What is the role of the senses in the creation and reception of poetry? How does poetry carry on the long tradition of making experience and suffering understood by others? With Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, Susan Stewart traces the path of the aesthetic in search of an explanation for the role of poetry in culture. Herself an acclaimed poet, Stewart not only brings the intelligence of a critic to the question of poetry, but the insight of a practitioner as well. Her new study includes close discussions of poems by Stevens, Hopkins, Keats, Hardy, Bishop, and Traherne, of the sense of vertigo in Baroque and Romantic works, and of the rich tradition of nocturnes in visual, musical, and verbal art. Ultimately, she argues that poetry can counter the denigration of the senses in contemporary life and can expand our imagination of the range of human expression. Poetry and the Fate of the Senses won the 2004 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in Memory of Newton Arvin, administered for the Truman Capote Estate by the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. It also won the Phi Beta Kappa Society's 2002 Christian Gauss Award for Literary Criticism.

Karen Brodine's award-winning feminist poetry explores themes of work, activism, sexual identity, family, language, and the author's fight against breast cancer. Published in 1990, WOMAN SITTING AT THE MACHINE, THINKING is the posthumously published, fourth collection of poems by a breakthrough writer on feminist, lesbian and workingclass themes. Brodine's work is widely published in anthologies. This collection includes a bibliography of Brodine's writing, a preface by the renowned feminist and radical poet Meridel LeSueur, and an introduction by Asian American lesbian poet Merle Woo.

The Fate of Difficulty in the Poetry of Our Time offers original readings of poems composed in this century—poems that are challenging to follow, challenging to understand, challenging to discuss, and challenging to enjoy. Difficult poetry of the past relied on allusion, syntactic complexity, free association, and strange juxtapositions. The new poetry breaks with the old in its stunning variety; its questioning of inherited values, labels, and narratives; its multilingualism; its origin in and production of unnamed affects; and its coherence around critical and social theorists as much as other poets. The essays in this volume include poets writing on the works of a younger generation (Lyn Hejinian on Paolo Javier, Bob Perelman on Rachel Zolf, Roberto Tejada on Rosa Alcalá), influential writers addressing the work of peers (Ben Lerner on Maggie Nelson, Michael W. Clune on Aaron Kunin), critics making imaginative leaps to encompass challenging work (Brian M. Reed on Sherwin Bitsui, Siobhan Philips on Juliana Spahr), and younger scholars coming to terms with poets who continue to govern new poetic experimentation (Joseph Jeon on Myung Mi Kim, Lytle Shaw on Lisa Robertson). In pairings that are both intuitive (Marjorie Perloff on Craig Dworkin) and unexpected (Langdon Hammer on Srikanth Reddy), The Fate of Difficulty in the Poetry of Our Time illuminates the myriad pathways and strategies for exploring difficult poetry of the present.

Readers of Holden's splendid new book will be rewarded by his summary of the latest battle: neo-formalists versus post-(post?)-modernists versus creative writing programs versus whatever. The decline of modernism is also examined. Holden rightly chastises those who decry the institutionalization of poetry; details the current state of lyric, narrative, and political poetry; and gives sensitive, intelligent readings of works by new and established poets. An important book by a solid poet and critic. Highly recommended. --Vincent D. Balitas.

Topical poems that present the life of the mind--mourning and celebrating who and what is lost as time goes by

LA-based poet returns with humor, irreverence, and sincere longing to sever the distinction between dream and reality, person and animal.