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A stunning collection of poems that John Updike wrote during the last seven years of his life and put together only weeks before he died for this, his final book. The opening sequence, “Endpoint,” is made up of a series of connected poems written on the occasions of his recent birthdays and culminates in his confrontation with his final illness. He looks back on the boy that he was, on the family, the small town, the people, and the circumstances that fed his love of writing, and he finds endless delight and solace in “turning the oddities of life into words.” “Other Poems” range from the fanciful (what would it be like to be a stolen Rembrandt painting? he muses) to the celebratory, capturing the flux of life. A section of sonnets follows, some inspired by travels to distant lands, others celebrating the idiosyncrasies of nature in his own backyard. For John Updike, the writing of poetry was always a special joy, and this final collection is an eloquent and moving testament to the life of this extraordinary writer.
A sensational collection of stories of the American experience from the Depression to the aftermath of 9/11, by one of the most gifted American writers of the twentieth century and the author of the acclaimed Rabbit series. John Updike mingles narratives of Pennsylvania with stories of New England suburbia and of foreign travel: “Personal Archaeology” considers life as a sequence of half-buried layers, and “The Full Glass” distills a lifetime’s happiness into one brimming moment of an old man’s bedtime routine. High-school class reunions, in “The Walk with Elizanne” and “The Road Home,” restore their hero to youth’s commonwealth where, as the narrator of the title story confides, “the self I value is stored, however infrequently I check on its condition.” Exotic locales encountered in the journeys of adulthood include Morocco, Florida, Spain, Italy, and India. The territory of childhood, with its fundamental, formative mysteries, is explored in “The Guardians,” “The Laughter of the Gods,” and “Kinderszenen.” Love’s fumblings among the bourgeoisie yield the tart comedy of “Free,” “Delicate Wives,” “The Apparition,” and “Outage.”
A post-humous, autobiographical collection of poetry from John Updike, one of the most celebrated American writers of the twentieth cenury and author of modern classic novel Rabbit, Run Updike had a boundless capacity for curiosity and delight. This collection of poems from across his career displays his extraordinary range in form and subject: from metaphysical epigrams, and lyrical odes to blank-verse sonnets, on topics from Roman busts to Lucian Freud to postage stamps. These poems are nimble and inventive, exploring art, science, popular culture, foreign travel, erotic love, growth, decay and rebirth. Collected in chronological order, from precocious undergraduate efforts to frequently anthologized classics, this is an autobiography in verse for every Updike fan and a celebration of twentieth century American life.
Winner of the 2023 CLMP Firecracker Award for Poetry Winner of the 2023 Northern California Book Award for Poetry Finalist for the 2023 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award Finalist for the 2022 L.A. Times Book Prize for Poetry Longlisted for the 2023 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award In Customs, Solmaz Sharif examines what it means to exist in the nowhere of the arrivals terminal, a continual series of checkpoints, officers, searches, and questionings that become a relentless experience of America. With resignation and austerity, these poems trace a pointed indoctrination to the customs of the nation-state and the English language, and the realities they impose upon the imagination, the paces they put us through. While Sharif critiques the culture of performed social skills and poetry itself—its foreclosures, affects, successes—she begins to write her way out to the other side of acceptability and toward freedom. Customs is a brilliant, excoriating new collection by a poet whose unfolding works are among the groundbreaking literature of our time.
In this collection of nonfiction pieces, John Updike gathers his responses to nearly two hundred invitations into print, each “an opportunity to make something beautiful, to find within oneself a treasure that would otherwise remain buried.” Introductions, reviews, and humorous essays, paragraphs on New York, religion, and lust—here is “more matter” commissioned by an age that, as the author remarks in his Preface, calls for “real stuff . . . not for the obliquities and tenuosities of fiction.” Still, the novelist’s shaping hand, his gift for telling detail, can be detected in many of these literary considerations. Books by Edith Wharton, Dawn Powell, John Cheever, and Vladimir Nabokov are incisively treated, as are biographies of Isaac Newton, Abraham Lincoln, Queen Elizabeth II, and Helen Keller. As George Steiner observed, Updike writes with a “solicitous, almost tender intelligence. The critic and the poet in him . . . are at no odds with the novelist; the same sharpness of apprehension bears on the object in each of Updike’s modes.”
