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Centered on the letters they exchanged with each other and with other members of their circle--writers, intellectuals, friends, and publishers, including Elizabeth Bishop, Caroline Blackwood, Mary McCarthy, and Adrienne Rich--the book has the narrative sweep of a novel, telling the story of the dramatic breakup of their twenty-one-year marriage and their extraordinary, but late, reconciliation.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eLowell's controversial sonnet-sequence \u003c\/span\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Dolphin\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cspan\u003e (for which he used Hardwick's letters as a source) and his last book, \u003c\/span\u003e\u003ci\u003eDay by Day\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cspan\u003e, were written during this period, as were Hardwick's influential books \u003c\/span\u003e\u003ci\u003eSeduction and Betrayal: Essays on Women in Literature\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cspan\u003e and \u003c\/span\u003e\u003ci\u003eSleepless Nights: A Novel\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cspan\u003e. 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Herter Norton\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublication Date: May 23, 2023\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublisher Marketing: This slim volume of letters from the poet and mystic, Rainer Maria Rilke, to a nineteen-year-old cadet and aspiring poet named Franz Xaver Kappus, has touched millions of readers since it was first published in English in 1934. The translator, Mary Dows Herter Norton--a polymath extraordinaire with expertise in music, literature, and science, and who, along with her husband, William Warder Norton, founded the company that bears his name--played a crucial role in elevating Rilke's reputation in the English-speaking world.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis Norton Centenary Edition commemorates Norton, known as \"Polly\" to friends and colleagues, and the \u003cem\u003e100th\u003c\/em\u003e anniversary of the publishing company she co-founded. 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With excerpts from her own books and those that she looked to for inspiration, this volume is a treat for Le Guin's longtime readers, a perfect introduction for those first approaching her writing, and a tribute to her incredible life and work.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":40534861021207,"sku":"9781941040997","price":14.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/products\/13238631-L.jpg?v=1679778327"},{"product_id":"silverblatt-michael-bookwormpb","title":"Silverblatt, Michael: Bookworm","description":"\u003cp\u003eSong Cave, The, paperback\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublication Date: March 31, 2023\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublisher Marketing: A Landmark Collection of Michael Silverblatt's Interviews from KCRW's Bookworm.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMichael Silverblatt, host of KCRW's Bookworm, the nation's premier literary radio program, has been bringing writers and readers together in close company for more than three decades. Audiences around the world tune in each week to discover new ways of thinking about books through Silverblatt's compassionate and enthusiastic conversations with contemporary writers, compelled by the surprising range of ideas and feelings that only his legendary close readings can evoke.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eBookworm: Conversations with Michael Silverblatt\u003c\/em\u003e gathers interviews with some of the most influential luminaries of our time: John Ashbery, John Berger, Octavia Butler, Joan Didion, Carlos Fuentes, William H. Gass, Toni Morrison, Grace Paley, W.G. Sebald, Stephen Sondheim, Susan Sontag, and David Foster Wallace (who notably said to Silverblatt in their first of several conversations, \"I feel like I wanna ask you to adopt me.\").\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eGathered together for the first time in print, these conversations span years, revealing not only the quality and character of the writers, but also the special relationship that Silverblatt developed with them during their lifetimes. This collection reveals why so many consider Silverblatt to be our greatest reader, as he allows us to see these writers at their most animated and understood.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"Michael Silverblatt is a better reader than any writer deserves. He brings such intensity, such respect, to any book, not for its level of achievement in every case, or the richness and generosity of imagination reflected in it, though he is greatly moved by these things, but simply for the fact of it as a book, an utterance in the language above language that speaks of the fact of humanity, and the miracle of our mutual intelligibility at the highest levels of subtlety and beauty, wit and candor. He teaches his listeners something writers often forget, that books enter human lives and change them, if not for the better in any usual sense then for the broader, for the opportunity any book presents to be encountered, welcomed or rejected, as an articulated vision, something that can be pondered at length, satisfyingly. A book recruits the sensibility of the reader. It is much more than casual encounter with another mind that our own minds are made for. Michael is one of those luxuries civilization from time to time affords itself, a voice who can say that its strange works are wonderful.