Andrew Zawacki - Böcker

By Reason of Breakings, Andrew Zawacki's first book of poetry, overwhelms and silences by virtue of its extremely austere beauty. In highly wrought lyrics, prose poems, fragments of apocrypha, and splintered efforts at song, this volume is forceful and haunted by doubt. Each intimate and restrained line is a glimpse at a wisdom that defies paraphrase, each image carefully chosen and constructed. Zawacki's language summons and invites and is almost menacing in its delicate intensity: "Weight is the syntax of filling empty spaces: scalpels and expired tissue fall, but fire rises to fever and sere." While pursuing an explanation for the disappearance of God and for the denouement of a love affair, and exploring the failure of language to compensate or console, these poems maintain their sublime power and elegance.

In-depth interviews with poets have been a popular feature of Verse magazine-and this volume collects many favorites, along with new interviews commissioned for this collection. The poets represent a wide range of aesthetics, ethnicities and politics. Although a particular focus of the book is emerging and innovative American poets, the collection also features interviews with Australian, Scottish, Irish, Czech, Slovenian and Kashmiri poets, as well as established American poets such as Hayden Carruth and Charles Wright. A vital record of contemporary poetry and an engaging read. Brian Henry's poetry collections include Graft, American Incident and Astronaut, and he is the editor of On James Tate. Andrew Zawacki is the author of Anabranch and By Reason of Breakings, co-translator of Ales Debeljak's Arrow's Shadow and an editor of Verse since 1995.

Poetry that aspires ‘to conjugate in a future imperfect,’ but a future nonetheless.In his fifth poetry volume, American poet Andrew Zawacki expands his inquiry into the possibilities and dangers of a ‘global pastoral,’ exploring geographies alternately enhanced and flattened out by digital networks, international transit, the uneven and invisible movements of capital, and the unrelenting feedback loops of data surveillance, weather disaster, war. Wheeling interference patterns of systems of meaning, from radio signals and runway signage to foreign phrases and babytalk, interact with the ‘langscape’ of English, while punctuation is retrofitted as coding. In creating a politically committed lyric form that opens all the dimensions of language – sonic and semantic, syntactic and graphic – Unsun sustains an oblique conversation with Paul Celan’s Fadensonnen, Chris Marker’s Sans soleil, and Michael Palmer’s Sun. Loosely structured by the settings of analog photography, the book features a suite of the author’s black-and-white, large format images alongside an adaptation of Tang Dynasty poet Wang Wei and a series of fractured sonnets for – and from – his young daughter.

Gustaf Sobin's Uncollected Poems brings under one set of covers some fugitive pieces that did not make it into his official posthumous Collected Poems (2010), together with some occasional works and two full-length volumes that stood outside the normal trajectory of his poetry: Articles of Light and Elation and Sicilian Miniatures, the former published in a bibliophile edition and the latter never distributed commercially. This Uncollected fills out the picture of the author's work more fully than ever before."Gustaf Sobin's poems are not, in any superficial sense, 'painterly', but there is about them that sense of the intangible which anyone who has done graphic work must have felt hovering about the image and its physical counterpart. They often seek to render this intangibility of a world not yet known at the moment it is seized upon by the forms of language. The forms of language are thus, for Sobin, a fundamental measure of human activity although his poems do not look at that activity within an immediately social context. Sobin's attitude to language and to the way it stylizes our world for us recalls the writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf on the spatial concepts of the Hopi Indians. And Sobin's world, like that of the Hopi, is basic, stripped, often sun-drenched, sometimes arid-and mysterious." -Charles Tomlinson

