Translated by Mark Spitzer Creative Arts Book Company ($14.95) by Karl Krause Mark Spitzer's From Absinthe to Abyssinia, a collection of obscure and never before translated works by one of France's most intoxicating poets, sheds a harsh light on a much-admired heroic figure. Along with some essential fragments and poems of Rimbaud's finest period comes […]
Yang Lian Translated from the Chinese by Mabel Lee Green Integer ($14.95) by Lucas Klein Over a decade ago Harvard Sinologist Stephen Owen took on contemporary Chinese literature with his article "The Anxiety of Global Influence—What is World Poetry?," wherein he succeeded, through astonishingly sensible and even-tempered writing, in laying out a pretty bullet-headed point. […]
Donald Revell Alice James Books ($13.95) by Hank Lazer George Oppen, a poet much admired by Donald Revell, concludes in "Route": "I have not and never did have any motive of poetry / But to achieve clarity." In My Mojave as well as in his previous books, Revell has idiosyncratically pursued a moving and beautiful […]
by Brian Evenson Anybody familiar with literary history realizes that the writers praised by their contemporaries are not always the writers that last the longest. Look at a 20-year-old copy of the New York Times and see how many of the Books of the Year are still available, how many of the names still hold […]
Promethean Risk: The Poet as Translator Risking It: Scandals, Teaching, Translation. by Kristin Prevallet Editor's note: the following paper was presented at the 2003 Associated Writing Programs Conference as part of a panel moderated by Tom Radko of Wesleyan University Press. Radko asked panelists Clayton Eshleman, Pierre Joris, Donald Revell, and Kristin Prevallet—all poets who […]
by Jessica Bennett Anthony Bourdain has come a long way since the release of his first two mystery novels, Bone in the Throat and Gone Bamboo. His curriculum vitae now contains two hit nonfiction books (Kitchen Confidential and A Cook's Tour) and the television show A Cook's Tour, which, with the possible exception of Iron […]
by Tom Devaney It is not for nothing that The New York Times has called Eileen Myles—poet, novelist, critic, editor, former Artistic Director of St. Mark's Poetry Project, and current Director of the Creative Writing Program at UC San Diego—"a cult figure to a generation of post-punk females forming their own literary avant-garde." Thirty years […]