\"--Marilynne Robinson\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"Each interview ranged far from the precipitating occasion as Silverblatt brought his considerable curiosity to questions of style, tone, language, structure, aspirations, and inspiration. Widely read, knowledgeable, and thoughtful, he elicited candid, detailed responses from his guests .... A warm celebration of creativity and the writing life.\"--Kirkus Reviews\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":40537784516631,"sku":"9781737277583","price":25.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/products\/9781737277583.jpg?v=1680131271"},{"product_id":"adnan-etel-the-beautypb","title":"Adnan, Etel: The Beauty of Light","description":"\u003cp\u003eNightboat Books, paperback\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublication Date: March 19, 2023\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublisher Marketing: A lively and spontaneous interview with Etel Adnan about her absolute belief in the beauty of the world and the beauty of art. In these interviews with journalist and editor Laure Adler, conducted in the months before her death in November 2021, Etel Adnan traces with depth and emotion the founding experiences of her artistic approach, between poetry and painting. From her youth in Lebanon, her American years in New York and California, to her late recognition at Documenta in 2012 and her life in France, the conversation covers philosophy, painting, poetry and aesthetics, as well Adnan's views on history and politics in Europe, the Middle East, and the United States. These transcripts usher the experiences and observations of Adnan's long and rich life into an intimate and spontaneous conversation with a dear friend--a window on the \"universe\" of her imagination.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":40578269315095,"sku":"9781643622118","price":17.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/files\/61Cqd7OukfL._SL1500.jpg?v=1773350701"},{"product_id":"schuyler-james-just-the-tpb","title":"Schuyler, James: Just the Thing","description":"\u003cp\u003eTurtle Point Press, paperback\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePublication Date: November 7, 2023\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePublisher Marketing: This updated edition of James Schuyler's letters to three dozen intimates, published on the 100th anniversary of the writer's birth, offers delicious insights into the vital lives, friendships, and sensibilities that sprang from the influential New York School. On New York in the summertime: \"Makes me think Thoreau was right and Whitman was wrong.\" On conducting himself post-breakup: \"I would like to do it with as much silence and grace as a loose tongue and a trick knee permit.\" On his sister-in-law's antipathy toward the town beatnik: \"His crimes against society seem to consist of long hair, tight pants and a Honda--I'm not sure which she minds most.\" Such effervescent and scathing takes on life, nature, love, and art are on joyous display in James Schuyler's letters to John Ashbery, Ron Padgett, Barbara Guest, Alex Katz, Joe Brainard, Kenneth Koch, and many more. They paint an indelible picture of a charmingly self-deprecating gentleman with a deliciously wicked tongue. \"Jimmy wrote letters for the most civilized of reasons,\" a friend of his once said: \"to inform and to entertain.\" And that they do, in inimitable style. Peppering his aperçus with the occasional \"tout de sweetie\" and \"pet noire,\" the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Morning of the Poem holds forth on everything from Dante and Delacroix to travel and gardening to the delicate workings of his own poems and those of others. While his tone ranges from the lightly graceful to the racily profane, each letter is exquisitely tuned to its recipient. And they have only grown more savory and valuable with time.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":40578270527511,"sku":"9781885983817","price":28.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/files\/ibg.common.titledetail-1_e2aa0df3-695c-413b-a216-1cc025d3e807.gif?v=1699740185"},{"product_id":"nelson-maggie-like-lovehb","title":"Nelson, Maggie: Like Love (HB)","description":"\u003cp\u003eGraywolf Press, hardcover\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePublication Date: April 2, 2024\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePublisher Marketing: A career-spanning collection of inspiring, revelrous essays about art and artists Like Love is a momentous, raucous collection of essays drawn from twenty years of Maggie Nelson's brilliant work. These profiles, reviews, remembrances, tributes, and critical essays, as well as several conversations with friends and idols, bring to life Nelson's passion for dialogue and dissent. The range of subjects is wide—from Prince to Carolee Schneemann to Matthew Barney to Lhasa de Sela to Kara Walker—but certain themes recur: intergenerational exchange; love and friendship; feminist and queer issues, especially as they shift over time; subversion, transgression, and perversity; the roles of the critic and of language in relation to visual and performance arts; forces that feed or impede certain bodies and creators; and the fruits and follies of a life spent devoted to making. Arranged chronologically, Like Love shows the writing, thinking, feeling, reading, looking, and conversing that occupied Nelson while writing iconic books such as Bluets and The Argonauts. As such, it is a portrait of a time, an anarchic party rich with wild guests, a window into Nelson's own development, and a testament to the profound sustenance offered by art and artists.