Feed your soul with what it means to be real. Turn each page in premonition of the next, and let this poetry paralyse your senses, with farms, and sheep, and grass, and sounds that are all too familiar. Maybe we can uncover your heart and piece it back together with a few words and nouns. This poetic encore is for you, and you only.

In this “heartrending, passionate, and surprisingly humorous account of the conjunction between art and death” (Andrew Solomon, New York Times bestselling author), acclaimed opera singer Charity Tillemann-Dick recounts her remarkable journey from struggling to draw a single breath to singing at the most prestigious venues in the world after receiving not one but two double lung transplants. Charity Tillemann-Dick was a vivacious young American soprano studying at the celebrated Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest when she received devastating news: her lungs were failing, her heart was three and a half sizes too big, and she would die within five years. Medical experts advised Charity to abandon her musical dreams, but if her time was running out, she wanted to spend it doing what she loved. In just three years, she endured two double lung transplants and had to slowly learn to breathe, walk, talk, eat, and sing again. With new lungs and fierce determination, she eventually fell in love, rebuilt her career, and reclaimed her life. More than a decade after her diagnosis, she has a chart-topping album, performs around the globe, and is a leading voice for organ donation. Weaving Charity’s extraordinary tale of triumph with those of opera’s greatest heroines, The Encore illuminates the indomitable human spirit and is “an uplifting story of overcoming significant odds to fulfill a dream” (Kirkus Reviews).

A work of extraordinary literary alchemy: a novel made out of lines taken from a hundred great works of literature.

In these essays, acclaimed poet and critic Anthony Hecht explores the ways in which poetry can be read and the many pleasures it affords. Ranging from Shakespeare's sonnets to Eliot, Frost, and Simic, Melodies Unheard offers profound insight into poetic form, meter, rhyme, and meaning--into the mysteries of poetry itself. Anthony Hecht's vast knowledge of literature and his gift for mesmerizing argument are both amply present in Melodies Unheard. Whether defending the sestina against accusations of boredom and dolefulness or examining the structure of Shakespeare's sonnets or unraveling some of the complexity of Moby-Dick, these essays are models of civility, candor, and grace. I know of no other poet, certainly none of Anthony Hecht's stature, who sheds as much light on the intricacies and hidden designs of poems and who does it with such style.--Mark Strand Anthony Hecht declares himself 'a poet first and only secondarily a critic, ' but Melodies Unheard proves again that he is a master in both trades. His discourse on such subjects as rhyme, the sestina, and 'the music of forms' is both scholarly and delightful; his articles on individual poets are finely done; and best of al

This book takes seriously the transformation of art into philosophy, focusing upon the systematic interest that so many European philosophers take in modernism. Among the philosophers Gerald Bruns discusses are Theodor W. Adorno, Maurice Blanchot, Arthur Danto, Stanley Cavell, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Jean-François Lyotard, Jean-Luc Nancy, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Emmanuel Levinas. As Bruns demonstrates, the difficulty of much modern and contemporary poetry can be summarized in the idea that a poem is made of words, not of any of the things that we use words to produce: meanings, concepts, propositions, narratives, or expressions of feeling. Many modernist poets have argued that in poetry language is no longer a form of mediation but a reality to be explored and experienced in its own right.

The sacred occupies a central place in the poetry of Guillevic, who described himself as a 'matérialiste religieux'. This study, informed by anthropological and psychoanalytical thought, examines the evolution of this aspect of his oeuvre from Terraqué (1942) through to the poet's last works and focuses in particular on the relation between the sacred and the mother figure. A semiotic approach is used for close textual analysis of key poems. Guillevic's poetic endeavour is conceived as an archaeological quest whereby the presence of the archaic within the domain of the real is disclosed and mythical patterns emerge. The re-enactment of the cosmogony, the performance of ritual and the process of mourning - all crucial to poetic creativity itself - are identified as motivating forces through which the poet seeks reparation of the mother. This study will be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students as well as to teachers of French literature, and will provide a useful introduction to those who may be unfamiliar with the unique voice of this major 20th century poet.