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The one-eyed singer, songwriter, and knight errant Oswald von Wolkenstein (surnameliterally "Cloud-Stone") was among the last of the great troubadours. A contemporaryof Villon, versed in Petrarch, and a Knight of the Holy Sepulchre, Wolkenstein was lostto history until scholarship in the 1970s recognized him as the German language's firstgenuinely autobiographical lyric voice. In the hands of the magician-translator RichardSieburth, working in the spirited tradition of Ezra Pound and Paul Blackburn, Wolkenstein's verse rises from the page like a medieval Bob Dylan. Facsimiles of Wolkenstein'smusical compositions are included.

The two sequences of this book form a braided ars poetica: "Killing Plato" and "Writing." The first is a numbered sequence of twenty-eight poems organized around an accident: a pedestrian has been hit by a truck and is dying in the middle of the road. Various characters appear-the philosopher Michel Serres, Robert Musil, a woman smoothing out her stocking, the truck driver, a boy on a balcony, the Spanish poet Jesús Aguado. At the bottom of the page another tale unfolds: a woman bumps into an old friend, a male poet who has written a book called Killing Plato about "a woman who has been knocked over by the force of a sound." "Writing," the second part, unfolds as a lyrical meditation on mortality and literary production.

One morning, Takahashi, a writer who has just stayed up all night working, is interrupted by a phone call from his old friend Sonomura: barely able to contain his excitement, Sonomura claims that he has cracked a secret cryptographic code based on Edgar Allan Poe's The Gold-Bug and now knows exactly when and where a murder will take place-and they must hurry if they want to witness the murder, because it's later that very night! Sonomura has a history of lunacy and playing the amateur detective, so Takahashi is of course reluctant to believe him. Nevertheless, they stake out the secret location, and through tiny peepholes in the knotted wood, become voyeurs at the scene of a shocking crime...        Atmospheric, erotic, and tense, Devils in Daylight is an early work by the master storyteller who "created a lifelong series of ingenious variations on a dominant theme: the power of love to energize and destroy" (Chicago Tribune).

Sebastián de Covarrubias's famous Treasure of the Castilian or Spanish Language was first published in 1611, only two years before the author's death. A contemporary of Cervantes, learned in Hebrew and Arabic languages, Covarrubias wrote his encyclopedic dictionary to explore the heterogeneous origins of words and their hidden connections to the moral, transcendental, and everyday meanings of the world. Here, the translator Janet Hendrickson has dived deep into this influential, pre-Enlightenment text to cull a coherent, poetic selection of Covarrubias's pioneering work.

"Who was Samuel Greenberg?" editor Garrett Caples asks: "The short answer is 'the dead, unknown poet Hart Crane plagiarized.'" In the winter of 1923, Crane was given some of Greenberg's notebooks and called him "a Rimbaud in embryo." Crane included many of Greenberg's lines, uncredited and slightly changed, in his own poetry. Poems from the Greenberg Manuscripts was edited by James Laughlin, who first published it in 1939. As well as Laughlin's original essay, Caples includes a new selection of poems from Greenberg's notebooks, along with some of his prose. Now the work of this mysterious, impoverished, proto-surrealist American poet, who never published a word in his life, is available to a new generation of readers.

Who has not suffered grief? In Mourning Songs, the brilliant poet and editor Grace Schulman has gathered together the most moving poems about sorrow by the likes of Elizabeth Bishop, William Carlos Williams, Gwendolyn Brooks, Neruda, Catullus, Dylan Thomas, W. H. Auden, Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, W. S. Merwin, Lorca, Denise Levertov, Keats, Hart Crane, Michael Palmer, Robert Frost, Hopkins, Hardy, Bei Dao, and Czeslaw Milosz-to name only some of the masters in this slim volume.         "The poems in this collection," as Schulman notes in her introduction, "sing of grief as they praise life." She notes, "As any bereaved survivor knows, there is no consolation. 'Time doesn't heal grief; it emphasizes it,' wrote Marianne Moore. The loss of a loved one never leaves us. We don't want it to. In grief, one remembers the beloved. But running beside it, parallel to it, is the joy of existence, the love that causes pain of loss, the loss that enlarges us with the wonder of existence."