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":40620233949207,"sku":"9781644452813","price":32.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/products\/content_39952038-223f-4522-87be-af9e40f5d7eb.jpg?v=1691882605"},{"product_id":"rilke-ranier-maria-letters-topb","title":"Rilke, Ranier Maria: Letters to a Young Poet","description":"\u003cp\u003eVintage, paperback\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTranslated by Stephen Mitchell\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublication Date: October 12, 1986\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublisher Marketing: The ten letters collected here are arguably the most famous and beloved letters of our century. Written when Rainer Maria Rilke was himself still a young man with most of his greatest work before him, they are addressed to a student who had sent Rilke some of his work, asking for advice about becoming a writer. The two never met, but over a period of several years Rilke wrote him these ten letters, which have been enjoyed by hundreds of thousands of readers for what Stephen Mitchell calls the \"vibrant and deeply felt experience of life\" that informs them.\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":40679359905815,"sku":"9780394741048","price":12.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/products\/view_archive_b6b53d6f-e337-4883-87a1-f2aff08206f6.jpg?v=1697662167"},{"product_id":"pasternak-tsvetayeva-rilke-letters-s","title":"Pasternak, Boris \/ Tsvetayeva, Marina \/ Rilke, Rainer Maria: Letters: Summer 1926","description":"\u003cp\u003eNYRB, paperback\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublication Date: October 31, 2001\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublisher Marketing: The summer of 1926 was a time of trouble and uncertainty for each of the three poets whose correspondence is collected in this moving volume. Marina Tsvetayeva was living in exile in France and struggling to get by. Boris Pasternak was in Moscow, trying to come to terms with the new Bolshevik regime. Rainer Maria Rilke, in Switzerland, was dying. Though hardly known to each other, they began to correspond, exchanging a series of searching letters in which every aspect of life and work is discussed with extraordinary intensity and passion. Letters: Summer 1926 takes the reader into the hearts and minds of three of the twentieth century's greatest poets at a moment of maximum emotional and creative pressure.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":40679366524951,"sku":"9780940322714","price":22.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/files\/813TrPJg6JL._SL1500.jpg?v=1773351070"},{"product_id":"hughes-ted-birthday-lpb","title":"Hughes, Ted: Birthday Letters","description":"\u003cp\u003eFarrar, Straus and Giroux, paperback\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublication Date: \u003cspan\u003eMarch 30, 1999\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublisher Marketing: \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFormerly Poet Laureate to Queen Elizabeth II, the late Ted Hughes (1930-98) is recognized as one of the few contemporary poets whose work has mythic scope and power. And few episodes in postwar literature have the legendary stature of Hughes's romance with, and marriage to, the great American poet Sylvia Plath.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eThe poems in \u003c\/span\u003e\u003ci\u003eBirthday Letters\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cspan\u003e are addressed (with just two exceptions) to Plath, and were written over a period of more than twenty-five years, the first a few years after her suicide in 1963. Some are love letters, others haunted recollections and ruminations. In them, Hughes recalls his and Plath's time together, drawing on the powerful imagery of his work--animal, vegetable, mythological--as well as on Plath's famous verse.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eCountless books have discussed the subject of this intense relationship from a necessary distance, but this volume--at last--offers us Hughes's own account. 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Edmund Wilson counted him as 'one of the half dozen greatest English writers, ' and T. S. Eliot has paid tribute to the Shakespearean quality of Keats's greatness. Indeed, his work has survived better than that of any of his contemporaries the devaluation of Romantic poetry that began early in this century. This Modern Library edition contains all of Keats's magnificent verse: 'Lamia, ' 'Isabella, ' and 'The Eve of St. Agnes'; his sonnets and odes; the allegorical romance \u003c\/span\u003e\u003ci\u003eEndymion;\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cspan\u003e and the five-act poetic tragedy \u003c\/span\u003e\u003ci\u003eOtho the Great.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cspan\u003e Presented as well are the famous posthumous and fugitive poems, including the fragmentary 'The Eve of Saint Mark' and the great 'La Belle Dame sans Merci, ' perhaps the most distinguished literary ballad in the language. 'No one else in English poetry, save Shakespeare, has in expression quite the fascinating felicity of Keats, his perception of loveliness, ' said Matthew Arnold. 'In the faculty of naturalistic interpretation, in what we call natural magic, he ranks with Shakespeare.'