Quarternote Chapbook Series – serie

"Tate’s originality was confirmed almost thirty years ago . . . testifying to the broad appeal of his wonderfully eccentric and generous poetry."—John Ashbery

“Wright has a hunk of the ineffable in his teeth and he won’t let go. In poem after poem, he plumbs our deepest relationships with nature, time, love, death, creation. Wright’s search breaks all the barriers of time, space, action, for its dramatic narrative simply refuses to acknowledge the usual unities, as though all time were this time, all places this place and all actions one.”—Philip Levine, from his citation for the 1996 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize.Charles Wright was named chancellor of The Academy of American Poets in 1999 and has won a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Critics Circle Prize and a Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Since 1983, he has been at the University of Virginia.

“The Preacher’s a poem with polyphonic voices, enormous range, and many of Stern’s familiar icons: his animism, his city grit, his philosophical fragments, his irony and justice quest, his reaching for the strain of memory.”—Ira SadoffGerald Stern is the author of fourteen poetry books, including This Time: New and Selected Poems, which won the 1998 National Book Award. He taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop for fifteen years, and he is the recipient of many awards, including the Lamont Poetry Prize, the Ruth Lilly Prize, the Wallace Stevens Award, and the National Jewish Book Award for poetry.

Josephine Jacobsen left behind a legacy of almost a dozen books and several considerable honors, including a position as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (1971–1973), the 1988 Lenore Marshall Award, the 1993 Shelley Memorial Award, and the Poetry Society of America’s highest honor—the Robert Frost Medal for Lifetime Achievement in Poetry—in 1997.Contents of a Minute is a treasure of recently discovered and previously unpublished poetry. Written with the spare eloquence and freedom of mind which Jacobsen was so well-known for, this collection of poems pays tribute to a woman ahead of her time.

Lucy / your secret book / that you leaned over and wrote just in the dirt— / Not having to have an ending / Not having to last. . . .And so begins Jean Valentine’s provocative new work, Lucy, a poem that pays homage to the three million-year-old skeleton of the earliest known hominid. With a deep sense of gratitude and profound longing, this poem celebrates the creative power of the female by introducing us to one of our oldest human ancestors. In a dreamlike and often fractured syntax that is vintage Valentine, Lucy, the “wildgood mother” of our species, can once again be heard.

"Jerusalem" is a stucco cottageFilled at all hours with angels,Devils, and assorted orphansWho dance and drinkAnd hand-tint engravings.Blake himself is up in the atticNight and day—Even in eternity, he's still scribbling.Gregory Orr is the author of ten collections of poetry. The recipient of National Endowment for the Arts and Guggenheim fellowships, he has been a Rockefeller Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Culture and Violence. He has taught at the University of Virginia since 1975, where he is professor of English.

For grownups who've begun to wonder whether romance is just for the kids, C. K. Williams has answered with Catherine's Laughter, the short and sweet story of the poet's long love affair with his wife. Is romance still possible, after the excited beginnings? Can a poet find sustaining love in marriage? "Yes," the poet declares, "yes"—even grownups can fall in love, and keep falling.C. K. Williams has won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Ruth Lilly Prize, among other honors.

A Pulitzer Prize-winning author details an unconsummated love affair that sustains political, philosophical, and sexual interest over a lifetime.The truth is always differentfrom what anyone says out loud,but who really cares? Not I, said the manI chose to be, nor I nor I nor I—among the many of us she left teetering.Stephen Dunn is a Pulitzer Prize winner and the author of seventeen collections of poetry, most recently Lines of Defense, Here and Now, and What Goes On: Selected & New Poems: 1995-2009. He teaches at Richard Stockton College of New Jersey.

"It is impossible for me to write about the imagination; it is like asking a fish to describe the sea," Mary Ruefle announces at the start of her essay. With wit and intellectual abandon, Ruefle draws inspiration from Wittgenstein, Shakespeare, Jesus, Steve Jobs, Johnny Cash, and Emily Dickson to explore her subject. The chapbook features original interior illustrations.Mary Ruefle is the author of numerous volumes of poetry and prose, including Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, and Selected Poems, winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America.

In Brood, Kimiko Hahn trains her eye on the commonplace—clothespins, bees, papaya, perfume, poached eggs, a sponge, fire, sand dollars—and reveals their very essence in concise evocative language. Underlying these little gems is a sense of loss, a mother's death or a longing for childhood. "Brood" connotes the bundling of family or beasts, but also dark thinking, and both are at play here where the less said, the better.Kimiko Hahn is the author of ten books of poetry, including most recently, Brain Fever (Norton, 2014). She has received numerous honors, including the PSA's Shelley Memorial Prize, the PEN/Voelcker Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Guggenheim Foundation, and New York Foundation for the Arts. She is a distinguished professor in creative writing at Queens College (CUNY) and lives in Forest Hills, New York.

“On the bridges to those slippery worlds, we are wrapped in gold foil, disease free. Who is saving whom? The question’s not stated, only implied.” In 2013, the Italian government implemented Mare Nostrum, an operation intended to limit immigration from Africa and the Middle East to European countries. For the refugees, the journeys were harrowing, often ending in shipwrecks or imprisonment, and the arrivals were wracked with uncertainty. Here, the poet Khaled Mattawa conjures a pointed, incantatory account of the refugee experience in the Mediterranean. In reclaiming the operation's name Mare Nostrum (our sea in Latin), he renders us culpable for the losses, and responsible to those risking their lives in pursuit of hope and respite from oppression. The voices are many, and the lyrics ritualistic, as if Mattawa has stirred ghosts from the wreckage. Part narrative, part blessing, this chapbook begs of its readers: Do you remember? Mattawa’s writing is a lighthouse for politics of the twenty-first century, and this chapbook a stunning memorial.