Bücher der Reihe Penguin Poets

"From an acclaimed and wildly imaginative poet, a book-length poem set in the Metropolitan Museum of Art that is a work of art history and a coming-of-age story. Robyn Schiff's fourth collection is an ambitious book-length poem in three parts set at The Metropolitan Museum of Art's information desk, where Schiff long ago held a staff position. Elaborately mapping an interconnected route in and out of the museum through history, material, and memory, Information Desk: An Epic takes us on an anguished soul-quest and ecstatic intellectual query to confront the violent forces that inform the museum's encyclopedic collection and the spiritual powers of art. Novelistic in its sweep, frantically informative, and deeply intimate in its private recollections, Information Desk: An Epic wayfares with riveting lyric intensity through an epic array of topics and concerns, including illusion, deception, self-deception, complicity, lecherous coworkers, the composition of pigment, the scattering of seeds, ideas, and capital, and insect infestations spreading within artwork. Along the way, Schiff pauses to invoke three terrifying muses-parasitic wasps-in desperate awe of their powers of precision and generative energy. Information Desk: An Epic undertakes a hemorrhaging ekphrastic journey through artifice and the natural world"--

Selected for the National Poetry Series by Terrance Hayes. Lauren Berry's bracing and emotionally charged first collection of poetry delivers visions of a gothic South that Flannery O'Connor would recognize. Set in a feverish swamp town in Florida, The Lifting Dress enters the life of a teenage girl the day after she has been raped. She refuses to tell anyone what has happened, and moves silently toward adulthood in a community that offers beauty but denies apology. Through lyric narratives, readers watch her shift between mirroring and rejecting the anxious swelter of her world, until she ultimately embraces it with the same violent affection once tendered to her.

One of his generation's most accomplished poets, Robert Wrigley is renowned for his ironic, powerful, and lucid style as well as his ability to fuse narrative and lyrical impulses. Earthly Meditations features nineteen original poems alongside a collection of sixty-one poems chosen from his first six books.

Mark Yakich is an original... In the unabashedly unwieldy title and in each poem, there are no borders drawn between the commonplace and the metaphysical. There are journeys, crossings, and departures-all evocative of the loneliness, alienation, and desire for identity with another (person or place), which, formalized, makes this work recognizable as art of a very high order." -James Galvin, Guggenheim Foundation and National Endowment of the Arts Fellow

Winner of the John Burroughs Medal for Lifetime Achievement in Nature PoetryPattiann Rogers, one of America's finest contemporary poets, has won a reputation for densely detailed, thickly textured poems describing the natural world and one's place in it that are informed by a broad knowledge of science. In the tradition of Emerson, Whitman, and A. R. Ammons, Rogers's wise and complex poems read like a series of witty but deeply felt explorations of the physical world and the presence of the divine, exuding much observational care and descriptive panache. Her new collection, Generations, consists of fifty-four poems that concern themselves not just with the notion of the generations of life, but "generations" in the sense of energy, change, replication, and continuity-the entire process of coming or bringing into being.

The New York Times has called Carl Dennis's poetry "wise, original, and deeply moving." A poet with a growing audience of admirers, Dennis writes in a clear, classically simple language that is both personal and universal. Making use of a rich variety of genres-advice, meditation, elegy, and prophecy-his poems take unexpected turns as they explore their subjects, catching the reader off balance in a way that is liberating. This new anthology gathers the best of his eight previous books along with a generous sampling of new poems.

Sly and sophisticated, direct, playful, and profound, Amy Gerstler's new collection highlights her distinctive poetic style. In thirty-seven poems, using a variety of dramatic voices and visual techniques, she finds meaning in unexpected places, from a tour of a doll hospital to an ad for a CD of Beethoven symphonies to an earthy exploration of toast. Gerstler's abiding interests-in love and mourning, in science and pseudoscience, in the idea of an afterlife, in seances and magic-are all represented here. Entertaining and erudite, complex yet accessible, these poems will enhance Gerstler's reputation as an important contemporary poet.

Stuart Dischell's poetry is passionate, darkly comic, heartbreaking, and always unpredictable. Dig Safe reaffirms why he commands high regard among poets and critics and popularity among his readers. Taking as their metaphor the markings that construction workers use to warn of utilities below street level—these new poems pierce the body politic as they evoke interconnection and misalliance, movement and inhabitation.