\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":40817142398999,"sku":"9780375756696","price":19.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/products\/view_archive_7c320e40-85ba-4b0e-9122-0a6933462169.jpg?v=1703281196"},{"product_id":"pereira-malin-ed-into-a-lig","title":"Pereira, Malin (ed.): Into a Light Both Brilliant and Unseen","description":"\u003cp\u003eUniversity of Georgia Press, paperback\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublication Date: \u003cspan\u003eDecember 01, 2010\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublisher Marketing:\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMalin Pereira's collection of eight interviews with leading contemporary African American poets offers an in-depth look at the cultural and aesthetic perspectives of the post-Black Arts Movement generation.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eThis volume includes unpublished interviews Pereira conducted with Wanda Coleman, Yusef Komunyakaa, Thylias Moss, Harryette Mullen, Cornelius Eady, and Elizabeth Alexander, as well as conversations with Rita Dove and Cyrus Cassells previously in print. Largely published since 1980, each of these poets has at least four books. Their influence on new generations of poets has been wide-reaching.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eThe work of this group, says Pereira, is a departure from the previous generation's proscriptive manifestos in favor of more inclusive voices, perspectives, and techniques. Although these poets reject a rigid adherence to a specific black aesthetic, their work just as effectively probes racism, stereotyping, and racial politics. Unlike Amiri Baraka's claim in \"Home\" that he becomes blacker and blacker, positioning race as a defining essence, these poets imagine a plurality of ideas about the relationship between blackness and black poetry. They question the idea of an established literary canon defining black literature. For these poets, Pereira says, the idea of \"home\" is found both in black poetry circles and in the wider transnational community of literature.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":40817195450391,"sku":"9780820337135","price":26.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/products\/7601327-L.jpg?v=1703281943"},{"product_id":"celan-paul-ingeborg-bachmann-correspond","title":"Celan, Paul \u0026 Bachmann, Ingeborg: Correspondence","description":"\u003cp\u003eSeagull, paperback\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTranslated by: Wieland Hoban\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublication Date: \u003cspan\u003eNovember 15, 2019\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublisher Marketing: \u003cspan\u003ePaul Celan (1920-70) is one of the best-known German poets of the Holocaust; many of his poems, admired for their spare, precise diction, deal directly with its stark themes. Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-73) is recognized as one of post-World War II German literature's most important novelists, poets, and playwrights. It seems only appropriate that these two contemporaries and masters of language were at one time lovers, and they shared a lengthy, artful, and passionate correspondence.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eCollected here for the first time in English are their letters written between 1948 and 1961. Their correspondence forms a moving testimony of the discourse of love in the age after Auschwitz, with all the symptomatic disturbances and crises caused by their conflicting backgrounds and their hard-to-reconcile designs for living--as a woman, as a man, as writers. In addition to the almost 200 letters, the volume includes an important exchange between Bachmann and Gisèle Celan-Lestrange, who married Celan in 1951, as well as the letters between Paul Celan and Swiss writer Max Frisch.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"Scarcely more breathlessly and desperately can two lovers ever have struggled for words. Little known among German literary historians, the relationship between these two poets amounts to one of the most dramatic and momentous occurrences in German literature.\"--\u003ci\u003eFAZ\u003c\/i\u003e, on the German edition\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":40817203871767,"sku":"9780857426420","price":16.5,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/files\/9780857426420.jpg?v=1737068340"},{"product_id":"tsvetaeva-marina-earthly-sipb","title":"Tsvetaeva, Marina: Earthly Signs: Moscow Diaries, 1917-1922","description":"\u003cp\u003eNew York Review of Books, paperback\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTranslated by Jamey Gambrell\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublication Date: December 05, 2017\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublisher Marketing: A moving collection of autobiographical essays from a Russian poet and refugee of the Bolshevik Revolution.