"A poet to watch."—O Magazine "I tell the truth, but I try to be kind about it."—Camille Rankine in 12 Questions Named "a poet to watch" by O Magazine, Camille Rankine's debut collection is a series of provocations and explorations. Rankine's short, lyric poems are sharp, agonized, and exquisite, exploring themes of doubt and identity. The collection's sense of continuity and coherence comes through recurring poem types, including "still lifes," "instructions," and "symptoms." From "Symptoms of Aftermath": …When I am saved, a slim nurse leans out of the white light. I need to hear your voice, sweetheart. I see my escape. I walk into the water. The sky is blue like the ocean, which is blue like the sky. Camille Rankine is the author of the chapbook Slow Dance with Trip Wire, selected by Cornelius Eady for the Poetry Society of America's Chapbook Fellowship. The recipient of a 2010 "Discovery" / Boston Review Poetry Prize and a MacDowell fellowship, her poetry appears in Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Tin House, and other publications. Currently, she is assistant director of the MFA program in creative writing at Manhattanville College and lives in Harlem.
A powerful, impactful, eye-opening journey that explores through the Civil Rights Movement in 1950s-1960s America in spare and evocative verse, with historical photos interspersed throughout. In stunning verse and vivid use of white space, Erica Martin's debut poetry collection walks readers through the Civil Rights Movement—from the well-documented events that shaped the nation’s treatment of Black people, beginning with the "Separate but Equal" ruling—and introduces lesser-known figures and moments that were just as crucial to the Movement and our nation's centuries-long fight for justice and equality. A poignant, powerful, all-too-timely collection that is both a vital history lesson and much-needed conversation starter in our modern world. Complete with historical photographs, author's note, chronology of events, research, and sources.
In his extraordinary and highly charged new novel, John Updike tackles one of America's most burning issues – the threat of Islamist terror from within. Set in contemporary New Jersey, Terrorist traces the journey of one young man, from radicalism to fundamentalism to terrorism, against the backdrop of a fraying urban landscape and an increasingly fragmented community. In beautiful prose, Updike dramatizes the logic of the fundamentalist terrorist – but also suggests ways in which we can counter it, in our words and our actions . . .
National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist A New York Times Notable Book of the Year "Transcendently disobedient, the most existence-affirming and iconoclastic defense a writer could mount against her own extinction." --Heidi Julavits, New York Times Book Review From "one of the great anomalies of contemporary literature" (The New York Times Magazine) comes a breathtaking memoir about terminal cancer and the author's relationship with Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing. In July 2014, Jenny Diski was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer and given "two or three years" to live. She didn't know how to react. All responses felt scripted, as if she were acting out her part. To find the response that felt wholly her own, she had to face the clichés and try to write about it. And there was another story to write, one she had not yet told: that of being taken in at age fifteen by the author Doris Lessing, and the subsequent fifty years of their complex relationship. In the pages of the London Review of Books, to which Diski contributed for the last quarter century, she unraveled her history with Lessing: the fairy-tale rescue as a teenager, the difficulties of being absorbed into an unfamiliar family, the modeling of a literary life. Swooping from one memory to the next--alighting on the hysterical battlefield of her parental home, her expulsion from school, the drug-taking twenty-something in and out of psychiatric hospitals--and telling all through the lens of living with terminal cancer, through what she knows will be her final months, Diski paints a portrait of two extraordinary writers--Lessing and herself. From a wholly original thinker comes a book like no other: a cerebral, witty, dazzlingly candid masterpiece about an uneasy relationship; about memory and writing, ingratitude and anger; about living with illness and facing death.
An exceptionally current volume of poems from one of Europe's greatest poets that dwell on the most pressing reality of our times: the coronavirus pandemic. One of the leading living European writers, Cees Nooteboom never shies away from contemporary issues. His latest collection of poems, Leaving, begins in a garden with descriptions of Mediterranean plants, but what emerges are memories of the war--images of a distant past that have never disappeared. The poems take another turn when, unexpectedly, a mysterious virus takes control of the world and turns life upside down. A collection that can be read as a single poem, in which desolation and beauty, past and future, nostalgia and mortality all merge to represent the most mature work of a great poet. German artist Max Neumann's haunting images that accompany the poems work as complex visual metaphors that further underline the beauty and the gravity of the poems. Together, they make for a delicate and thoughtful read.