“Poets,” a term taken from the ancient Greek, “to make”– have contributed significantly to linguistic, artistic, and even practical aspects of language. Poetry is unique among literary forms, it enhances empathy, self-expression, and is in many ways the perfect medium for complicated thought. Over the years, 91ĚŇÉ« has made it a part of its publishing mission to increase awareness and appreciation of this art form, and we are excited to share our array of offerings.
In Poetry’s Data, Meredith Martin explores what current access to data might mean for mapping the discourse of poems. Martin’s account of her work learning about digital humanities so that she could build a database of historic prosodic materials becomes a through line in a narrative that chronicles how literature has understood poetry’s data—its sounds—from the sixteenth century to the present day.
Since 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall, Russian poetry has exuded a powerful awareness of freedom, both aesthetic and political. No longer confined to the cultural underground, poets reacted with immediacy to events in the world. In The Freest Speech in Russia, Stephanie Sandler offers the first English-language study of contemporary Russian poetry, showing how these poems both express and exemplify freedom.
Seeking to find a song of the self that can survive or even thrive amid the mundane routines of work, Ariel Yelen’s lyrics include wry reflections on the absurdities and abjection of being a poet who is also an office worker and commuter in New York. In the poems’ dialogues between labor and autonomy, the beeping of a microwave in the staff lounge becomes an opportunity for song, the poet writes from a cubicle as it is being sawed in half, and the speaker of the title poem decides “to quit everything except work...”
In Stet, poet Dora Malech takes constraint as her catalyst and subject, exploring what it means to make or break a vow, to create art out of a life in flux, to reckon with the body’s bounds, and to arrive at a place where one might bear and care for another life. Tapping the inventive possibilities of constrained forms, particularly the revealing limitations of the anagram, Stet is a work of serious play that brings home the connections and intimacies of language.
In A Kiss for the Absolute, Mary Jo Bang, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, and her fellow poet and translator Yuki Tanaka present the first collection in English of Shuzo Takiguchi’s ingenious, playful, and erotic poems, complete with an introduction and the original Japanese texts on facing pages.
The Owl and the Nightingale, one of the earliest literary works in Middle English, is a lively, anonymous comic poem about two birds who embark on a war of words in a wood, with a nearby poet reporting their argument in rhyming couplets, line by line and blow by blow. In this engaging and energetic verse translation, Simon Armitage captures the verve and humor of this dramatic tale with all the cut and thrust of the original.
C. P. Cavafy (1863–1933) is the most important figure in twentieth-century Greek poetry, and his poems are considered among the most powerful in modern European literature. Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard’s celebrated English translation of Cavafy’s collected poems captures the poet’s mixture of formal and idiomatic language, the immediacy of his frank treatment of homoeroticism, his brilliant re-creation of history, and his astute political ironies.
In this new edition of George Seferis’s poems, the acclaimed translations by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard are revised and presented in a compact, English-only volume. The revision covers all the poems published in 91ĚŇɫ’s earlier bilingual edition, George Seferis: Collected Poems (expanded edition, 1981). Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1963, George Seferis (1900-1971) has long been recognized as a major international figure, and Keeley and Sherrard are his ideal translators.
Modern Russian lyric poets, often on the right side of history but the wrong side of their country’s politics, have engaged intensely with subjectivity, aesthetic movements, ideology (usually subversive), and literature itself. All the World on a Page gathers thirty-four poems, written between 1907 and 2022, presenting each poem in the original Russian and an English translation, accompanied by an essay that places the poem in its cultural, historical, and biographical contexts.
A major American writer, thinker, and activist, Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) transformed herself from a traditional, Radcliffe-educated lyric poet and married mother of three sons into a path-breaking lesbian-feminist author of forceful, uncompromising prose as well as poetry. Drawing on a wealth of unpublished materials, including Rich’s correspondence and in-depth interviews with many people who knew her, Hilary Holladay provides a vividly detailed, full-dimensional portrait of a woman whose work and life continue to challenge and inspire new generations.
City of Beginnings is an exploration of modernism in Arabic poetry, a movement that emerged in Beirut during the 1950s and became the most influential and controversial Arabic literary development of the twentieth century. Robyn Creswell introduces English-language readers to a poetic movement that will be uncannily familiar—and unsettlingly strange. He also provides an intellectual history of Lebanon during the early Cold War, when Beirut became both a battleground for rival ideologies and the most vital artistic site in the Middle East.
In his 1668 preface to Paradise Lost, John Milton rejected the use of rhyme, portraying himself as a revolutionary freeing English verse from “the troublesome and modern bondage of Riming.” Despite his claim to be a pioneer, Milton was not initiating a new line of thought—English poets had been debating about rhyme and its connections to liberty, freedom, and constraint since Queen Elizabeth’s reign. Examining a poetic feature that sits between sound and sense, liberty and measure, The Fetters of Rhyme elucidates early modern efforts to negotiate these forces in verse making and reading.
When T. S. Eliot published The Waste Land in 1922, it put the thirty-four-year-old author on a path to worldwide fame and the Nobel Prize. “But,” as Jed Rasula writes, “The Waste Land is not only a poem: it names an event, like a tornado or an earthquake. Its publication was a watershed, marking a before and after. In What the Thunder Said, Rasula tells the story of how The Waste Land changed poetry forever and how this cultural bombshell served as a harbinger of modernist revolution in all the arts, from abstraction in visual art to atonality in music.
Charles Singleton’s English-language translation of The Divine Comedy is widely considered to be one of the finest renderings of Dante’s masterpiece. Singleton’s prose is both faithful and scholarly, and sensitive to the subtle nuances of meaning and richness of reference in Dante’s epic poem. Here for the first time is the single-volume edition of Singleton’s celebrated translation.
An intimate portrait of a work that has challenged and inspired generations of readers, Dante’s “Divine Comedy” reveals how Dante’s strikingly original and controversial vision of the afterlife can help us define our spiritual beliefs, better understand ourselves, and navigate the complexities of modern life.
An essential companion to Milton’s poetic masterpiece, this book shows why Paradise Lost continues to serve as a mirror reflecting our own complex attitudes about power and authority, justice and revolt, and sin and salvation.
Beautifully written and skillfully blending biography, literary appreciation, and descriptions of TĂłibĂn’s travels to Bishop’s Nova Scotia, Key West, and Brazil, On Elizabeth Bishop provides a fresh and memorable look at a beloved poet even as it gives us a window into the mind of one of today’s most acclaimed novelists.
Reading the Odyssey is an introduction to Homer’s masterpiece like no other. It combines a cultural and intellectual history of the epic with an in-depth exploration of its unique and influential narrative structure and the ways it continues to inform issues of identity, meaning and experience.