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMarina Tsvetaeva ranks with Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, and Boris Pasternak as one of Russia's greatest twentieth-century poets. Her suicide at the age of forty-eight was the tragic culmination of a life buffeted by political upheaval. The essays collected in this volume are based on diaries she kept during the turbulent years of the Revolution and Civil War. In them she records conversations of women in the markets, soldiers and peasants on the train traveling from the Crimea to Moscow in October 1917, fighting in the streets of Moscow, a frantic scramble with co-workers to dig frozen potatoes out of a cellar, and poetry readings organized by a newly minted Soviet bohemia. Alone in Moscow with two small children, no income, and a missing husband, Tsvetaeva struggled to feed her daughters (one of whom died of malnutrition in an orphanage), find employment in the Soviet bureaucracy, and keep writing poetry. Her keen and ruthless eye observes with compassion and humor--bringing the social, economic, and cultural chaos of the period to life. These autobiographical writings not only give a vivid eyewitness account of Russian history but provide vital insights into the workings of Tsvetaeva's unique poetics.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIncludes black and white photographs.\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":40817251778583,"sku":"9781681371627","price":18.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/files\/images_b5932922-6f94-49e2-bd91-0878109b132d.jpg?v=1747953606"},{"product_id":"amiri-barapb","title":"Moreno Pisano, Claudia (ed.): Amiri Baraka and Edward Dorn: The Collected Letters","description":"\u003cp\u003eUniversity of New Mexico Press, paperback\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublication Date: June 15, 2024\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublisher Marketing: From the end of the 1950s through the middle of the 1960s, Amiri Baraka (b. 1934) and Edward Dorn (1929-1999), two self-consciously avant-garde poets, fostered an intense friendship primarily through correspondence. The early 1960s found both poets just beginning to publish and becoming public figures. Bonding around their commitment to new and radical forms of poetry and culture, Dorn and Baraka created an interracial friendship at precisely the moment when the Civil Rights Movement was becoming a powerful force in national politics. The major premise of the Dorn-Jones friendship as developed through their letters was artistic, but the range of subjects in the correspondence shows an incredible intersection between the personal and the public, providing a schematic map of what was so vital in postwar American culture to those living through it.\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eTheir letters offer a vivid picture of American lives connecting around poetry during a tumultuous time of change and immense creativity. Reading through these correspondences allows access into personal biographies, and through these biographies, profound moments in American cultural history open themselves to us in a way not easily found in official channels of historical narrative and memory.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":40885132689431,"sku":"9780826366344","price":29.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/products\/content_fe2b5824-79e6-436f-9a31-c0a6c040dbfe.jpg?v=1706733454"},{"product_id":"artaud-antonin-journey-topb","title":"Artaud, Antonin: Journey to Mexico: Revolutionary Messages \u0026 the Tarahumara","description":"\u003cp\u003eContra Mundum Press, paperback\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePublication Date: March 4, 2024\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePublisher Marketing: On 10 January 1936, the poet, actor, and dramatic theorist, Antonin Artaud departed Europe on a journey to Mexico that would take him from the streets, cafés, and lecture halls of Mexico City to the remote mountains of the Sierra Tarahumara. The journey would last only ten months, culminating in some six to eight weeks spent among the Tarahumara (Rarámuri), but it was a profound turning point in his life.\rArtaud didn't just leave Europe. He fled it. \"I came to Mexico to escape European civilization … I hoped to find a vital form of culture.\" The vital form of culture that he sought was one wherein individual and communal behaviors were rooted in the soil of a place, wherein the rituals of religion reinforced a connection in human lives between the earth and the sun.\rBut Artaud's search for a vital form of culture would not be a simple one. His appeal to indigenous culture would first require an intense and intricate effort at aesthetic, religious, political, and philosophical decolonization. And this intellectual work would not be without a psychological cost.\rJourney to Mexico collects very nearly all of Artaud's writings related to his voyage to the land of the Tarahumara: the writings he prepared prior to this journey; the pieces he published in Mexico and the lectures he delivered there; the essays, letters, and poems that he wrote in the years after his journey, reflecting on and reframing his experiences. A selection of letters written before, during, and after the trip conveys the very personal — the physical, emotional, and financial — challenges of the journey. \rArtaud's Journey to Mexico takes us far from home to the limits of art and anthropology, myth and religion, to confront the legacies of colonial conquest and the possibility of decolonization in a desperate search for a \"vital form of culture.\"\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":41016287625239,"sku":"9781940625645","price":34.