Fifty years of writing on literature, film, and art by one of the most influential poets and critics of our time

The essential work of Mallarmé, collected in a bilingual French and English edition.

That Adrienne Rich is a not only a major American poet but an incisive, compelling prose writer is made clear once again by this collection, in which she continues to explore the social and political context of her life and art. Examining the connections between history and the imagination, ethics and action, she explores the possible meanings of being white, female, lesbian, Jewish, and a United States citizen, both at this particular time and through the lens of the past.

The first Latin American to receive a Nobel Prize for Literature, the Chilean writer Gabriela Mistral (1889-1957) is often characterized as a healing, maternal voice who spoke on behalf of women, indigenous peoples, the disenfranchised, children, and the rural poor. She is that political poet and more: a poet of philosophical meditation, self-consciousness, and daring. This is a book full of surprises and paradoxes. The complexity and structural boldness of these prose-poems, especially the female-erotic prose pieces of her first book, make them an important moment in the history of literary modernism in a tradition that runs from Baudelaire, the North American moderns, and the South American postmodernistas. It's a book that will be eye-opening and informative to the general reader as well as to students of gender studies, cultural studies, literary history, and poetry. This Spanish-English bilingual volume gathers the most famous and representative prose writings of Gabriela Mistral, which have not been as readily available to English-only readers as her poetry. The pieces are grouped into four sections. "Fables, Elegies, and Things of the Earth" includes fifteen of Mistral's most accessible prose-poems. "Prose and Prose-Poems from Desolación / Desolation [1922]" presents all the prose from Mistral's first important book. "Lyrical Biographies" are Mistral's poetic meditations on Saint Francis and Sor Juana de la Cruz. "Literary Essays, Journalism, 'Messages'" collects pieces that reveal Mistral's opinions on a wide range of subjects, including the practice of teaching; the writers Alfonso Reyes, Alfonsina Storni, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Pablo Neruda; Mistral's own writing practices; and her social beliefs. Editor/translator Stephen Tapscott rounds out the volume with a chronology of Mistral's life and a brief introduction to her career and prose.

In these 37 prose-poems, ranging in density from short lists to treatises on poetics and philosophy, Anderson begins with a deceptively simple voice that breaks into dark hilarity: "No, you shall not be hurt. You may depart at once. All that is required is that you wear this placard reading, I am an ugly thing because I am superfluous."

A Selected Prose represents the most wide-ranging collection to date of Robert Duncan's essays and talks and is a companion volume to the Selected Poems (1993).

R. S. Thomas is Wales's most eminent poet in the English language, and one of the most acclaimed poets writing in Britain today. Since 1946 he has published twenty-six collections of poetry including his massive Collected Poems in 1993. His poems and books have won many prizes including the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 1964. Thomas's growing influence on modern poetry has been considerable. This is a result of the poems themselves: Thomas remains a largely private figure, living on the island Anglesey, content to let his writing speak for itself. Thomas's occasional prose writings have consequently been of great importance, providing a glimpse into the craft of his poems and their concerns. Selected Prose is the only book to collect some of his scattered prose in both languages, many Welsh language articles appearing in translation for the first time. It is a varied selection, both creative and critical, aiming to reflect the major preoccupations of Thomas and his poetry: religion and theology; Wales and its topography; Welsh Nationalism and the language; Nature and the countryside; the poet and his craft. It includes also the translated transcript of an autobiographical radio broadcast.