After getting a haircut in London and a few new outfits ("she bought two pairs of shoes and began to enjoy herself"), Millie, the neglected American wife of an academic pill, is transformed-and, upon arrival in Africa, falls into the perfect affair. Binstead's Safari unfolds the fractured fairy tale of the rebirth of a drab, insecure woman as a fiercely alive, fearless beauty. "Life was too short to waste time trying to find excuses for not doing the things you really wanted to do," Millie realizes, helping herself to love and joy. The husband is astonished-everyone adores the new Millie. She can't put a foot wrong, and as they move deeper into Africa in search of lion myths for his book, "excitement and pleasure carried her upwards as on a tide." Mysteries abound, but in the hands of Rachel Ingalls, the ultimate master of the curveball, Millie's resurrection seems perfectly natural: caterpillar to butterfly.        "Only now had she found her life"-and also her destiny, which may, this being Ingalls, take the form of a Lion God.

The American poet Robert Lax belongs to the generation of Thomas Merton, Beat poetry, Abstract Expressionism, and the compositions of John Cage. Yet he stands out as this era's most intriguing minimalist poet, gaining this reputation through a constant questioning of the universe and our idea about it. His poetry varies from fables and parables to clear-cut columns of words, from his account of a day at the circus as a vision of creation to his own insistent and mystical search for truth.        33 Poems presents the quintessential gathering of Lax's work, including Sea & Sky and The Circus of the Sun, "perhaps the greatest English-language poem of this century" (The New York Times).

With the elliptical looping of a butterfly alighting on one's sleeve, the poems of Ana Lui¿sa Amaral arrive as small hypnotic miracles. Spare and beautiful in a way reminiscent both of Szymborska and of Emily Dickinson (it comes as no surprise that Amaral is the leading Portuguese translator of Dickinson), these poems-in Margaret Jull Costa's gorgeous English versions-seamlessly interweave the everyday with the dreamlike and ask "What's in a name?""How solid is a name if answered to," Amaral answers, but "like the Rose-no, like its perfume: ungovernable. Free." There is much freedom within Amaral's poetry, room for mysteries to multiply, and yet her beautiful lines are as clear as water: And that time of smiles Which does, incidentally, really exist, I swear, as does the fireAnd the invisible sea, which with nothing will agree

Winner of the 2020 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translation PrizeThe Fox and Dr. Shimamura toothsomely encompasses East and West, memory and reality, fox-possession myths, and psychiatric mythmaking. As an outstanding young Japanese medical student at the end of the nineteenth century, Dr. Shimamura is sent-to his dismay-to the provinces: he is asked to cure scores of young women afflicted by an epidemic of fox possession. Believing it's all a hoax, he considers the assignment an insulting joke, until he sees a fox moving under the skin of a young beauty... Next he travels to Europe and works with such luminaries as Charcot, Breuer and Freud-whose methods, Dr. Shimamura concludes, are incompatible with Japanese politeness. The ironic parallels between Charcot's theories of female hysteria and ancient Japanese fox myths-when it comes to beautiful, writhing young women-are handled with a lightly sardonic touch by Christine Wunnicke, whose flavor-packed, inventive language is a delight.

Ismail, the profesor, is a retired teacher in a small Colombian town where he passes the days pretending to pick oranges while spying on his neighbor Geraldina as she lies naked in the shade of a ceiba tree on a red floral quilt. The garden burns with sunlight; the macaws laugh sweetly. Otilia, Ismail's wife, is ashamed of his peeping and suggests that he pay a visit to Father Albornoz. Instead, Ismail wanders the town visiting old friends, plagued by a tangle of secret memories: Where have I existed these years? I answer myself: up on the wall, peering over. When the armies slowly arrive, the profesor's reveries are gradually taken over by a living hell. His wife disappears and he must find her. We learn that not only gentle, grassy hillsides surround San José but landmines and coca fields. The reader is soon engulfed by the violence of Rosero's narrative that is touched not only with a deep sadness, but an extraordinary tenderness.

In this day of mindless distraction, we're desperate for reasons to put down our phones and reconnect with our spiritual selves. In time for the 50th anniversary of Thomas Merton's death in 1968, Silence, Joy is an invitation to slow down, take a breath, make a space for silence, and open up to joy.Poet, monk, spiritual advisor, and social critic, Thomas Merton is a unique-and uniquely beloved-figure of the twentieth century, and this little rosary brings together his best-loved poems and prose. Drawn from classics like New Seeds Of Contemplation and The Way Of Chuang Tzu as well as less famous books, the writings in Silence, Joy offer the reader deep, calming stillness, flights of ecstatic praise, steadying words of wisdom, and openhearted laughter. Manna for Merton lovers and a warm embrace for novices, this slim collection is a delightful gift.