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/files\/1705232134-900.jpg?v=1711579589"},{"product_id":"murillo-john-dear-yusefhb","title":"Murillo, John: Dear Yusef","description":"\u003cp\u003eWesleyan University Press\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublication Date: November 5, 2024\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublisher Marketing: Anthology of new work honoring the legacy of a celebrated African American poet This carefully and generously curated mosaic of essays, letters, and poems reveals the profound impact that poet Yusef Komunyakaa has had on poets, educators, and readers worldwide. The anthology brings together creative and critical offerings from fellow poets, former students, literary entities, and other admirers. There are emerging and established voices—from previously unpublished writers to Pulitzer Prize winning poets. Together these pieces honor one of the most influential writers of the last half century, one, it turns out, who is as beloved for his teaching as he is celebrated for his creative work.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eContributors include Terrance Hayes, Sharon Olds, Carolyn Forché, Toi Derricotte, and Martín Espada, among others. \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDear Yusef affirms Komunyakaa's transformative influence, showcasing how his mentoring has ignited creativity, nurtured passion, and fostered a sense of belonging among countless individuals. Through the artistry of these testimonials, we witness the transformative power of poetry and the enduring legacy of a true literary icon. Sample Poem: from \"Reading Yusef,\" by Major Jackson Over powdered beignets, over a demitasse of chicory near Royal, I came to grips I am the lonely sort for I am ever seeking potions, my head sideways, a book winged in my hand, its words from the chitlin circuit, fried dough going cold and congealing, passing tourists drowned out, a sullen look on my face. It is when I most want to make love.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDostoevsky was a way out of my confusion, as was Baraka whom I gave my reverence freely. Nothing I believed stayed, and thus, my melancholy deepened though banjos and clarinets played the streets through late afternoon rain, maybe Black Bottom Stomp, eucalyptus and live oaks aging against arpeggio-runs. from \"The Forty-Fourth Poem,\" by Jennifer Grotz The first student in my correspondence course who completed the final lesson on Dien Cai Dau was, like many students in that course, incarcerated in the Indiana State Penitentiary. In his essay, he wrote that Dien Cai Dau was the first book of poems he'd ever read. He'd been so taken with the experience that he'd proceeded to read poems from it aloud to his fellow inmates, after which they'd exchanged stories about being in the military, about Vietnam. He wrote about what it was like to witness violence. About what it was like to be numb, or to want to be numbHe also wrote about appreciating beauty, especially natural beauty, and of an awareness of gratitude for some grace that had nonetheless kept him alive, about how the poems still gave him hope.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDien Cai Dau had had a profound effect on him. from \"Dear Yusef,\" by Emily Jungmin Yoon The framework of your class was always care. Because you cared for us, we cared for one another. From then on, my poetry was always about love, even when it spoke through ugly histories, because I wanted to love the people in those narratives.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":41479037550615,"sku":"9780819501349","price":24.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/files\/71crFWoTAPL._AC_UF1000_1000_QL80.jpg?v=1719002981"},{"product_id":"heaney-seamus-the-letterhb","title":"Heaney, Seamus: The Letters of Seamus Heaney (HB)","description":"\u003cp\u003eFarrar, Straus and Giroux, hardcover\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePublication Date: September 10, 2024\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePublisher Marketing: The letters provide us with an intimate, multilayered understanding of this extraordinary poet's life and mind. Every now and again I need to get down here, to get into the Diogenes tub, as it were, or the Colmcille beehive hut, or the Mossbawn scullery. At any rate, a hedge surrounds me, the blackbird calls, the soul settles for an hour or two. In this astute selection from Seamus Heaney's vast correspondence, we are given direct access to the life and poetic development of a literary titan, from his early days in Belfast, through his controversial decision to settle in the Republic, to the gradual broadening of horizons that culminated in the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature and the years of international eminence that kept him heroically busy until his death. Christopher Reid draws from both public and private archives to reveal this remarkable story in the poet's own words. Generous, funny, exuberant, confiding, irreverent, empathetic, and deeply thoughtful, The Letters of Seamus Heaney encompasses decades-long relationships with friends and colleagues, as well as an unstinted responsiveness to passing acquaintances. 