The first major Jewish poet in America and a key figure of the Objectivist movement, Charles Reznikoff was a crucial link between the generation of Pound and Williams, and the more radical modernists who followed in their wake. A Menorah for Athena is an extended treatment of Reznikoff's work, in it Stephen Fredman illuminates the relationship of Jewish intellectuals to modernity through a close look at Reznikoff's life and writing. He shows that when we regard the Objectivists as modern Jewish poets, we can see more clearly their distinctiveness as modernists and the reasons for their...

In his latest book of poetry, Michael Fried continues his pursuit of lyric intensity but greatly expands his range of subject matter. The Next Bend in the Road is a powerfully coherent book of lyric and prose poems that has the internal scope of a novel with a host of characters, from the poet's wife and adopted daughter to Franz Kafka, Paul Cezanne, Osip Mandelstam, Sigmund Freud, Gisele Lestrange, and many others, transformative encounters with works of art, literature, and philosophy, including Heinrich von Kleist's The Earthquake in Chile, Giuseppe Ungaretti's Veglia, and Edouard Manet's...

In poems of haunting lyricism, and in a voice wholly unlike any other American poet, Christine Garren's second book of poetry explores common themes such as love, loss, and family with an uncommon sensibility. "Among the Monarchs" is filled with unforgettable metaphors, unconventional and unpredictable juxtapositions, turns and angles of perception, and seductive free verse rhythms. Through all of this, Garren captivates readers in a unique exploration of the nature of desire, the raptures and burdens of love and loss, the peculiarities of family life and, perhaps most compelling, the power...

Set in a castle and on its grounds in Brittany, "The Little Field of Self" is one long poem comprised of individual poems that articulate the essence of devotion and the conflict within the devoted. With surprising inventiveness and technical skill, and without ornamentation, self-consciousness, or self-display, Doreen Gildroy has forged an original poetic style that renders inner being authentically and convincingly.

"Prolusion"
This is my kitchen.
I looked around.
You think I would have noticed before
that it was safe.
(I started to feel.)
What I wanted first
was color.
I intended terra cotta,
but the paint turned
twice as vibrant:
true orange.
(And then I became used to
boldness.)
Doreen Gildroy's second book of poems is a marvel of lyric exactitude. On the surface a book about a man and a woman trying to conceive a child, "Human Love" is more deeply an attempt to focus on the process of human creativity in general and, ultimately, the desire to remake...

Human, hunger, happiness, hope, heart and Halliday all start with h, as does ham. Accident? Maybe But seldom have the flour of the humanistic and the egg yolk of honesty mixed more swellingly with the yeast of desire and the salt of self-doubt -not to mention the olive paste of ambition.

"Mixing autobiography with invented other voices, this book is an extraordinary meditation on what it means to have lived the history of China in the second half of the twentieth century. At its best, Ha Jin's language is as accessible, penetrating, and mysterious as Pound's "Cathay." This is a profound book, an event." Frank Bidart
"In these poems Ha Jin gives voice to the millions whose lives were altered and whose tongues were silenced by the Cultural Revolution. . . .If Ha Jin speaks in tongues in these poems, we feel him behind those voices the hidden director behind the scenes never...

The poems in "Iron Wheel" are hard won, the product of the clash of cultures: Southern, religious, gay. Miller achieves an intense, disturbing, and singular poetic voice, capable of tenderness, but undaunted when forced to confront the harsh, often violent realities of contemporary life in the South.

"The World at Large" brings together the best of James McMichael's poetry and includes works that appear for the first time in this volume. With the publication of the new poems, McMichael surpasses even the formally daring and psychologically penetrating poetry that has characterized his work thus far.