Alice Notley has earned a reputation as one of the most challenging and engaging radical female poets at work today. Her last collection, Mysteries of Small Houses, was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize in poetry and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Structured as a long series of interconnected poems in which one of the main elements is an ongoing dialogue with a seedy detective, Disobedience sets out to explore the visible as well as the unconscious. These poems, composed during a fifteen-month period, also deal with being a woman in France, with turning fifty, and with being a poet, and thus seemingly despised or at least ignored.

Originally published in 1964, The Sonnets by Ted Berrigan is considered by many to be his most important and influential book. This new annotated edition, with an introduction by Alice Notley, includes seven previously uncollected works. Like Shakespeare's sonnets, Berrigan's poems involve friendship and love triangles, but while the former happen chronologically, Berrigan's happen in the moment, with the story buried beneath a surface of names, repetitions, and fragmented experience. Reflecting the new American sensibilities of the 1960's as well as timeless poetic themes, The Sonnets is both eclectic and classical - the poems are monumental riddles worth contemplating.

Described by the late James Dickey as "one of the finest new poets to come along in years," Robert Wrigley fulfills that early promise with this, his newest collection. Reign of Snakes is a book about desire, the soul's desire as much as the body's. As Jane Hirshfield said of Wrigley's previous book, In the Bank of Beautiful Sins (Penguin, 1995), "To read it is to unpeel a little further into the human, and into the wideness that holds the human--a splendid gift." Reign of Snakes takes us to yet another level, deep into the daily devotions, "where the dark blows a kiss to night.". . . a frigid day in February and a full-grownrattlesnake curled to a comma in the middle of the middle of the just-plowed road. Ice ghost, I think, curve of rock or stubbed-off branch. But the diamonds are there, under a dust of crystals looming, impossible, summer's tattoo, the mythical argyle of evil. --from "Reign of Snakes"

"Kill Or Cure,” a bold prescriptive for these apocalyptic days, brings together substantial new work as well as the best of Anne Waldman's previously uncollected poetry. It includes credos, manifestos, dreams, homages to literary predecessors, "Shaman Hisses You Slide Back Into The Night” (the journal poem written during Bob Dylan's historic Rolling Thunder Revue), witty political diatribes, travel vignettes, incantations, and a new section of the ongoing epic poem "Iovis,” a powerful meditation on male energy.

Red Trousseau is the latest work from one of America's greatest modern poets. The Los Angeles Times wrote that Carol Muske has discovered a way to work magic within the boundaries of technical achievement … Her contemplation of experience is personal yet moves further, into the spiritual and philosophical; then it be longs not only to the poet but to all of us.The poems in Red Trousseau use Los Angeles as a symbol for the seduction of appearances; reality crosses from the Wallace Stevens notion of the sun in "Red Trousseau," "hovering in its guise of impatient tribunal," to the sun in "Unsent letter." in which a director reshoots a tarnished sunset so that "the scene, infinite, rebegins" In Muskes poems primary colors dominate, most notably red-the red of Salem burnings, the self-immolation of a political dissident in Prague, and Eros it self, moving like a red shadow over the body of love Stylistically brilliant and emotionally resonant, the poems in Red Trousseau display the work of a master poet at the peak of her craft."With Red Trousseau, Carol Muske achieves the insight, emotional accuracy, and terrifying sureness of moral discernment she has always sought. She surveys human relations with an acid clairvoyance through which the reckless currents of personal and cultural history course, ripping away all but the essential tones of the human conversation with its humanity: terror, sometimes courage, excessive need, and the stubborn twin habits of hope and representation. This is urgent and beautifully confident work.'-Jorie Graham

Selections from the first three decades of the poetry of John Ashbery, author of Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book AwardThe late John Ashbery was a poet whose "teasing, delicate, soulful lines made him one of the most influential figures of late-20th and early 21st century American literature." (The New York Times) This important volume gathers work from his first ten collections of poetry, from Some Trees, which was chosen by W.H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets Series (1956), to A Wave (1984). The 138 poems in this volume include short lyrics, haikus, prose poems, and many of Ashbery's major long poems, including "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror," offering a beautiful distillation of the first thirty years of his remarkable, groundbreaking work.