World Poetry Books – förlag

The first English-language collection focused on the later works of Joyce Mansour, an Arab-Jewish Surrealist poet who was exiled from Egypt in the 1950s and settled in Paris. Mansour's late poems chart constellations of desire, femininity, and dream. Considered by Andre Breton to be the preeminent Surrealist of the post-war period, Mansour brings this masculine movement into a feminine realm never-before-imagined. She insists on a forgotten or perhaps vehemently denied eventuality of women's equality: their ability to do harm, to be violent: 'Why tear fire from the impalpable sky / When it already grows and smolders in me / Why throw your glove into the crowd / Tomorrow is a livid stump.' In the Glittering Maw is poet C. Francis Fisher's first published translation and includes a preface by eminent Surrealism scholar Mary Ann Caws.

Swedish poet Judith Kiros's widely-acclaimed debut stretches boundaries of genre, race, and gender in an alternative production of Shakespeare's Othello that sidesteps black death for a multitude of futures. Taking a cue from Derek Walcott's Omeros, Kiros employs metric verve and critical bite to add to Shakespeare a wide range of historical and contemporary works, producing a meditation on blackness that sets up a new reflective surface at every turn. O marks the first translation into English of one of Sweden's most thrilling young poets.

The first English-language collection of Greek Modernist George Sarantaris, described by Nobel Laureate Odysseus Elytis as 'the greatest poet of the Generation of '30,' whose laconic lyric poetry oscillates between the philosophical and the erotic. Sarantaris' lucid poems, with their epigrammatic simplicity, recall the ancient Greek poetic tradition while drawing on the French and Italian influences of his time. Louka's translation conveys the freshness of Sarantaris's aphoristic style, metaphorical wit, and philosophical musings. In their condensed precision and attention to landscape, Sarantaris's poems may remind English-language readers of his American contemporary Lorine Niedecker and others in the Objectivist circle.

A selection from the legendary French poet Paul Verlaine's first four books translated with irreverence and musicality by Keith Waldrop and K.A. Hays. Before he became an icon of fin de siecle French poetry and a major influence on the Symbolist and Decadent movements, before he met Arthur Rimbaud and published his best-known collection (Wisdom), and before he was renowned as a troubled and often violent alcoholic, Paul Verlaine wrote four books of poetry: Saturnine Poems (1866), Wild Parties (1869), The Good Song (1870), and Wordless Romances (1874). This volume presents Verlaine's lesser-known early work, in translations that Cole Swensen has called 'a real tour de force' and Michael Palmer calls 'remarkable versions.'

One of the most influential, if rarely seen, visual poetry books of the post-war avant-garde, Pomerand's Lettrist masterwork elaborates a psychogeographic story of the bohemian Parisian neighborhood of Saint-Germain-des-Pres through punning prose-poems and dazzling, rebus-like 'metagraphics' on facing pages. Pomerand's SAINT GHETTO OF THE LOANS (1950) is one of the earliest, and perhaps most formidably sustained examples of the Lettrist's engagement with verbo-visual expression. This expanded, bilingual edition also includes the book's original preface by the filmmaker Jacques Baratier, the author's idiosyncratic resume of his published works, a contextualizing afterword by Michael Kasper, as well as a complete bibliography and filmography, which reveals the breadth and scope of Pomerand's Lettrist activities.

The elusive, distant, almost disembodied voice of Korean poet Seo Jung Hak's English-language debut examines interiorities that seem familiar, yet whose ordinariness rises to the level of the uncanny. Inspired by the commodification of arts, emotions, and ideologies, these poems - written over a span of 18 years from 1999 to 2017 - parody the very act of writing amid worn-out rhetorical tropes, in a tone that is at times sinisterly witty and at others ominously blithe.

The lyrical, imaginatively-crafted debut collection by one of Germany's most important contemporary poets explores the 'shifting of the mouth' toward the other, toward translation, toward a reckoning with historical silences. In KOCHANIE, TODAY I BOUGHT BREAD, Uljana Wolf crosses borders from East Germany into Poland, from fairy tales to the tallying of land torn by fateful past, from women's voices 'hibernating in documents,' to Lavinia's spilling forth of red language. Hailed by critics for its 'brief strokes that open up a wide historical space in which political doom is still present,' this book is a testament that the cartography we inherit is equal parts limit and dare. Wolf's debut collection won the Peter Huchel Prize in 2006 -- she was its youngest recipient. Nearly 20 years later, this bilingual edition -- featuring a new introduction by Valzhyna Mort and Greg Nissan's superbly-tuned translation -- invites English-language readers into the 'guest room' of poetry.

In her debut English-language collection, contemporary Greek poet Dimitra Kotoula takes on contemporary Greek society in challenging lyrical forms. In The Slow Horizon that Breathes, a selection from her first three books, published between 2004-2022, Kotoula-a poet born after the military Junta-engages modern Greek struggles, including troubled relationships, the financial crisis, motherhood, and the act of writing. Translated by Maria Nazos in close collaboration with the author, and introduced by A.E. Stallings, this volume presents to English readers Kotoula's masterful transformation of private demons into a public resonance.

In the first of her poetry books to appear in English, acclaimed French-Jewish poet, translator, and translation-theorist Mireille Gansel crisscrosses time and extends hospitality to exiled poets and peoples in her quest to recreate a lost literary and spiritual home. Gansel opens this meditative volume of 53 prose poems with an epigraph from Gaston Bachelard: 'against all odds, the house invites us to say: I will be a citizen of the world despite the world.' In these war-torn days of refugees fleeing to Europe, Gansel strives to describe what we have in common, creating a crossroads of people, places, and languages she has loved. For Gansel, a poet rebuilding her 'soul house,' every word is a building block. At the same time that she welcomes the stranger to her lost house, poetry is her weapon -- 'these migrant poems from all languages, these smuggled words that no border can stop' -- with which to fight persecution and exile. Sophie Ehrsam wrote, 'The 'soul house' is anything that harbors a glimmer, a hope, including an open door or an outstretched hand.'

The first English-language collection of Oscar Garcia Sierra, one of Spain's most relevant young authors, performs and interrogates the desires and disillusionments of millennial culture. Garcia Sierra, one of the central figures of the Spanish young literature movement, constructs bold, strange, uncomfortable poems from everyday life, touching on mental illness, drugs, and heartbreak. His first novel, Facendera, has brought him broad critical acclaim in Spain. HOUSTON, I'M THE PROBLEM, a selection from his first poetry collection topped off with more recent poems, is the first of his books to appear in English translation.