Johns Hopkins: Poetry and Fiction – Serie

John Hollander's "Blue Wine and Other Poems," his first collection of verse since the appearance of his new and selected poems, "Spectral Emanations," shows one of our best poetic craftsmen in America moving into a new phase in his distinguished career. Poems on painting and sculpture, in which Hollander examines the static/dynamic interaction of life and art, are balanced against a graceful lyric cycle, which is itself a commentary on the meaning of art songs. The longer poems in this volume--"Blue Wine," "Monuments," "The Train," and "Just for the Ride"--move beyond Hollander's unique blend of meditative elegance, closely observed detail, and learned wit. They explore even further the realms of mythological vision beyond the boundaries of easy irony. Of the title poem, "Blue Wine," Hollander writes, "I visited Saul Steinberg one afternoon and found that he had pasted some mock- (or rather, visionary) wine labels on bottles, which were then filled with a substance I could not identify. This poem is an attempt to make sense out of what was apparently in them."

"In Wyatt Prunty's poetry, familiar things and places, old things and new things, lost things, lost faces are recovered and illumined by a language both skewed and precise".--Walker Percy. (Poetry)

This second collection by award-winning poet Philip Dacey runs the gamut from existential mysteries to domestic dramas. Dacey writes in both traditional and free verse forms, and organizes these selections into four sections whose focus gradually shifts from the inexplicable phenomena of "apple-doors" to the cultural otherworldliness of a foreign country, in "Spanish artifacts". The third section, "nipples rise to spirit", traces a child's growth to middle age, with particular reference to sex and family, while "the presence of Presence" redefines the religious experience.

Winner of the Helen C. Smith Memorial Award for the Best Book in Poetry, Texas Institute of LettersJohn Briuth treats the world with extraordinary wit and subtle humar-rare enough qualities in much twentieth-century poetry. Bricuth writes with gusto on a variety of subjects, from the act of writing poetry to the lives of Glenn Miller and Laurel and Hardy. His rare command of verse forms and wide range of tone make his work a distinctive addition to contemporary American poetry.

Poems deal with the past, parenthood, mortality, nature, loneliness, violence, beauty, neighbors, and sleep

In this major new collection, John Hollander displays the elegance, versatility, and wit that mark him as perhaps the most urbane poet in America. "In Time and Place" features a generous offering of new verse, an extended prose piece, and a series of prose poems previously available only in a rare, privately published edition. The tightly rhymed quatrains of the new poems demonstrate once again the freedom Hollander achieves through mastery of form. The consummate control with which he writes in memoriam to a lost love and a time of absence gives him opportunities to move through dimensions most poets never see. His purgatorial mock-journal--dwelling on loss and gain, on difference and effacement, on places and the place of writing--leads into a sequence of captivating prose poems, where imagination centers on the word and language celebrates its own creation.

In Wyatt Prunty's new collection of poems, people either keep their balance or, doubting it, tip and fall. A small girl struggles to ride her bike among older children already 'stable as little gyros.' Ice-skating with friends, a boy suddenly drops from sight, and drowns. The poet of Paterson stands at the edge of his Jersey waterfall and knows that 'good balance is belief.' Poising and counterpoising themselves in settings at once fixed and erosive, the people in these poems move through 'one long revisionary river that curls back against itself, as if the only way to move ahead was by deflecting back.'

The author of "Eelgrass" and "The Kentucky Stories" now offers a collection of "mysterious and beautiful" (Lee Smith) stories, "as subtle, syntactically graceful, and beautiful as any I've seen" (Toby Olson).

In "Dark Horses" prize-winning poet X.J. Kennedy gathers 42 new poems. From the lighthearted ballad "Dancing with the Poets at Piggy's" to the darkly meditative lyric "The Waterbury Cross", the poems show Kennedy's wide range. There are intimate portraits of a woman veterinarian and a young man dying of AIDS, a song about the Sri Lankan festival of Buddha's tooth, and a stark account of a confrontation with a homeless panhandler. "Emily Dickinson Leaves a Message to the World" on the newly installed answering machine in her Amherst homestead. Finding a "Woodpile Skull" - the severed head of a black ant makes the poet laugh at his own expense as he plays "ham Hamlet to a formic Yorick". X.J. Kennedy's first collection, "Nude Descending a Staircase" (1961) won the Lamont Award of the Academy of American Poets. His most recent collection, "Cross Ties: Selected Poems" (1985) received the "Los Angeles Times" Book Award for poetry.

