Come Closer and Listen

Charles Simic was a poet, essayist, and translator who was born in Yugoslavia in 1938 and immigrated to the United States in 1954. He published more than twenty books of poetry, in addition to a memoir and numerous books of translations for which he received many honors, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Award, the Griffin Poetry Prize, a MacArthur Fellowship, and the Wallace Stevens Award. In 2007, he served as poet laureate of the United States. He was a distinguished visiting writer at New York University and professor emeritus at the University of New Hampshire, where he taught since 1973. He died in January 2023 at the age of eighty-four.

“Simic...has always challenged and delighted his audience with writing that is beautiful and surreal and forces people to consider the validity of their own perceptions.” — Washington Post“One of our finest poets... singularly engaging, eminently sane...” — New York Review of Books“His poetry … is comic and elegiac in equal measure. It has an Old World sensibility…that he pins to a New World lightness of heart.” — Dwight Garner, New York Times