Gustaf Sobin's Collected appeared posthumously in 2010, and has been unavailable now for some two years. Given our long association with the author - his work appeared in the very first issue of Shearsman magazine in 1981, and we published three chapbooks of his work at various times in the 1980s and 1990s - we are delighted to be able to bring this major volume back into print. Sobin was an American poet of a very singular kind, but allied in some ways to the Objectivists and to poets such as Robert Creeley and Robert Duncan. Crucially, he spent most of his adult life in Provence, and counted France, and French poets, amongst his most important influences. This makes him stand apart from his US contemporaries and leaves him in a slightly odd corner of the literary landscape. What is not in doubt, however, is the quality of the work. Sobin was a major poet, by any standard."I can't think of anyone in our time who has trod the via negativa so determinedly and with such purpose. The texture of the ground, but also the grain of what lies beneath it. And so, the miracle, as Oppen would say, that there is a music in all this, in all this nothing, our brief glimpse." -Michael Palmer "Sobin is a master of hoverings, hesitances, etched definitions of movement, soundings, fine measurings of air. He leads the mind into a poetry of great distinction, awakening the spirit to a world of errant clarities renewed." -Robert Duncan"Gustaf Sobin is sui generis, one of the deep figures of recent times. He is one of our dark and scintillating stars, his poetry a gift to our art now when there is a dearth of beauty and of myriadness of intelligence." -Michael McClure"Gustaf Sobin's poems are not, in any superficial sense, 'painterly', but there is about them that sense of the intangible which anyone who has done graphic work must have felt hovering about the image and its physical counterpart. They often seek to render this intangibility of a world not yet known at the moment it is seized upon by the forms of language. The forms of language are thus, for Sobin, a fundamental measure of human activity although his poems do not look at that activity within an immediately social context. Sobin's attitude to language and to the way it stylizes our world for us recalls the writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf on the spatial concepts of the Hopi Indians. And Sobin's world, like that of the Hopi, is basic, stripped, often sun-drenched, sometimes arid - and mysterious." -Charles Tomlinson"This expatriate American poet is a national treasure." -Rain Taxi

Gustaf Sobin's Collected appeared posthumously in 2010, and has been unavailable now for some two years. Given our long association with the author - his work appeared in the very first issue of Shearsman magazine in 1981, and we published three chapbooks of his work at various times in the 1980s and 1990s - we are delighted to be able to bring this major volume back into print. Sobin was an American poet of a very singular kind, but allied in some ways to the Objectivists and to poets such as Robert Creeley and Robert Duncan. Crucially, he spent most of his adult life in Provence, and counted France, and French poets, amongst his most important influences. This makes him stand apart from his US contemporaries and leaves him in a slightly odd corner of the literary landscape. What is not in doubt, however, is the quality of the work. Sobin was a major poet, by any standard."I can't think of anyone in our time who has trod the via negativa so determinedly and with such purpose. The texture of the ground, but also the grain of what lies beneath it. And so, the miracle, as Oppen would say, that there is a music in all this, in all this nothing, our brief glimpse." -Michael Palmer"Sobin is a master of hoverings, hesitances, etched definitions of movement, soundings, fine measurings of air. He leads the mind into a poetry of great distinction, awakening the spirit to a world of errant clarities renewed." -Robert Duncan"Gustaf Sobin is sui generis, one of the deep figures of recent times. He is one of our dark and scintillating stars, his poetry a gift to our art now when there is a dearth of beauty and of myriadness of intelligence." -Michael McClure"Gustaf Sobin's poems are not, in any superficial sense, 'painterly', but there is about them that sense of the intangible which anyone who has done graphic work must have felt hovering about the image and its physical counterpart. They often seek to render this intangibility of a world not yet known at the moment it is seized upon by the forms of language. The forms of language are thus, for Sobin, a fundamental measure of human activity although his poems do not look at that activity within an immediately social context. Sobin's attitude to language and to the way it stylizes our world for us recalls the writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf on the spatial concepts of the Hopi Indians. And Sobin's world, like that of the Hopi, is basic, stripped, often sun-drenched, sometimes arid - and mysterious." -Charles Tomlinson"This expatriate American poet is a national treasure." -Rain Taxi

Slovenia emerged from the former Yugoslavia in 1991 following a brief skirmish that prefigured the Balkan conflicts that persist to this day. Part of one empire or another for centuries, Slovenia was denied a cultural identity of its own. Its writers, however, insisted on writing in their native tongue, thus keeping Slovenian culture alive in the written word. The confused, confusing questions of Europe, ethnicity, empire, and autonomy are often only backdrop to what may of these writers have sought to foreground, namely, an attention to private life and its attendant sorrows and joy. In their work Slovenian authors still insist upon fidelity to a personal dialogue that, far from delaying these tragedies, in fact redeems them. Such poignant, reverent pleas for intimacy amid destruction may be the hallmark of most engaging writing in Central Europe, from which Slovenia is a crucial, distinctive voice.