In his latest book of poems, Wyatt Pruncy finds beauty, violence, mystery, and humour in a variety of public and private worlds. Wyatt Prunty's previous collections of poems, "The Times Between, What Women Know, What Men Believe", and "Balance as Belief" are also available from Johns Hopkins.

"Mr. Dixon wields a stubbornly plain-spoken style; he loves all sorts of tricky narrative effects. And he loves even more the tribulations of the fantasizing mind, ticklish in their comedy, alarming in their immediacy".--"New York Times Book Review".

"Home" is the unnamed goal in this collection whose characters are somehow always searching for that ideal state of calm and warmth and perfect tolerance. Of course, that dream is quite unlike the hard world of Providence, where these dreamers really live - a world of wary neighbours and vague priests, of flinty teachers, of parents distant and irascible. Hungering for some better place, these sons and daughters of New England follow very different paths, and make very different - often shattering - discoveries. In "The Raft", a ten-year-old boy struggles with the shock of his father's leap from a ninth-floor window of the failed family business. A middle-aged woman invites her widowed mother to move in with her - and then the two of them must fight it out to see which one of them has made the greater "sacrifice". A high school senior, more interested in boys than in fruit flies, uses her genetics project - "Sex-Linked Traits" - to probe the foibles of her own high-strung family. In "Uncle Maggot", a little girl, unwilling to say goodbye at her father's coffin, shocks the mourners with a very odd performance.Charged with dark humour and dramatic power, the stories in "Home At Last" are crafted with that rare stylistic purity which readers have come to expect from an author whose work the "New York Times" has praised as "deft, comic, and devastatingly precise".

Through his collections of poems Timothy Steele has earned the reputation as a highly regarded poet who continue to work in meter. This volume brings together 35 new poems that extend the scope and deepen the spirit of his previous work. While always faithful to the richness and complexity of experience, the poems in The Color Wheel aim to be clear and accessible. They blend imaginistic detail and reflection and bring to contemporary subjects what Steele calls "the preservative virtues of formal care".

A collection of 18 short stories by a "very skillful storyteller (whose) grasp of the life of ordinary American city dwellers is such that he can shape it dramatically to meet the demands of his far from ordinary imagination" ("Times Literary Supplement").

The recipient of nearly every major literary award in the United States, Josephine Jacobsen has enjoyed a career that spans more than six decades, from the publication of her first poem at age eleven to her 1995 nomination as a National Book Award finalist. What Goes without Saying brings together thirty of her previously published stories. In "Sound of Shadows," she takes readers through the double-bolted front door of a rowhouse, into the narrow quarters of Mrs. Bart, an elderly widow who has folded her life into her dark living room where the sole light in her "one room wide" world comes from the magenta- and green-tinged colors flashing on her television screen. We follow the muezzin's melancholy call in "A Walk with Raschid," an O. Henry Prize story about an intriguing ten-year-old Arab boy who guides a honeymoon couple through the Moroccan Fez. And the tautly written "Protection" begins with an exacting poetic image that is typical of Jacobsen's insightful prose: "Mica sparkles. The banshee ambulance is beating its mad bell. Like a reaped grassblade on a meadow of macadam, its object lies."

Collected poetry from the 1995 National Book Award finalist.

