offers splinters of testimony and objection. It negotiates a constantly changing world, scavenging through scraps of experience, spaces around words, and remnants of emotion for a language that enfolds the enormity of what we cannot express.

Engages the traditional resources of lyric poetry in an exploration of historical and cultural landscapes ravaged by imponderable events. This book sifts the psychological residue that accumulates in the wake of unspeakable acts and so negotiates that terrain between the banality of language and the need to stand witness and to speak.

"e;Ghosts appear in place of whatever a given people will not face"e; (p. 65)The poems in Gravesend explore ghosts as instances of collective grief and guilt, as cultural constructs evolved to elide or to absorb a given society's actions, as well as, at times, to fill the gaps between such actions and the desires and intentions of its individual citizens. Tracing the changing nature of the ghostly in the western world from antiquity to today, the collection focuses particularly on the ghosts created by the European expansion of the 16th through 20th centuries, using the town of Gravesend, the seaport at the mouth of the Thames through which countless emigrants passed, as an emblem of theambiguous threshold between one life and another, in all the many meanings of that phrase.

Part planetary love poem, part 24/7 news flash, the hypnotic poems of This Connection of Everyone with Lungs wrap with equal, angular grace around lovers and battleships. These poems hear the tracer fire in a bird's song and capture cell division and troop deployments in the same expansive thought. They move through concentric levels of association and embrace -from the space between the hands to the mesosphere and back again-touching everything in between. The book's focus shifts between local and global, public and private, individual and social. Everything gets in: through all five senses, through windows, between your sheets, under your skin.

Dark archive: The purpose of a dark archive is to function as a repository for information that can be used as a failsafe during disaster recovery.Laura Mullen's fourth collection is a sequence of beautifully interrelated poems that explores how to accurately represent the reality of change and loss. Mullen pinpoints what is at stake: the possibility of communication and connection-and the hope of intimacy. Invoking Wordsworth's "e;I wandered lonely as a cloud,"e; she pushes experiments in consciousness against their boundaries in an array of poetic forms. Poetic tropes are measured against natural phenomena as Mullen examines what "e;witness"e; might mean in the context of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the failures of capitalism to effect social justice, the murder of James Byrd in Texas, the personal loss of a mother figure, and a disintegrating love affair.

Srikanth Reddy's second book of poetry probes this world's cosmological relation to the plurality of all possible worlds. Drawing its name from the spacecraft currently departing our solar system on an embassy to the beyond, Voyager unfolds as three books within a book and culminates in a chilling Dantean allegory of leadership and its failure in the cause of humanity. At the heart of this volume lies the historical figure of Kurt Waldheim-Secretary-General of the U.N. from 1972-81 and former intelligence officer in Hitler's Wehrmacht-who once served as a spokesman for humanity while remaining silent about his role in the collective atrocities of our era. Resurrecting this complex figure, Reddy's universal voyager explores the garden of forking paths hidden within every totalizing dream of identity.

Presents a selection of poems. This book includes peoms in which the theme is the exile of the spirit in this world and the painfully exciting, tiny margin in which movement out of exile is imaginable and perhaps possible. It protests against the difficulty of salvation.

Green is the Orator follows on Sarah Gridley's brilliant first collection, Weather Eye Open, in addressing the challenge of representing nature through language. Gridley's deftly original syntax arises from direct experience of the natural world and from encounters with other texts, including the Egyptian "e;Book of the Dead"e; and the writings of Charles Darwin, Peter Mark Roget, William Morris, William James, and Henri Bergson. Gridley's own idiom is compressed, original, and full of unexpected pleasures. This unusual book, at once austere and full of life, reflects a penetrating mind at work-one that is thinking through and re-presenting romantic and modernist traditions of nature.

This compelling selection of recent work by internationally celebrated poet Keith Waldrop presents three related poem sequences-"e;Shipwreck in Haven,"e; "e;Falling in Love through a Description,"e; and "e;The Plummet of Vitruvius"e;-in a virtuosic poetic triptych. In these quasi-abstract, experimental lines, collaged words torn from their contexts take on new meanings. Waldrop, a longtime admirer of such artists as the French poet Raymond Queneau and the American painter Robert Motherwell, imposes a tonal override on purloined materials, yet the originals continue to show through. These powerful poems, at once metaphysical and personal, reconcile Waldrop's romantic tendencies with formal experimentation, uniting poetry and philosophy and revealing him as a transcendentalist for the new millennium.

Between the Age of Innocence and the Age of Experience comes The Age of Huts. This book brings together for the first time all of the poems in Ron Silliman's Age of Huts cycle, including Ketjak, Sunset Debris, The Chinese Notebook, and 2197, as well as two key satellite texts, Sitting Up, Standing, Taking Steps, and BART. Each poem offers a radically different approach toward using language to explore the world. One of the founding works of Language Poetry, The Age of Huts is about everything, more or less literally, as each sentence, even each phrase, embarks on its own narrative, linking together to form a large polyphonic investigation of contemporary life. From Ketjak, one of the first poems to employ "e;the new sentence,"e; to 2197, a serial work that scrambles the vocabulary and grammar of its sentences, The Age of Huts questions everything we have known about poetry in order to see the world anew.

Drawing on four decades of work and including new poems published here for the first time, this selection of Mei-mei Berssenbrugge's poetry displays the extraordinary luminosity characteristic of her style-its delicate, meticulous observation, great scenic imagination, and unusual degree of comfort with states of indetermination, contingency, and flux.

Harryette Mullen's fifth poetry collection, Sleeping with the Dictionary, is the abecedarian offspring of her collaboration with two of the poet's most seductive writing partners, Roget's Thesaurus and The American Heritage Dictionary. In her menage a trois with these faithful companions, the poet is aware that while Roget seems obsessed with categories and hierarchies, the American Heritage, whatever its faults, was compiled with the assistance of a democratic usage panel that included black poets Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps, as well as feminist author and editor Gloria Steinem. With its arbitrary yet determinant alphabetical arrangement, its gleeful pursuit of the ludic pleasure of word games (acrostic, anagram, homophone, parody, pun), as well as its reflections on the politics of language and dialect, Mullen's work is serious play. A number of the poems are inspired or influenced by a technique of the international literary avant-garde group Oulipo, a dictionary game called S+7 or N+7. This method of textual transformation--which is used to compose nonsensical travesties reminiscent of Lewis Carroll's "e;Jabberwocky"e;--also creates a kind of automatic poetic discourse.Mullen's parodies reconceive the African American's relation to the English language and Anglophone writing, through textual reproduction, recombining the genetic structure of texts from the Shakespearean sonnet and the fairy tale to airline safety instructions and unsolicited mail. The poet admits to being "e;licked all over by the English tongue,"e; and the title of this book may remind readers that an intimate partner who also gives language lessons is called, euphemistically, a "e;pillow dictionary."e;