The Doctor Stories collects thirteen of Williams's stories (direct accounts of his experiences as a doctor), six related poems, and a chapter from his autobiography that connects the world of medicine and writing, as well as a new preface by Atul Gawande, an introduction by Robert Coles (who put the book together), and a final note by Williams's son (also a doctor), about his famous father. The writings are remarkably direct and freshly true. As Atul Gawande notes, "Reading these tales,you find yourself in a conversation with Williams about who people really are-who you really are. Williams recognized that, caring for the people of his city, he had a front-row seat to the human condition. His writing makes us see it and hear it and grapple with it in all its complexities. That is his lasting gift."

Who doesn't love haiku? It is not only America's most popular cultural import from Japan but also our most popular poetic form: instantly recognizable, more mobile than a sonnet, loved for its simplicity and compression, as well as its ease of composition. Haiku is an ancient literary form seemingly made for the Twittersphere-Jack Kerouac and Langston Hughes wrote them, Ezra Pound and the Imagists were inspired by them, Hallmark's made millions off them, first-grade students across the country still learn to write them. But what really is a haiku? Where does the form originate? Who were the original Japanese poets who wrote them? And how has their work been translated into English over the years? The haiku form comes down to us today as a cliché: a three-line poem of 5-7-5 syllables. And yet its story is actually much more colorful and multifaceted. And of course to write a good one can be as difficult as writing a Homeric epic-or it can materialize in an instant of epic inspiration.In On Haiku, Hiroaki Sato explores the many styles and genres of haiku on both sides of the Pacific, from the classical haiku of Basho, Issa, and Zen monks, to modern haiku about swimsuits and atomic bombs, to the haiku of famous American writers such as J. D. Salinger and Allen Ginsburg. As if conversing over beers in your favorite pub, Sato explains everything you wanted to know about the haiku in this endearing and pleasurable book, destined to be a classic in the field.

*Winner of The Griffin International Poetry Prize and the Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Award*The title section of Kim Hyesoon's powerful new book, Autobiography of Death, consists of forty-nine poems, each poem representing a single day during which the spirit roams after death before it enters the cycle of reincarnation. The poems not only give voice to those who met unjust deaths during Korea's violent contemporary history, but also unveil what Kim calls "the structure of death, that we remain living in." Autobiography of Death, Kim's most compelling work to date, at once reenacts trauma and narrates our historical death-how we have died and how we survive within this cyclical structure. In this sea of mirrors, the plural "you" speaks as a body of multitudes that has been beaten, bombed, and buried many times over by history. The volume concludes on the other side of the mirror with "Face of Rhythm," a poem about individual pain, illness, and meditation.

In 1506, Michelangelo-a young but already renowned sculptor-is invited by the Sultan of Constantinople to design a bridge over the Golden Horn. The sultan has offered, alongside an enormous payment, the promise of immortality, since Leonardo da Vinci's design had been rejected: "You will surpass him in glory if you accept, for you will succeed where he has failed, and you will give the world a monument without equal."Michelangelo, after some hesitation, flees Rome and an irritated Pope Julius II-whose commission he leaves unfinished-and arrives in Constantinople for this truly epic project. Once there, he explores the beauty and wonder of the Ottoman Empire, sketching and describing his impressions along the way, and becomes immersed in cloak-and-dagger palace intrigues as he struggles to create what could be his greatest architectural masterwork.Tell Them of Battles, Kings, and Elephants-constructed from real historical fragments-is a story about why stories are told, why bridges are built, and how seemingly unmatched pieces, seen from the opposite sides of civilization, can mirror one another.

Gathered here are the gems of William Carlos Williams's astonishing achievements in poetry. Dramatic, energetic, beautiful, and true, this slim selection will delight any reader-The Red Wheelbarrow & Other Poems is a book to be treasured.