Providence -- a city named in the hope that a direct compliment to God might place Him under some sort of obligation to its inhabitants -- provides Jean McGarry with the fertile ground of her comic and gritty, harsh and touching cycle of stories. Weaving in and out of Airs of Providence is o novella telling the story of April and Margery Flanaghan, two sisters trying to grow up in this neighborhood and doing only a so-so job of it. And it is a job, in a world not clearly made for anyone, but better suited to an older generation. Surrounded by nuns and priests, uncles and aunts, biddies and oddballs, April and Margery do their best to be normal. They practice their penmanship, babysit, go to o prom, and try to be up to date. But how even to look normal in a world where you are always running up against uncontrollable mood swings, mysterious infirmities, unexplained sorrows? Over a period of thirty-five years, they sniff out neighborhood scandals, get an "earful" of what the others are up to, and rest secure behind their sets of double curtains in the knowledge that everything human and frail is on the outside, everything blameless and perfect on the inside.If the Airs of Providence are sometimes rough, they are always funny. They may be sad too, but it is a dry-eyed melancholy that is no relation -- or perhaps just a poor relation -- to the air of "Danny Boy".

Robert Phillips is a prominent figure in what has been called America's neglected "transition generation"-poets born in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Spinach Days is his sixth full-length collection, following his critically acclaimed Breakdown Lane (Johns Hopkins, 1994), named a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times. In content and in its various use of forms, Spinach Days is Phillips' most innovative book yet. There are long narratives and short lyrics, villanelles and somonkas, haiku and found poems, free verse and eclogues, on subjects ranging from St. Francis to the Holocaust, from Jung's concept of the anima to a particular bit of American folklore on the gangster John Dillinger. Throughout, the poet's memory is the cohesive force, mixing events of childhood with adulthood, rural life with big-city life, love with loss, and humorous events with tragic ones. Phillips reveals himself to be a master of closure, and he writes as one who delights in the liveliness of language and wordplay.

Jean McGarry has been praised for her "deft, comic, and devastatingly precise portraits" ( New York Times Book Review) and as "a writer who honors the human condition" ( Baltimore Sun). In her new collection of stories, Dream Date, she focuses her skills as a "gifted observer" ( Publishers Weekly) on the delicate boundary that separates the real from the ethereal states we drift into and out of as we try to make sense of our relationships, romantic and otherwise, with the other sex. Funny and haunting in equal measure-and suffused with a hint of the surreal-McGarry's stories explore the confusions, contradictions, and calamities of the modern relationship: in "Paris," a woman tracks down her wayward husband in the City of Lights and ends up having a meeting of minds with his mistress that gives great satisfaction to both women; in "Moon, June," a woman stalks the wardrobe of a wealthy socialite in a consignment shop, opening up a world of polymorphous delight and fashion envy; and in "The Secret of His Sleep," a man wakes up after forty years to a reality that is at once strangely familiar and completely unexpected.In these wry fictions, real-world problems often have solutions fashioned with the stunning clarity and logic of a dream.

In Time to Go, the author of the highly acclaimed 14 Stories, Long Made Short, and All Gone has written a dazzling book of eighteen interlocking pieces. Part short story collection, part novel, Time to Go moves from despair to hope, from the passing of things -- time, relationships, businesses, chances -- to the coming of marriage, stability, family, a new life. It is a book that can be in turn frightening and funny, touching and tough -- and one that is, on occasion, all these things at once.

The stories in Drowned Moon are set in Southeast Texas, where the Old and the Lost Rivers meet and empty into the bay. This unique geographic location, with its unpredictable waters, its sinking swamps, its bayous and sloughs, provides a haunting landscape for Glenn Blake's characters.

The Lords of Misrule, X. J. Kennedy's seventh volume of poetry, exhibits his characteristic blend of wit, intellectual curiosity, and formal mastery. The sixty poems collected here explore a wide range of subjects: a scathing curse on a sneak-thief, a wry ballad of Henry James and his not-quite lover Constance Fenimore Woolson, an elegy for Allen Ginsberg, incisive views of contemporary Egypt, a serio-comic meditation on the relic of St. Teresa of Avila which Spain's General Franco kept at his bedside, and a response to the events of September 11. Like the controlled frenzy of medieval Christmas festivities presided over by the appointed Lords of Misrule, Kennedy's poems possess a chaotic humor and frenetic energy held within tight metrical bounds. In his latest collection, Kennedy confirms his reputation as one of America's most accomplished and engaging poets.