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An intimate look at this canonical poet's process, mental health, and quotidian moments during the early 1950s. Paul Celan, a Jewish poet born in the Bukovina, now part of Romania, who survived the Nazi genocide and moved to Paris while continuing to write in German, is recognized as one of the most powerful poetic imaginations of the second half of the twentieth century. His work, a touchstone not only for poets but for historians and philosophers, has been translated into countless languages. The letters he wrote to his wife, the artist Gisèle Lestrange, now published for the first time in English, provide the best picture we have of Celan's complicated personality and the course of his life, both private and public. The life was troubled by paranoid episodes and repeated mental breakdowns ending in hospitalization, and in 1970 he committed suicide. At the same time, his devotion to his work as a poet and translator (of Shakespeare, Dickinson, and Mandelstam, among others) was unflagging. This selection of his letters to Gisèle, which also includes his letters to his young son, Eric, as well as significant number of Gisèle's own letters, covers almost all of his literary career, and while it is a personal document, offering a remarkable protrait of a great poet, a tender husband and father, and a difficult but enduring marriage, it is also a poetic one, providing Celan's translations for Gisèle of his poems from German into French and his extensive commentaries on them. It takes us to Celan's work desk, capturing him in the act of composition while also giving us Celan's reading of Celan. Bertrand Badiou's notes transmit precious information about Celan's work and life. 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Just pull up a chair and listen.\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":41976101732375,"sku":"9781946448804","price":16.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/files\/81HlXowIsgL._SY522.jpg?v=1739057273"},{"product_id":"randall-margaret-letters-frpb","title":"Randall, Margaret: Letters from the Edge: Outrider Conversations","description":"\u003cp\u003eNew Village Press, paperback\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePublication Date: April 1, 2025\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePublisher Marketing: By excerpting from letters she exchanged with five irreverent writers and artists, Margaret Randall constructs conversations that open windows on four pivotal moments in her life and on world events. This correspondence touches on important themes, such as social change, identity, art, and creative integrity—issues that were relevant then and remain so today. The letters are sometimes philosophical, sometimes intimate, and deal with family life as well as major creative projects, including literary political publishing, often taken on against daunting odds. Society continuously tries to subsume or shape influential rebel minds to its interests. Every generation has those who will not allow themselves to be silenced or controlled. This book is exciting evidence of this. Chapters: I. Walter Lowenfels: A Poet Who Laughed at Time II. Laurette Séjourné: A Woman with Pick and Shovel and Arnaldo Orfila: A Man Who Filled a Century III. Susan Sherman: A Woman Before Her Time IV. 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Fittingly, then, when he was invited to deliver the Norton Lectures at Harvard in 1989, Ashbery declined to spell out what he put on the page. Instead, he offered rapt audiences a tour of his influences, the authors he turned to as a “jumpstart for times when the batteries have run down.”\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eThe poets in Ashbery’s personal canon—John Clare, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Raymond Roussel, John Wheelwright, Laura Riding, and David Schubert—were all tragic figures in their own way, plagued by mental illness or poverty, ridiculed or barely recognized in their own lives, and in some cases, all but forgotten today. More importantly for Ashbery, each wrote poetry that somehow defies the reader. Clare’s sometimes-monotonous naturalism, Roussel’s exhausting maze of parenthetical clauses, and Wheelwright’s eccentric Anglican mysticism do not invite casual reading. But under Ashbery’s tutelage, we experience the idiosyncratic brilliance of these “other traditions,” discovering how they shaped not only Ashbery’s poetics but also the broader trajectory of twentieth-century literature, from surrealism to New Criticism.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eWith inimitable charm, wit, and erudition, the lectures collected in \u003c\/span\u003e\u003ci\u003eOther Traditions\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cspan\u003e elevate the imperfect and peculiar, affirming the literary virtues of Ashbery’s difficult predecessors. The result is a revealing self-portrait of one of the giants of American poetry, if only through a convex mirror.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42137152389143,"sku":"9780674302440","price":22.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/files\/9780674302440_d6743.jpg?v=1742498593"},{"product_id":"dahlen-beverly-something-pb","title":"Dahlen, Beverly: Something\/Nothing","description":"\u003cp\u003eFurther Other Book Works, paperback\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublication Date: April 1, 2025\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublisher Marketing: \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eA selection of essays and talks spanning Beverly Dahlen's career, with an introduction by Jocelyn Saidenberg, an afterword by Susan Gevirtz, and a selected bibliography. 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Dahlen’s work is vital, original, and above all, bold.\" --Rachel Blau DuPlessis, author of Drafts\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42182810828823,"sku":"9780989313292","price":18.