Envisioned in the form of a scrapbook, Ventrakl folds poetry, prose, biography, translation practices, and photographic imagery into an innovative collaboration with the 19th/early 20th century Austrian Expressionist poet Georg Trakl. Like Jack Spicer's After Lorca, translation is the central mode of composition in this book, and it is also the book's central theme, which Hawkey explores in a surprising array of different genres and modes of writing. What evolves is a candid and deeply felt portrait of two authors--one at the beginning of the 20th century, the other at the beginning of the 21st century, one living and one dead--wrestling with fundamental concerns: how we read texts and images, how we are influenced and authored by other writers, and how the practice of translation--including mistranslation--is a way to ornament and enrich the space between literature and life. "Ventrakl will speak resonantly to anyone who has fallen for the work of someonelong dead and wants desperately to reach out both to it and to its creator." --Laird Hunt, Bookforum

"Each of the three sections of this book examines a different aspect of the same base assumption -- that we are both a part of the world and separate from it at the same time."--Publisher's website.

This book marks the debut of a startling new voice that restlessly transforms self and surroundings in every poem.

The surprising story of the relationship between experimental poetry and literary studies. In The Academic Avant-Garde, Kimberly Quiogue Andrews makes a provocative case for the radical poetic possibilities of the work of literary scholarship and lays out a foundational theory of literary production in the context of the university. In her examination of the cross-pollination between the analytic humanities and the craft of poetry writing, Andrews tells a bold story about some of today's most innovative literary works. This pathbreaking intervention into contemporary American literature and higher education demonstrates that experimental poetry not only reflects nuanced concern about creative writing as a discipline but also uses the critical techniques of scholarship as a cornerstone of poetic practice. Structured around the concepts of academic labor (such as teaching) and methodological work (such as theorizing), the book traces these practices in the works of authors ranging from Claudia Rankine to John Ashbery, providing fresh readings of some of our era's most celebrated and difficult poets.

“Kevin Young has thoughtfully gathered many of these sorrowful perambulations and grievous plummets.” -Billy Collins The Art of Losing is the first anthology of its kind, delivering poetry with a purpose. Editor Kevin Young has introduced and selected 150 devastatingly beautiful poems that embrace the pain and heartbreak of mourning. Divided into five sections (Reckoning, Remembrance, Rituals, Recovery, and Redemption), with poems by some of our most beloved poets as well as the best of the current generation of poets, The Art of Losing is the ideal gift for a loved one in a time of need and for use by therapists, ministers, rabbis, and palliative care workers who tend to those who are experiencing loss. Among the poets included: Elizabeth Alexander, W. H. Auden, Amy Clampitt, Billy Collins, Emily Dickinson, Louise Gluck, Ted Hughes, Galway Kinnell, Kenneth Koch, Philip Larkin, Li-Young Lee, Philip Levine, Marianne Moore, Sharon Olds, Mary Oliver, Robert Pinsky, Adrienne Rich, Theodore Roethke, Anne Sexton, Wallace Stevens, Dylan Thomas, Derek Walcott, and James Wright.

"The Book of Funnels is one of the strangest and most beautiful first books of poetry I have read in a long time."--John Ashbery Christian Hawkey constructs a visionary world rich with fantastic imagery. In blurring the line of reality versus imagination, this turbulent dreamscape calls into question the frightening and surprising nature of the actual world. Christian Hawkey's The Book of Funnels (Verse Press, 2004) received the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Hawkey is co-founder of the international poetry journal jubilat, and he teaches at Pratt Institute.

Presents humorous retellings of each of Emily Dickinson's nearly eighteen hundred poems.