Böcker i Johns Hopkins: Poetry and Fict-serien

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 from contemporary American poetry.

This is the first collection to appear in twenty years from one of America's best short story writers. His thirteen stories are marvelous--funny, heartbreaking, and wise by turns, and on occasion all three at once. Praise for Max Apple: "Apple may not be as well known a humorist as Russell Baker, Calvin Trillin, or Garrison Keillor. But he should be. He belongs in the same crowd."-- "Newsday," reviewing "Free Agents""Apple is an amiable, good-hearted, sweet-tempered writer whose short pieces occupy an agreeable territory somewhere between fact and fiction."-- "Washington Post Book World," reviewing "Free Agents""A tender, tough, and totally compelling account."-- "USA Today," reviewing "Roommates""The slim, sweet slices of this particular Apple pie are always served warm and contain generous amounts of humor, off-the-wall inventiveness, and down-to-earth intelligence."-- "Cleveland Plain Dealer," reviewing "Free Agents"

An exuberant collection of poems celebrating art, nature, and humanity.This various and vital poetry collection, in rich language and sharp detail, spans the rural and urban, country and town, and foreign and domestic. Tracing the vagaries of the self, these poems record and transmute biography from an English youth to the trials and challenges of aging in America. Memorable for its exuberant voice and exacting eye, Brian Swann's Imago is awake to the natural world as well as the world within. From the half-page title poem to the multi-section "Elegiac," this volume is striking in its largeness, its tone evolving from self-indicting to ecstatic and self-transcendent. This collection, the author's fourteenth, is moving both as art and as testament.Imago unfolds much like a piece of music. It is a continuum by which Swann sees nature and art interwoven in the ways they emerge and change. In "Grief and Magritte," Swann muses upon "all of us snagged in a net whose skeins tangle in night sky / where one star dreams another." The title poem focuses on an insect "on its way through the changes, the patterns / of what led up to it, the catches and releases . . . saying now, and now" till "splitting down the back" such changes "release what was always there." Brian Swann's poems, moving in their candor, read as though they have always been there, too.