The Shutters collects the two most important poetry collections-"The Shutters" and "Photograms"-by the legendary Moroccan writer Ahmed Bouanani. By intertwining myth and tradition with the familiar objects and smells of his lived present, Bouanani reconstructs vivid images of Morocco's past. He weaves together references to the Second World War, the Spanish and French protectorates, the Rif War, dead soldiers, prisoners, and poets screaming in their tombs with mouths full of dirt. His poetry, written in an imposed language with a "strange alphabet," bravely confronts the violence of his country's history-particularly during the period of les années de plomb, the years of lead-all of which bears the brutal imprint of colonization. As Bouanani writes, "These memories retrace the seasons of a country that was quickly forgetful of its past, indifferent to its present, constantly turning its back on the future."

The Galloping Hour: French Poems-never before rendered in English and unpublished during her lifetime-gathers for the first time all the poems that Alejandra Pizarnik (revered by Octavio Paz and Roberto Bolano) wrote in French. Conceived during her Paris sojourn (1960-1964) and in Buenos Aires (1970-1971) near the end of her tragically short life, these poems explore many of Pizarnik's deepest obsessions: the limitation of language, silence, the body, night, sex, and the nature of intimacy.Drawing from personal life experiences and echoing readings of some of her beloved/accursed French authors-Charles Baudelaire, Germain Nouveau, Arthur Rimbaud, and Antonin Artaud-this collection includes prose poems that Pizarnik would later translate into Spanish. Pizarnik's work led Raúl Zurita to note: "Her poetry-with a clarity that becomes piercing-illuminates the abysses of emotional sensitivity, desire, and absence. It presses against our lives and touches the most exposed, fragile, and numb parts of humanity."

A professor prepares to retire-Gustavo is set to move from Sao Paulo to the countryside, but it isn't the urban violence he's fleeing: what he fears most is the violence of his memory. But as he sorts out his papers, the ghosts arrive in full force. He was arrested in 1970 with his brother-in-law Armando: both were vicariously tortured. He was eventually released; Armando was killed. No one is certain that he didn't turn traitor: I didn't talk, he tells himself, yet guilt is his lifelong harvest. I Didn't Talk pits everyone against the protagonist-especially his own brother. The torture never ends, despite his bones having healed and his teeth having been replaced. And to make matters worse, certain details from his shattered memory don't quite add up... Beatriz Bracher depicts a life where the temperature is lower, there is no music, and much is out of view. I Didn't Talk's pariah's-eye-view of the forgotten "small" victims powerfully bears witness to their "internal exile." I didn't talk, Gustavo tells himself; and as Bracher honors his endless pain, what burns this tour de force so indelibly in the reader's mind is her intensely controlled voice.

Drawing from his experience as a translator, Forrest Gander includes in the first, powerfully elegiac section a version of a poem by the Spanish mystical poet St. John of the Cross. He continues with a long multilingual poem examining the syncretic geological and cultural history of the U.S. border with Mexico. The poems of the third section-a moving transcription of Gander's efforts to address his mother dying of Alzheimer's-rise from the page like hymns, transforming slowly from reverence to revelation. Gander has beencalled one of our most formally restless poets, and these new poems express a characteristically tensile energy and, as one critic noted, "the most eclectic diction since Hart Crane."

"When I walked through the large iron gate of the hospital, I must have still been alive..." So begins Ahmed Bouanani's arresting, hallucinatory 1989 novel The Hospital, appearing for the first time in English translation. Based on Bouanani's own experiences as a tuberculosis patient, the hospital begins to feel increasingly like a prison or a strange nightmare: the living resemble the dead; bureaucratic angels of death descend to direct traffic, claiming the lives of a motley cast of inmates one by one; childhood memories and fantasies of resurrection flash in and out of the narrator's consciousness as the hospital transforms before his eyes into an eerie, metaphorical space. Somewhere along the way, the hospital's iron gate disappears.Like Sadegh Hedayat's The Blind Owl, the works of Franz Kafka-or perhaps like Mann's The Magic Mountain thrown into a meat-grinder-The Hospital is a nosedive into the realms of the imagination, in which a journey to nowhere in particular leads to the most shocking places.

Japan, after suffering from a massive irreparable disaster, cuts itself off from the world. Children are so weak they can barely stand or walk: the only people with any get-go are the elderly. Mumei lives with his grandfather Yoshiro, who worries about him constantly. They carry on a day-to-day routine in what could be viewed as a post-Fukushima time, with all the children born ancient-frail and gray-haired, yet incredibly compassionate and wise. Mumei may be enfeebled and feverish, but he is a beacon of hope, full of wit and free of self-pity and pessimism. Yoshiro concentrates on nourishing Mumei, a strangely wonderful boy who offers "the beauty of the time that is yet to come."A delightful, irrepressibly funny book, The Emissary is filled with light. Yoko Tawada, deftly turning inside-out "the curse," defies gravity and creates a playful joyous novel out of a dystopian one, with a legerdemain uniquely her own.