Stephen Dixon's stories and novels have an original, immediately recognizable sound and feel -a weird blend of Franz Kafka and Frank Capra. Readers of his previous work will find in 14 Stories that same wry, inventive, knife-edged humor that has come to characterize his distinctive style. With an adroit use of language and a keen eye for the quirky, offbeat side of human nature, Dixon creates a world as viewed through a fish-eye lens-slightly distorted and off-center, yet recognizable and often familiar. 14 Stories is part comedy, part tragedy, part social comment and part spoof. But most of all it is a highly entertaining series of all-too-plausible vignettes that shows off Stephen Dixon's remarkable talent at its best.

Wyatt Prunty's poems have been described as "quiet, reflective, and of unexpected depth" (Howard Nemerov), "both artful and truthful" (Donald Justice), "a triumph of controlled and understated but powerful emotion" (Anthony Hecht), and "illuminated by a language both skewed and precise" (Walker Percy). As a poet, Prunty-who is also the founder and director of the Sewanee Writers' Conference-has been praised for "his powerful imagination in the specifics of ordinary details, suggesting persuasively that the near at hand is as unexplored and full of wonder as the far ends of the universe" ( Publishers Weekly) and called "one of the most gifted and technically accomplished American poets of the post-World War II generation" ( Southern Review).An elegant overview of his career until now, Unarmed and DANGEROUS: New and Selected Poems features selections from Wyatt Prunty's five previous books- The Times Between (1982); What Women Know, What Men Believe (1986); Balance as Belief (1989); Run of the House (1993); and Since the Noon Mail Stopped (1997), all published by the Johns Hopkins University Press-as well as new poems that demonstrate the poet's wide-ranging and sympathetic imagination. Prunty's new work includes moving evocations of childhood ("A Child's Christmas in Georgia, 1953"), richly detailed poems about ordinary people and situations ("The Downtown Bus"), and even a probing meditation on the fairy tale "Jack and the Beanstalk" ("Annals of Jack"). Together, the poems gathered in this volume afford a clear portrait of a major American poet whose distinctive voice and vision have earned him the admiration and respect of such contemporaries as Richard Wilbur, X. J. Kennedy, and Mark Strand and marked him as "a writer who has mastered his craft, [a] poet [who] can look at the life most of us take for granted and show us what is most real, most precious in it" ( The Commercial Appeal).

Impressionistic and dreamlike, the stories in Cake explore the complexities of love and relationships in contemporary society. Linked by a sense of regret, these characters are at the mercy of their desires and uncertain longings, often with disastrous results. A young couple experiences town politics, group dynamics, and their own insecurities through a seemingly innocuous holiday ritual in "Snowflake." "Talent Show" introduces us to a series of unnamed women, their dreams and aspirations summed up in a few deceptively simple lines. One life leads into another, until we return to where we began, like a cinematic pan across a landscape of ambition gone awry. The imagery in these compact and highly visual stories ranges from the everyday to the surreal. "Buena Vista Notebook" deftly blends language and word play with the story of doomed love affairs, culminating in a chance meeting that is random yet somehow not unexpected. And "Job" relates the story of what is perhaps the most unusual meeting of two naked people in recent fiction. Comic and yet sad, its hero experiences a moment of painful clarity in the most unlikely of circumstances.Questions of identity, love, and the nature of existence may never be answered fully (in life or in fiction), but each of these stories presents a psychological turning point, often just a fleeting moment, sometimes more bitter than sweet. And in that moment the characters are brought that much closer to the answers to some of those questions. Emotionally taut and infused with poetic imagery, Cake is a bold debut and a portrait of the crisis of the modern relationship.

Robert Phillips is a prominent figure in what has been called America's neglected "transition generation"-poets born in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Spinach Days is his sixth full-length collection, following his critically acclaimed Breakdown Lane (Johns Hopkins, 1994), named a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times. In content and in its various use of forms, Spinach Days is Phillips' most innovative book yet. There are long narratives and short lyrics, villanelles and somonkas, haiku and found poems, free verse and eclogues, on subjects ranging from St. Francis to the Holocaust, from Jung's concept of the anima to a particular bit of American folklore on the gangster John Dillinger. Throughout, the poet's memory is the cohesive force, mixing events of childhood with adulthood, rural life with big-city life, love with loss, and humorous events with tragic ones. Phillips reveals himself to be a master of closure, and he writes as one who delights in the liveliness of language and wordplay.

