This year's winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition is Loren Goodman's Famous Americans. Hilarious, eclectic, and bizarre, this collection takes the reader on a rollercoaster of a ride through the absurdities of American pop culture. Employing a variety of forms (from epistolary to script to interview and beyond), this work proves to be as much about exploring frameworks as it is about examining the lives of famous and not-so-famous Americans. Goodman questions our concept of what it means to be an icon: he disrupts our assumptions, creating an alternate universe in which...

From a major American poet -- a thrilling story, in verse, of nineteenth-century Hawaii. The story of an attempt by the government to seize and constrain possible victims of leprosy and the determination of one small family not to be taken. A tale of the perils and glories of their flight into the wilds of the island of Kauai, pursued by a gunboat full of soldiers.
A brilliant capturing -- inspired by the poet's respect for the people of these islands -- of their life, their history, the gods and goddesses of their mythic past. A somber revelation of the wrecking of their culture through...

A contemporary prose rendering of the great medieval French epic, The Song of Roland is as canonical and significant as the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf. It extols the chivalric ideals in the France of Charlemagne through the exploits of Charlemagne's nephew, the warrior Roland, who fights bravely to his death in a legendary battle. Against the bloody backdrop of the struggle between Christianity and Islam, The Song of Roland remains a vivid portrayal of medieval life, knightly adventure, and feudal politics. The first great literary works of a culture are its epic chronicles, those that create...

A literary event--a new volume of poems by one of the masters of modern poetry--The Rain in the Trees is W. S. Merwin's first book since the publication five years ago of his Opening the Hand.
Almost no other poet of our time has been able to voice in so subtle a fashion such a profound series of comments on the passing of history over the contemporary scene. To do this, he seems to have reinvented the poem--so that the experience of reading Merwin is unlike the reading of any other poetry. In such famous books as The Lice, The Moving Target and (most recently)...

"In Travels, one of the most beautiful and moving collections of poetry of his career, W. S. Merwin displays his narrative gifts to provide us with a book of deep historical resonance and luminous poetic grace...With each new book we have been reminded why, for forty years, he has remained a pivotal figure in the literary life of this country... he] continues to earn his place as one of our most influential and compelling contemporary poets."
--David St. John, Los Angeles Times Book Review

This major collection, by a major American poet who has been awarded the Marshall, Bollingen, Pulitzer, and other important prizes for mastery of his art, is concerned with the people, countryside, and creatures of southwest France. "Merwin writes," J.D. McClatchy has said in THE NEW YORKER, "with one of the most distinctive and original voices in American poetry."

Acclaimed poet W.S. Merwin's translations are as breathtakingly elegant as a Japanese Zen rock garden. The Pulitzer Prize-winner has translated poems and aphorisms from Asian languages as diverse as Urdu, Chinese, Sanskrit, Persian, Vietnamese, Tagalog, and Japanese.

Lucid and immediate Zenlike aphroisms translated from Spanish by one of America's great poets.

A bilingual edition celebrating the centennial of Follain's birth, translated by one of America's great poets.