Poetry. Latinx Studies. LGBTQIA Studies. Cuban Studies. Translated by David Francis. Cuban writer Severo Sarduy was one of the most groundbreaking Latin American literary figures of the 20th-Century. His poems are acrobatic in content and form, innovative, and also part of a deep lineage and web of connection. David Francis translated the poems from Spanish into a gripping English. He writes, FOOTWORK is "a body of work that sings on its own, that celebrates the carnal life, the sensual experiences of dance, of painting, food, music, and sexual pleasure, but that also recognizes--in these pleasures--the imminence of one's passing." Although Sarduy's novels have been translated into English and received praise from such writers as Roland Barthes, Richard Howard, and James McCourt, this is the first collection of his poetry to appear in English translation. FOOTWORK represents work from throughout Sarduy's life, following the thrilling trajectory of a great thinker. Sarduy invents new forms to engage questions of identity, specifically how his own and Cuba's Spanish, African, and Chinese heritage is intrinsically intertwined with Cuba's history of slavery and indentured labor. As Francis writes, "Severo Sarduy was not known to follow convention. Nor did he think that conventional approaches to storytelling or lyrical composition could capture the complexities of human behavior or personal and national identity." The title, FOOTWORK, "recognizes how Sarduy's poems deliver devastating wit, which lands on its prototypical feet or adroitly maneuvers, purposefully, around naming objects, people, or body parts and toward unexpected endings," writes Francis. The poetry in FOOTWORK makes it clear why Gabriel García Márquez once called Sarduy the best writer in the Spanish language. "Baroque, yes, as we expect from the great Severo Sarduy: but these poems are also severe, mathematical, futurist, neoclassical, occasional, private, courtly, and lubricated. Some of the poems come from the heady world of poststructuralism, but most come from a Caravaggio-like sepulchral grotto, where a lush and explicit eroticism meets up with the sculpted and the shaped. Fixity is everywhere in this volume: fate fixes Sarduy, just as the seam between sex and language fixates his verse. David Francis's translations are a labor of love, executed with ingenuity and a voluptuary fineness."--Wayne Koestenbaum

Capturing the grace and beauty of the two biggest names in dance history, this fascinating glimpse into the lives of siblings Fred and Adele Astaire traces their extraordinary journey to success on Broadway and in Hollywood.

Translated by Joshua Edwards and Lynn Xu. Chinese writer Lao Yang's PEE POEMS go deep and dark--with deceptive lightness--into the metaphysical and the social, offering insight and humor along the way. Written over the past decade, this iconoclastic collection is the first of Yang's to be translated from Chinese into English. PEE POEMS is comprised of meditations, fragments, lyrics, and aphorisms, in dialogue with Chan hermit poets and Zen tricksters, with radical grassroots activism, experimental music, and Dada. Yang regards the body's most basic functions and desires as philosophical problems, restoring garbage and bladder-control to the field of politics, inhabiting both epochal and local time. In PEE POEMS vocabulary fights itself, while impossible opposites are lovingly conjoined. Joshua Edwards and Lynn Xu, poets both and friends of the author, translate Yang with brave tenderness, revealing a thinker whose observations are as simple and as rich as the languages we speak. In the mythos of Chinese ethnogenesis, the sage king Yu countered the great flood by diverting it into rural irrigation. The contemporary Chinese poet Lao Yang adopts a more irreverent strategy for liquid transport, urination (with an emphasis on the nation). This apocalyptic book reads like the waste journals of a survivalist on the run from carnivorous leviathans, God, and the Chinese state. Calling to mind the work of Raul Zurita and Kim Hyesoon, Yang's PEE POEMS consist of crystalline scatalogy, expressions of a profane piety. I can't quite recall reading another poetry book that felt simultaneously this elemental and funny.--Ken Chen In these irreverent poems, we see a fearless spirit in confronting the darkness and absurdity around the poet. An extraordinary collection.--Ha Jin Burrowing trinkets of sound and fury, these poems shoot inward like velvet claws, evoking a courageous loneliness and despair that spits out flowers in return.--Rob Mazurek These poems eat themselves. There's nothing for me to say. Nonetheless I send them to everyone I know. They're all shaking their heads saying this is so good. These poems are so good I can't point, I can only send them out. They are out there. Truly, yay.--Eileen Myles These crisp, lean and clean words of Yang conjure up a landscape situated in uncertain times and with movable spiritual boundaries. Determined to resist the powerful tides of propaganda from political and commercial life, Yang's poems here, like his struggle in the real world, intrigue, provoke and challenge simultaneously.--Zhang Er Poetry. Asian & Asian American Studies.

This new selection of poems by one of America's most distinguished and original writers recovers work that is immensely contemporary and at the same time reaches back to the roots of his remarkable generation of poets. In highly wrought and passionately felt lines, Weiss explores paradox, history, and love. His distinctive, idiosyncratic poems, noted for their syntactic compression, linguistic playfulness, and characteristic linking of intimate experience and historic incident, are a major accomplishment. This volume is the definitive selection of his work.

These poems serve as an introduction to Nicholas Hagger’s poetic works, which include nearly 1,500 poems, more than 300 classical odes, two poetic epics and five verse plays. They are grouped in two parts which reflect the two aspects of the fundamental theme of world literature outlined in his A New Philosophy of Literature: ‘Quest for the One’ and ‘Follies and Vices’. They present a quest for Reality along with moments of heightened consciousness in which the universe is seen as a unity, and condemn social follies and over 220 vices in terms of an implied virtue. This selection of poems combines image and statement in the reconciling Universalist manner, and in different poems blends Romantic search and organic form with classical social attitudes, verbal precision and architectural structure. The poems cover five decades and include extracts from ‘The Silence’, which describes Freeman’s quest for Reality in Modernist style, ‘Archangel’ (a reflection on Communism following visits to China and the Soviet Union), poems written during a Dark Night of the Soul, glimpses of illumination and poems of social satire. There are also extracts from Hagger's verse plays. As can be seen from his ‘A Metaphysical in Marvell’s Garden’ Hagger derives his inspiration from the 17th-century Metaphysical poets and seeks to unite the later Augustan and Romantic traditions. This selection offers a chance to reappraise a poet whose material, accomplished technique and reconciling sensibility places him in the forefront of poets writing today.

“A wonderful example of the poet’s ability to satisfy readers and anticipate their thoughts.”—Elizabeth Lund, Washington Post In his sixteenth collection, Stephen Dunn continues to bring his imagination and intelligence to what Wallace Stevens calls “the problems of the normal,” which of course pervade most of our lives. The poem “Don’t Do That” opens with the lines: “It was bring-your-own if you wanted anything / hard, so I brought Johnnie Walker Red / along with some resentment I’d held in / for a few weeks.” In other poems, Dunn contemplates his own mortality, echoing Yeats—“That is no country for old men / cadenced everything I said”—only to discover he’s joined their ranks. In “The Writer of Nudes” his speaker is in search of the body’s “grammar” but tells his models, “Don’t expect to see yourself as other / than I see you.” Full of grace, wit, humor, and masterful precision, the poems in Here and Now attest to the contradictions we live with in the here and now. Political and metaphysical, these astonishing poems remind us of the essential human comedy of getting through each day. from "The House on the Hill" . . . from out of the fog, a large, welcoming house would emerge made out of invention and surprise. No things without ideas! you'd shout, and the doors would open, and the echoes would cascade down to the valleys and the faraway towns.

Chiefly poetry, with some art and one short prose piece.