The final posthumous collection of Angel’s poetry offers spare lyrics set in an urban landscape that seems timeless, universal, and historical.In his own words, Ralph Angel described poetry as “the language for which we have no language.” Across his more than seven books of poetry, Angel’s work has been distinguished by his attention to the spare lyric, at once abstract and philosophical. These are poems that sit at the intersection of immediacy and meditation, offering a thoughtful companionship to the reader. Even Blood is Angel’s final collection of poems, distilling his lifelong engagement with poetry and showcasing the power of his vivid imagery, sharp diction, and attention to structure, no matter how slight.

A collection of essays by poet Ralph Angel, a second-generation American of Sephardic Jewish descent, that reflects on his upbringing, his relationship to language, and the poetry and art that have been his greatest influences.“I speak the word I because I am not anyone or anything else. I am my strangeness, my presence. And by acknowledging it thus, by naming it, I am intending, hoping, I am going elsewhere, toward what I am not.”Drawn from his reflections on being a distinguished translator of Federico García Lorca as well as the lectures he delivered while a longstanding member of the faculty of the Vermont College of Fine Arts, these essays smash conventional truths about writing by showing us that fragmentation has a symmetry of its own and demonstrating that the distinction between poetry and prose is, to say the least, superfluous.Including a foreword by David St. John, these are essays that reveal that Angel was as close and as engaged an observer of artworks of all kinds as he was the world that formed his poems.

A brilliant new collection by the winner of the James Laughlin Award.

Poems, said Robert Lowell, should be events, not records of events. The poems of Twice Removed are events, set in the "bright between," that place between short days and long shadows, between past and future, between the inviolate self and the public person.In this third collection, Angel writes the arias of our subtext, provoking in the reader the recognition of longings just beyond reach of articulation. And though his poems are addressed to complexity, the language is not obscure: Angel's intense, visionary lyricism arrives in a seamless weave of elegance and streetwise savvy, the cadences somehow hypnotic and urgent at once. This is a poet with the audacity to push the very limits of the American idiom in order to say things that could not previously be said, using sounds not previously heard. Ralph Angel stands as an American original, and Twice Removed is a book that will expand his already large and passionate audience of readers.Ralph Angel is the author of two previous collections of poetry: Neither World, which received the 1995 James Laughlin Award of The Academy of American Poets, and Anxious Latitudes, which was published in the Wesleyan University Press New Poets Series. His work has been collected in numerous anthologies, including The Best American Poetry, New American Poets of the '90s, and Forgotten Language: Contemporary Poets and Nature. His most recent honors include a Pushcart Prize and awards from the Fulbright Foundation, Poetry magazine, and the Fundacion Valparaiso in Spain. Originally from Seattle, Mr. Angel now lives in Los Angeles.

“He brings something ancient and compelling . . . a kind of rare Sephardic wisdom, a brilliance traveling at the speed of Los Angeles light. He is one of America’s very best poets. A true visionary.”—Tomaz Salamun  “Angel’s poems are deceptively quiet, deceptively calm. Beneath their carefully constructed surfaces, they are wild, even intimidating. The power of restraint in poetry cannot be overestimated. . . . These poems burn from within.”—Carol Muske-Dukes, LA TimesWith the publication of his award-winning volumes, Anxious Latitudes, Neither World, and Twice Removed, Ralph Angel has won the admiration of readers of contemporary poetry for the extraordinary abstract lyricism of his poems. There is a superb grace, speculative intelligence, and a wry philosophical wisdom to Angel’s poetry. There are few poets so accomplished at creating an elegant yet innovative and provocative voice. Now, in Ralph Angel’s Exceptions and Melancholies: Poems 1986–2006, we find ourselves again in the presence of poetry that will move us even closer to a new and renewed promise of the American sublime. As Mark Doty has written, “These are the poems of a casual, down-to-earth philosopher who’s been spun around and turned inside out by loss, by the desolation of life in the late [and early] hours of the century. . . . Angel’s poems are stamped indelibly with the mark of a unique, shaping imagination, and they’re fresh with news of how it feels to live right now. He creates himself and his poems’ characters, strange people in a strangely familiar place. We recognize them, of course, as well we might since they are ourselves and the city where they live is ours.Ralph Angel is the author of three previous collections of poetry: Anxious Latitudes; Neither World, which received the 1995 James Laughlin Award of The Academy of American Poets; and Twice Removed; as well as a translation of Federico García Lorca’s Poem of the Deep Song.Angel’s poems have appeared in scores of magazines and anthologies, both here and abroad, and recent literary awards include a gift from the Elgin Cox Trust, a Pushcart Prize, the 2003 Willis Barnstone Poetry Translation Prize, a Fulbright Foundation fellowship, and the Bess Hokin Award of the Modern Poetry Association.Mr. Angel is the Edith R. White Distinguished Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Redlands, and a member of the MFA Program in Writing faculty at Vermont College. Originally from Seattle, he lives in Los Angeles.