Although The Book of Hours is the work of Rilke's youth, it contains the germ of his mature convictions. Written as spontaneously received prayers, these poems celebrate a God who is not the Creator of the Universe but rather humanityitself and, above all, that most intensely conscious part of humanity, the artist. Babette Deutsch's classic translations-born from "the pure desire to sing what thepoet sang" (Ursula K. Le Guin)-capture the rich harmony and suggestive imagery of the originals, transporting the reader to new heights of inspiration and musicality.

Across the ages, cats have provided their adopted humans with companionship, affection, mystery and innumerable metaphors; cats cast a mirror on their beholders; cats endlessly captivate and hypnotise, frustrate and delight. And to poets, in particular, these enigmatic creatures are the most delightful and beguiling of muses (Charles Baudelaire: "the sole source of amusement in one's lodgings") as they go about purring, prowling, hunting, playing, meowing and napping, often oblivious to their so-called masters (Jorge Luis Borges: "you live in other time, lord of your realm-a world as closed and separate as a dream").Cat Poems offers a litter of odes to our beloved felines by Charles Baudelaire, Stevie Smith, Christopher Smart, Denise Levertov, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Rainer Maria Rilke, Muriel Spark, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound and many others.

Combining fact and fiction, each of the one hundred and two tales of Alexander Kluge's Temple of the Scapegoat (dotted with photos of famous operas and their stars) compresses a lifetime of feeling and thought: Kluge is deeply engaged with the opera and an inventive wellspring of narrative notions. The titles of his stories suggest his many turns of mind: "Total Commitment," "Freedom," "Reality Outrivals Theater," "The Correct Slowing-Down at the Transitional Point Between Terror and an Inkling of Freedom," "A Crucial Character (Among Persons None of Whom Are Who They Think They Are)," and "Deadly Vocal Power vs. Generosity in Opera." An opera, Kluge says, is a blast furnace of the soul, telling of the great singer Leonard Warren who died onstage, having literally sung his heart out. Kluge introduces a Tibetan scholar who realizes that opera "is about comprehension and passion. The two never go together. Passion overwhelms comprehension. Comprehension kills passion. This appears to be the essence of all operas, says Huang Tse-we." He also comes to understand that female roles face the harshest fates: "Compared to the mass of soprano victims (out of 86,000 operas, 64,000 end with the death of the soprano), the sacrifice of tenors is small (out of 86,000 operas 1,143 tenors are a write-off)."

The Desert and Its Seed opens with a taxi ride to the hospital: Eligia's face is disintegrating from acid thrown by her ex-husband while they signed divorce papers. Mario, her son, tries to wipe the acid from Eligia's face, but his own fingers burn.What follows is a fruitless attempt to reconstruct Eligia's face-first in Buenos Aires, thereafter in Milan. Mario, the narrator, becomes the shadow and witness of the reconstruction attempts to repair his mother's outraged flesh. In this role, he must confront his own terrible existence and identity, both of which are bound to an Argentina he sees disintegrating around him.Based on a true, tragic family story, Jorge Barón Biza's The Desert and Its Seed was rejected by publishers in Buenos Aires and was finally self-published in 1998, three years before the author committed suicide. Written in a captivating plain style with dark, bitter humor, The Desert and Its Seed has become a modern classic, published to enormous acclaim throughout the Spanish-speaking world and translated into many languages.

the people, the boats completely gone with the tsunami / tonight you would not be able to sleep -from Sea, Land, ShadowSea, Land, Shadow, the fourth collection by Kazuko Shiraishi to be published by New Directions, comprises work written over sixty-years, from 1951 to 2015. Shiraishi, described by Donald Keene as "the outstanding poetic voice of her generation of disengagement in Japan," sees the world in a grain of rice and finds poetry in a mountain-road traffic jam. In the haunting title poem, she visits Iwanuma not long after the disastrous tsunami hit in 2011 and finds "no houses but a place where houses had been." This pamphlet also includes a long, lyrical homage to Yukio Mishima, as well as playful and profound meditations on a Roman condom, lizard god, god of war, and an ear.