Lannan Translations Selection Series – serie

This collection features poems from Al-Azzawi’s six previous Arabic poetry collections and many new poems. Springing from classical Arabic poetry, his poems speak to political exile, -cultural marginalization, and Middle Eastern and Western histories and mythologies. Al-Azzawi employs -humor, melancholy and tenderness to celebrate new worlds of possibility.

Fadhil Al-Azzawi was born in 1940 in Kirkuk, Iraq. By the time he was -fifteen, he was publishing poems in the leading Arab literary magazines in Beirut and Baghdad. Al-Azzawi -currently lives in London.

Khaled Mattawa (Translator) is the author of a -collection of poetry, Ismailia Eclipse, and the translator of two books of contemporary Arabic poetry, Hatif Janabi’s Questions and Their Retinue and Saddi Youssef’s Without an Alphabet, Without a Face.

“Bodhisattva of Korean poetry, exuberant, demotic, abundant, obsessed with poetic creation . . . Ko Un is a magnificent poet, combination of Buddhist cognoscente, passionate political libertarian, and naturalist historian.”—Allen Ginsberg"Korea's greatest living Zen poet."—Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Flowers of a Moment is a treasure trove of more than 180 brief poems by a major world poet at the apex of his career. A four-time Nobel Prize nominee,Ko Un grew up in Korea during the Japanese occupation. During the Korean War, he was conscripted by the People's Army. In 1952, he became a Buddhist and lived a monastic life for ten years.

For his activism confronting South Korea's dictatorial military government, he was imprisoned and tortured. He has published more than one hundred volumes of poetry, essays, fiction, drama, and translations of Chinese poetry. 

At sunset a wish to become a wolf beneath a fat full moon

The Clean Shirt of It marks the first English translation of a full-length poetry title by acclaimed Brazilian poet Paulo Henriques Britto. As translator Idra Novey writes in her introduction, “No other contemporary Brazilian poets write like Britto. At least not with such a keen sense of the relationship between form and content, or pop culture and high art.”

Paulo Henriques Britto has received Brazil’s most prestigious prizes for literature and translation. He lives in Rio de Janeiro, where he teaches at Catholic University.

Idra Novey lives in New York City. She received the 2005 Poetry Society of America New York Chapbook Fellowship.

Novica Tadic is Serbia’s leading poet and the linguistic heir to Vasko Popa. With this translation, US Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize–winner Charles Simic brings the full range of Tadic’s dark beauty to light:

I dream how on a flat surfaceI set down knives of various shapes and sizes.Already there are so many of themI can’t count them,or see them all. Someone’s being done inby those knives.

Novica Tadic has won most major Serbian literary awards, including the prestigious Laureat Nagrade. Charles Simic’s latest poetry collection is That Little Something (Harcourt, 2008).

Ece Temelkuran is arguably Turkey’s most accomplished young writer. In Book of the Edge, she describes an allegorical journey wherein the speaker, or explorer, encounters strange creatures, including a butterfly, bull, swordfish, sow bug, and cruel city dwellers. These poems point to the undeniable connection between all living beings.

Born 1973 in Turkey, Ece Temelkuran (www.ecetemelkuran.com) has published eight books of poetry, prose, and nonfiction. An award-winning daily columnist for Milliyet, she was a 2008 visiting fellow at the University of Oxford’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.

Translator Deniz Perin received the 2007 Anna Akhmatova Fellowship for Younger Translators.

From his first book of poems, Chessboards of Hours (1995), Aleš Šteger has been one of Slovenia's most promising poets. The philosophical and lyrical sophistication of his poems, along with his work as a leading book editor and festival organizer, quickly spread Šteger's reputation beyond the borders of Slovenia. The Book of Things is Šteger's most widely praised book of poetry and his first American collection. The book consists of fifty poems that look at "things" (i.e. aspirin, chair, cork) which are transformed by Šteger's unique poetic alchemy.

Translator Brian Henry is a distinguished poet, translator, editor, and critic.

"These poems do much more than blur the line between illusion and reality: they evoke that vibrant contradiction of dreaming in which the real and unreal exist in perfect simultaneity."—The Georgia Review

Theatre

A man performs whole days from his life as a drama, each day at home in his apartment. He goes to great lengths to be as realistic as possible, walking around the apartment and tending to day-to-day business. Only at night, when he sits by himself in the kitchen, does he peek now and then at the window to glimpse his audience. He won't completely abandon the notion that someone is out there. It's like when you stand on the landing, in front of a closed door, and you can't help thinking that someone is watching through the peephole.

With a dozen poems previously published in The Paris Review, Carsten René Nielsen is already a familiar name to US poetry readers. These dark prose poems—reminiscent of Charles Simic—map out a uniquely European territory with chilling, cinematic clarity.

Award-winning Danish poet Carsten René Nielsen is the author of nine books of poetry, including his US debut The World Cut Out with Crooked Scissors (2007). His poems appear in The Paris Review, Agni, Circumference, Mid-American Review, Mississippi Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Aarhus, Denmark.

David Keplinger's poetry awards include the Colorado Book Award, T.S. Eliot Prize, an NEA fellowship, and grants from the Danish Arts Council. He directs the MFA program at American University in Washington, DC.

"His poems are meditative and beautiful, his diction fragile and clear...In short, it is a lovely book, and BOA Editions has provided us with a fine candidate for torchbearer."--Hey Small Press!

"We are fortunate to now have them in English so that we who don't read Polish can now read these, and enjoy their insight and wry wit."––Mary Jo Bang

In his triumphant collection The Folding Star and Other Poems, poet of the imagination Jacek Gutorow offers thirty-one gems that that will help change our understanding of Polish poetry.

Jacek Gutorow has been nominated for the Nike Award, the Cogito Award, and the Gdynia Award. He teaches at the University of Opole.

Piotr Florczyk has taught at the University of Delaware, Antioch University Los Angeles, and University of California-Riverside. He lives in Los Angeles, California.

Marosa di Giorgio has one of the most distinct and recognizable voices in Latin American poetry. Her surreal and fable-like prose poems invite comparison to Franz Kafka, Julio Cortázar, or even contemporary American poets Russell Edson and Charles Simic. But di Giorgio's voice, imagery, and themes—childhood, the Uruguayan countryside, a perception of the sacred—are her own. Previously written off as "the mad woman of Uruguayan letters," di Giorgio's reputation has blossomed in recent years. Translator Adam Giannelli's careful selection of poems spans the enormous output of di Giorgio's career to help further introduce English-language readers to this vibrant and original voice.

Marosa di Giorgio was born in Salto, Uruguay, in 1932. Her first book Poemas was published in 1953. Also a theater actress, she moved to Montevideo in 1978, where she lived until her death in 2004.