Poems deal with childhood, color, censorship, freedom, greed, loneliness, love, pain, and mortality.

Spanning nearly sixty years, these poems--both new English compositions and Nina Cassian's translations of her work in Romanian--blend her gallows humor with an engagement with the human experience.

I am I I am personal I am subjective, intimate, private particular confessional All that happens happens to me The landscape I describ is myself. . . If you're intereste in birds, trees, rivers try reference books Don't read my poems I'm no indexed bird tree or river just a registered Self.

There is also an anthology of the favorite poems of each poet, many not previously published, as well as other tragic and comic literary surprises in this nothing-like-it book.

Here are the long overdue translations of Paul Celan's Romanian poems (one poem dated 1947) by a great poet, Nina Cassian: they contain the buds, bloom, and deathly flowering of the obsessions found in all of Celan's work--death, drowning, deportation, love, pride, loneliness, the magic of language. The book also includes important essays by Nina Cassian, on Celan's early life and work, and post-WWII Bucharest and Paris.

Letter from Paul Celan to Nina Cassian, 1947
"Ingrate ...Seeing yourself simultaneously in the double posture of sleeping bird and fountain pen...the foul mouths of...

The late poet, Nina Cassian, knew the avant-garde's joyful flights and chivalrous desperation. In this collection, she brings poetry to a higher level by inventing a new language that is funny and challenging, imaginative and unique in force and grace. Framed from within by Nina's delightfully witty drawings, this book collects her most famous avant-garde poems, written over six decades. Cassian's decades of song set bodies and hearts in the enchanted state that flourishes above and below the edicts of dullness and the precincts of censure. Her glossolalic ease and ecstatic insouciance are...