The final posthumous collection of Angel’s poetry offers spare lyrics set in an urban landscape that seems timeless, universal, and historical.In his own words, Ralph Angel described poetry as “the language for which we have no language.” Across his more than seven books of poetry, Angel’s work has been distinguished by his attention to the spare lyric, at once abstract and philosophical. These are poems that sit at the intersection of immediacy and meditation, offering a thoughtful companionship to the reader. Even Blood is Angel’s final collection of poems, distilling his lifelong engagement with poetry and showcasing the power of his vivid imagery, sharp diction, and attention to structure, no matter how slight.

A collection of essays by poet Ralph Angel, a second-generation American of Sephardic Jewish descent, that reflects on his upbringing, his relationship to language, and the poetry and art that have been his greatest influences.“I speak the word I because I am not anyone or anything else. I am my strangeness, my presence. And by acknowledging it thus, by naming it, I am intending, hoping, I am going elsewhere, toward what I am not.”Drawn from his reflections on being a distinguished translator of Federico García Lorca as well as the lectures he delivered while a longstanding member of the faculty of the Vermont College of Fine Arts, these essays smash conventional truths about writing by showing us that fragmentation has a symmetry of its own and demonstrating that the distinction between poetry and prose is, to say the least, superfluous.Including a foreword by David St. John, these are essays that reveal that Angel was as close and as engaged an observer of artworks of all kinds as he was the world that formed his poems.

A brilliant new collection by the winner of the James Laughlin Award.

Poems, said Robert Lowell, should be events, not records of events. The poems of Twice Removed are events, set in the "bright between," that place between short days and long shadows, between past and future, between the inviolate self and the public person.In this third collection, Angel writes the arias of our subtext, provoking in the reader the recognition of longings just beyond reach of articulation. And though his poems are addressed to complexity, the language is not obscure: Angel's intense, visionary lyricism arrives in a seamless weave of elegance and streetwise savvy, the cadences somehow hypnotic and urgent at once. This is a poet with the audacity to push the very limits of the American idiom in order to say things that could not previously be said, using sounds not previously heard. Ralph Angel stands as an American original, and Twice Removed is a book that will expand his already large and passionate audience of readers.Ralph Angel is the author of two previous collections of poetry: Neither World, which received the 1995 James Laughlin Award of The Academy of American Poets, and Anxious Latitudes, which was published in the Wesleyan University Press New Poets Series. His work has been collected in numerous anthologies, including The Best American Poetry, New American Poets of the '90s, and Forgotten Language: Contemporary Poets and Nature. His most recent honors include a Pushcart Prize and awards from the Fulbright Foundation, Poetry magazine, and the Fundacion Valparaiso in Spain. Originally from Seattle, Mr. Angel now lives in Los Angeles.

“He brings something ancient and compelling . . . a kind of rare Sephardic wisdom, a brilliance traveling at the speed of Los Angeles light. He is one of America’s very best poets. A true visionary.”—Tomaz Salamun  “Angel’s poems are deceptively quiet, deceptively calm. Beneath their carefully constructed surfaces, they are wild, even intimidating. The power of restraint in poetry cannot be overestimated. . . . These poems burn from within.”—Carol Muske-Dukes, LA TimesWith the publication of his award-winning volumes, Anxious Latitudes, Neither World, and Twice Removed, Ralph Angel has won the admiration of readers of contemporary poetry for the extraordinary abstract lyricism of his poems. There is a superb grace, speculative intelligence, and a wry philosophical wisdom to Angel’s poetry. There are few poets so accomplished at creating an elegant yet innovative and provocative voice. Now, in Ralph Angel’s Exceptions and Melancholies: Poems 1986–2006, we find ourselves again in the presence of poetry that will move us even closer to a new and renewed promise of the American sublime. As Mark Doty has written, “These are the poems of a casual, down-to-earth philosopher who’s been spun around and turned inside out by loss, by the desolation of life in the late [and early] hours of the century. . . . Angel’s poems are stamped indelibly with the mark of a unique, shaping imagination, and they’re fresh with news of how it feels to live right now. He creates himself and his poems’ characters, strange people in a strangely familiar place. We recognize them, of course, as well we might since they are ourselves and the city where they live is ours.Ralph Angel is the author of three previous collections of poetry: Anxious Latitudes; Neither World, which received the 1995 James Laughlin Award of The Academy of American Poets; and Twice Removed; as well as a translation of Federico García Lorca’s Poem of the Deep Song.Angel’s poems have appeared in scores of magazines and anthologies, both here and abroad, and recent literary awards include a gift from the Elgin Cox Trust, a Pushcart Prize, the 2003 Willis Barnstone Poetry Translation Prize, a Fulbright Foundation fellowship, and the Bess Hokin Award of the Modern Poetry Association.Mr. Angel is the Edith R. White Distinguished Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Redlands, and a member of the MFA Program in Writing faculty at Vermont College. Originally from Seattle, he lives in Los Angeles.