A collection of poems about baseball.

John Ashbery’s wild, deliriously inventive book-length poem, inspired by the adventures of Henry Darger’s Vivian Girls Henry Darger, the prolific American outsider artist who died in 1973, leaving behind over twenty thousand pages of manuscripts and hundreds of artworks, is famous for the elaborate alternate universe he both constructed and inhabited, a “realm of the unreal” where a plucky band of young girls, the Vivians, helps lead an epic rebellion against dark forces of chaos. Darger’s work is now renowned for its brilliant appropriation of cultural ephemera, its dense and otherworldly prose, and its utterly unique high-low juxtaposition of popular culture and the divine—some of the very same traits that decades of critics and readers have responded to in John Ashbery’s many groundbreaking works of poetry. In Girls on the Run, Ashbery’s unmatched poetic inventiveness travels to new territory, inspired by the characters and cataclysms of Darger’s imagined universe. Girls on the Run is a disquieting, gorgeous, and often hilarious mash-up that finds two radical American artists engaged in an unlikely conversation, a dialogue of reinvention and strange beauty.

The award-winning memoir of life in an LA street gang from the acclaimed Chicano author and former Los Angeles Poet Laureate: “Fierce, and fearless” (The New York Times). Luis J. Rodríguez joined his first gang at age eleven. As a teenager, he witnessed the rise of some of the most notorious cliques in Southern California. He grew up knowing only a life of violence—one that revolved around drugs, gang wars, and police brutality. But unlike most of those around him, Rodríguez found a way out when art, writing, and political activism gave him a new path—and an escape from self-destruction. Always Running spares no detail in its vivid, brutally honest portrayal of street life and violence, and it stands as a powerful and unforgettable testimonial of gang life by one of the most acclaimed Chicano writers of his generation. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Luis J. Rodríguez including rare images from the author’s personal collection.

"In this book, scholar Thorpe Running shows that a skeptical approach to both language and poetry places eight poets from three countries in Latin America within a strain of poetry prefigured by Stephane Mallarme." "Octavio Paz, Jorge Luis Borges, Roberto Juarroz, Alejandra Pizarnik, Alberto Girri, Juan Luis Martinez, Gonzalo Millan, and David Huerta span three different generations. In addition to their age and geographical differences, their poetry bears no obvious similarities. All eight, however, are poetas pensantes, or thinking poets, and underlying the work of these probing writers is the disturbing question: Does language do what it is supposed to do? The answer is negative for all these poets who see their poems as being made up of words that don't work."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

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Fernando Pessoa is one of the greatest poets of the 20th century. Until some years ago known in the English-speaking world only among a minority of connaisseurs, his work is finally becoming available in English translations, and more are in the process of reaching the literary public. Born in Lisbon in 1888, Pessoa was only forty-seven when he died, but he left behind a staggering number of unpublished manuscripts that are still being screened and brought to light. George Steiner heralded the day Pessoa discovered his major Portuguese heteronyms, for no country had ever seen the birth of four great poets in a single day. That was a reference to the personae Pessoa created, the famous heteronyms Alberto Caeiro, Alvaro de Campos, and Ricardo Reis, besides the man himself -- all poets in their own right with their biographies and even critical exchanges among themselves. Today well over a hundred Pessoa heteronyms are known, including, notably, the semi-heteronym Bernardo Soares, author of The Book of Disquiet, presently available in two English translations. Lately, another Pessoa is emerging -- an English writer, as well as a thinker. Indeed, having been educated in Durban, South Africa, where his stepfather was the consul of Portugal, the poet had a strong English education that shaped his life and thought. George Monteiro has been in the forefront of the uncovering of this side of Pessoa. Author, among many other works, of The Presence of Pessoa: English, American, and Southern African Literary Responses, and Fernando Pessoa and Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Literature, in this volume Monteiro continues to explore and interpret the world of Pessoa to English-speaking readers.