Over the past twenty-five years, the Johns Hopkins Poetry and Fiction series has published thirty-one volumes of poetry, beginning in 1979 with John Hollander's Blue Wine and Other Poems. The series was launched with two guiding principles: to publish works of poetry exhibiting formal excellence and strong emotional appeal and to publish writers at all stages of their careers. Words Brushed by Music gathers the best poems of the past twenty-five years, works that exhibit extraordinary wit, elegance, wisdom born of experience, and mastery of language. Sometimes comic, always moving, these poems reflect the talent of twenty distinctive voices: John Bricuth, John Burt, Thomas Carper, Philip Dacey, Tom Disch, Emily Grosholz, Vicki Hearne, John Hollander, Josephine Jacobsen, X. J. Kennedy, Charles Martin, Robert Pack, Robert Phillips, Wyatt Prunty, Gibbons Ruark, William Jay Smith, Barry Spacks, Timothy Steele, David St. John, and Adrien Stoutenburg. In this anniversary volume, award-winning poet and critic Anthony Hecht reflects on the state of American poetry today.

Over the past twenty-five years, the Johns Hopkins Poetry and Fiction series has published thirty-one volumes of poetry, beginning in 1979 with John Hollander's Blue Wine and Other Poems. The series was launched with two guiding principles: to publish works of poetry exhibiting formal excellence and strong emotional appeal and to publish writers at all stages of their careers. Words Brushed by Music gathers the best poems of the past twenty-five years, works that exhibit extraordinary wit, elegance, wisdom born of experience, and mastery of language. Sometimes comic, always moving, these poems reflect the talent of twenty distinctive voices: John Bricuth, John Burt, Thomas Carper, Philip Dacey, Tom Disch, Emily Grosholz, Vicki Hearne, John Hollander, Josephine Jacobsen, X. J. Kennedy, Charles Martin, Robert Pack, Robert Phillips, Wyatt Prunty, Gibbons Ruark, William Jay Smith, Barry Spacks, Timothy Steele, David St. John, and Adrien Stoutenburg. In this anniversary volume, award-winning poet and critic Anthony Hecht reflects on the state of American poetry today.

Since its founding in 1979, the Johns Hopkins Poetry and Fiction series has published forty volumes of short fiction, beginning with Guy Davenport's acclaimed Da Vinci's Bicycle. The series was launched with two guiding principles: to publish works of short fiction exhibiting formal excellence and strong emotional appeal and to publish writers at all stages of their careers. So the Story Goes gathers the best short fiction of the series, works exhibiting wit, elegance, and wisdom. Writing about a wide variety of subjects and in a multitude of styles, the twenty writers collected here share a mastery of language and an extraordinary ability to entertain.Ellen Akins from World Like a Knife, "Her Book"Steve Barthelme from And He Tells the Little Horse the Whole Story, "Zorro"Glenn Blake from Drowned Moon, "Marsh"Jennifer Finney Boylan from Remind Me to Murder You Later, "Thirty-six Miracles of Lyndon Johnson"Richard Burgin from Fear of Blue Skies, "Bodysurfing"Avery Chenoweth from Wingtips, "Powerman"Guy Davenport from Da Vinci's Bicycle, "A Field of Snow on a Slope of the Rosenberg"Tristan Davies from Cake, "Counterfactuals"Stephen Dixon from Time to Go, "Time to Go"Judith Grossman from How Aliens Think, "Rovera"Josephine Jacobsen from What Goes without Saying, "On the Island"Greg Johnson from I Am Dangerous, "Hemingway's Cats"Jerry Klinkowitz from Basepaths, "Basepaths"Michael Martone from Safety Patrol, "Safety Patrol"Jack Matthews from Crazy Women, "Haunted by Name Our Ignorant Lips"Jean McGarry from Dream Date, "The Last Time"Robert Nichols from In the Air, "Six Ways of Looking at Farming"Joe Ashby Porter from Lithuania, "West Baltimore"Frances Sherwood from Everything You've Heard Is True, "History"Robley Wilson from The Book of Lost Fathers, "Hard Times"