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/files\/1740494052-900_1.jpg?v=1743280112"},{"product_id":"lee-li-young-breaking-tpb","title":"Lee, Li-Young: Breaking the Alabaster Jar","description":"\u003cp\u003eBOA Editions, paperback\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublication Date: September 1, 2006\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublisher Marketing: \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn the foreword to Li-Young Lee's first book,\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003ci\u003eRose\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e(BOA Editions, 1986), Gerald Stern wrote, \"What characterizes Li-Young Lee's poetry is a certain kind of humility, a kind of cunning, a love of plain speech, a search for wisdom and understanding. . . . I think we are in the presence of a true spirit.\" Poetry lovers agree!\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003ci\u003eRose\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003ehas gone on to sell more than eighty thousand copies, and Li-Young Lee has become one of the country's most beloved poets.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eBreaking the Alabaster Jar: Conversations with Li-Young Lee\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003eis a collection of the best dozen interviews given by Li-Young Lee over the past twenty years. From a twenty-nine-year-old poet prodigy to a seasoned veteran in high demand for readings and appearances across the United States and abroad, these interviews capture Li-Young Lee at various stages of his artistic development. He not only discusses his family's flight from political oppression in China and Indonesia, but how that journey affected his poetry and the engaging, often painful, insights being raised a cultural outsider in America afforded him. 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Spicer writes tenderly to lovers and friends in self-reflective series that recall the poetic sequences in \u003ci\u003eMy Vocabulary Did This To Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer\u003c\/i\u003e. Letters to elders like Charles Olson and Ezra Pound and to poetic collaborators like Robin Blaser and Robert Duncan provide insight into the inner workings of an avant-garde, and are indispensable documents for students of 20th century American poetry. Writing to younger poets, Spicer offers inspiring words of mentorship--sometimes with a sting--about how to live in total devotion to art. Spicer's letters paint a unique portrait of the political and personal challenges faced by a gay man at mid-century, including documents from his involvement in the early gay rights movement. 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A collaborative work of friendship as much as the occasion for philosophical scholarship, where one can find the answers to burning questions like: What makes sex good? What constitutes a good reason to dislike someone? What does my nipple piercing mean for your nipples? 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It is in this context that he is one of the masters of our contemporary language.\"\u003cbr\u003e--Peter Ackroyd\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"Ed was one of the most thoughtful but penetrating thinkers. There was no PollyAnna in him at all. And that's what I liked about him.\"\u003cbr\u003e--Amiri Baraka\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAlong with Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, Denise Levertov, William Carlos Williams, and others, Edward Dorn taught at and became associated with the Black Mountain school in North Carolina. 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As the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer wrote, \"Paul Celan's poems reach us, but we miss them.\" Perhaps through these rare prose texts we may find the key to what we missed.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44898219720727,"sku":"9780811240529","price":15.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/files\/71S4vAoqGhL._SL1500.jpg?v=1775076925"},{"product_id":"fleckenstein-mark-wherever-ypb","title":"[06\/16\/26] Fleckenstein, Mark: Wherever You Go, There You Are: Letters Rescued from a Fire","description":"\u003cp\u003eUnsolicited Press, paperback\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublication Date: June 16, 2026\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublisher Marketing: \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWHEREVER YOU GO, THERE YOU ARE: Letters Rescued from a Fire by Mark Fleckenstein is a fractured, obsessive, deeply intimate collection that moves through longing, memory, art, emotional collapse, and the impossible desire to reconstruct what has already vanished. Part poetry collection, part epistolary artifact, part meditation on obsession and survival, the book assembles \"left-handed correspondence\" from a brief but life-altering exchange between two artists whose connection burns long after contact ends.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAcross letters, commentary, prose fragments, and poems threaded through recurring symbols of red shoes, birds, mirrors, windows, photographs, and unfinished conversations, Fleckenstein interrogates what happens when memory becomes both sanctuary and wound. The collection wrestles with the limits of language itself: how words fail, distort, seduce, memorialize, and sometimes imprison the people who depend on them most.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe poems move through dream logic and emotional excavation with startling vulnerability, tracing the psychic afterlife of desire, artistic awakening, abuse, regret, loneliness, and the strange endurance of hope. These pieces are not interested in neat resolution. 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