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Cid Corman writes, "For the vast majority of Italians and others to whom the name means anything, Matera is synonymous with abject poverty and backwardness. In fact, being the capital of its province, which occupies the lower and Eastern half of the region known today as La Basilicata, in the highlands inland between the Ionian Sea and the Adriatic, it is relatively affluent in a world where degradation is the rule. It has a railway terminal, all the functionary establishments of authority, more than a dozen churches, and a growing middle-class. In the outlying areas, in the castle villages perched on remote mountains, is poverty undisguised, unmitigated, and kept quiet. I came to this community quite by accident, penniless, and stayed to teach there for a year and a half. What I saw, what I learned, what I felt, my relations to others there and that of earth and air, fire and water, to them and to myself, should be implicit, if not explicit, in these poems."

Concrete Poetry has been growing in many countries, from Brazil to Japan, and especially in England and Europe. Its ancestry goes back to pre-historic picture writing and the anagrams of early Christian monks; it has affinities with the oriental ideogram, and, in our century, with Apollinaire's Calligrammes, the work of Klee and Schwitters, and the experiments in "visual form" of Cummings, Dylan Thomas, and the Dadaists and Surrealists. Once Again is not so much an anthology, though it includes the work of 54 poets from 10 countries, as a group presentation, designed to be read as a consecutive "visual happening." It has been assembled by Jean-François Bory, an editor of the Paris magazine Approches and the author of Plein Signe, Height Texts + 1 and other "Concrete" books. Bory has provided an introduction which traces the history of the movement and analyzes its aesthetic. He also comments on individual poems.

It is a warm June morning in the West End of St. Louis in the mid-thirties--a lovely Sunday for a picnic at Creve Coeur Lake. But Dorothea, one of Tennessee Williams's most engaging "marginally youthful," forever hopeful Southern belles, is home waiting for a phone call from the principal of the high school where she teaches civics--the man she expects to fulfill her deferred dreams of romance and matrimony. Williams's unerring dialogue reveals each of the four characters of A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur with precision and clarity: Dorothea, who does even her "setting-up exercises" with poignant flutters; Bodey, her German roommate, who wants to pair Dotty with her beer-drinking twin, Buddy, thereby assuring nieces, nephews, and a family for both herself and Dotty; Helena, a fellow teacher, with the "eyes of a predatory bird," who would like to "rescue" Dotty from her vulgar, common surroundings and substitute an elegant but sterile spinster life; and Miss Gluck, a newly orphaned and distraught neighbor, whom Bodey comforts with coffee and crullers while Helena mocks them both. Focusing on one morning and one encounter of four women, Williams once again skillfully explores, with comic irony and great tenderness, the meaning of loneliness, the need for human connection, as well as the inevitable compromises one must make to get through "the long run of life."

This brilliantly ironic novel about literature and writing, in Vila-Matas's trademark witty and erudite style, is told in the form of a lecture delivered by a novelist clearly a version of the author himself. The "lecturer" tells of his two-year stint living in Marguerite Duras's garret during the seventies, spending time with writers, intellectuals, and eccentrics, and trying to make it as a creator of literature: "I went to Paris and was very poor and very unhappy." Encountering such luminaries as Duras, Roland Barthes, Georges Perec, Sergio Pitol, Samuel Beckett, and Juan Marsé, our narrator embarks on a novel whose text will "kill" its readers and put him on a footing with his beloved Hemingway. (Never Any End to Paris takes its title from a refrain in A Moveable Feast.) What emerges is a fabulous portrait of intellectual life in Paris that, with humor and penetrating insight, investigates the role of literature in our lives.

Part of our revived "Poetry Pamphlet" series, Two American Scenes features two masters of the essay discussing "found material."Excerpts:It was given to me, in the nineteenth century,to spend a lifetime on this earth. Along with a few of the sorrowsthat are appointed unto men, I have had innumerable enjoyments;and the world has been to me, even from childhood,a great museum.- Lydia DavisBad rapids. Bradley is knocked over the side; his foot catchesunder the seat and he is dragged, head under water. Camped ona sand beach, the wind blows a hurricane. Sand piles over us likea snow-drift.- Eliot Weinberge

Part of our revived "Poetry Pamphlet Series", Sorting Facts is Susan Howe's masterful meditation on the filmmaker Chris Marker, whose film stills are interspersed throughout.An excerpt:Sorting word-facts I only know an apparition. Scribble grammarhas no neighbor. In the name of reason I need to record somethingbecause I am a survivor in this ocean.

That Smell is Sonallah Ibrahim's modernist masterpiece and one of the most influential Arabic novels. Composed in the wake of a five-year prison sentence, the semi-autobiographical story follows a recently released political prisoner as he wanders through Cairo, adrift in his native city.

Now in a gorgeous new paperback edition with full-color illustrations by Maira Kalman, Microscripts is a one-of-a-kind masterpiece.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti's first book since Poetry as Insurgent Art, a new call to action and a vivid picture of civilization moving towards its brink.

A sweeping, kaleidoscopic, and passionate novel that presents a stunning series of flashes - scenes, moods, dreams, and weather- as the narrator wanders through Lima.

Poet Forrest Gander's mesmerizing series of poems - hinging around a dance schematic - that captures and extends Eiko & Koma's performance with lyrical intensity and vividness

Long live Man! sings the poet Gregory Corso-despite atom bombs and computers, cold wars that get hot and togetherness that isn't, too many cars and too little love...and in these poems he celebrates the wonders (and the laughs and griefs) of being a man alive. Whether he is musing on antic glories amid the ruins of the Acropolis or watching a New York child invent games on the city's sidewalks, Corso is there in it, putting us into it, with the magic of vision, with the senses-awakening images, that transmute reality into something more-insights that let us share his joy and echo his shout of Long live Man!

Rebel Lions, Michael McClure's first book of poetry since the retrospective Selected Poems (1985), spans a decade of profound personal change and poetic evolution for the author. In an introductory note, he provides a backdrop for the collection, which moves from old life to new. McClure's work bursts forth from the matrix of the physical and spiritual. "Poetry is one of the edges of consciousness," he asserts. "And consciousness is a real thing like the hoof of a deer or the smell of a bush of blackberries at the roadside in the sun." In the first section of Rebel Lions, "Old Flames," the poems range from the realistic ("Awakening and Recalling a Summer Hike") to the metaphorical ("The Silken Stitching"), as the poet addresses a life on the verge of transformation. The second section, "Rose Rain," exults in a life transformed through love's alchemy. Rebel Lions closes with "New Brain," poems affirming the freedom of all humankind and matter in the eternal now.

Kenneth Rexroth's sequence of four short plays, Beyond the Mountains, was first brought out by New Directions in 1951, then reprinted in 1966 by City Lights Books.

Over the course of his life, Kenneth Rexroth wrote about the Sierra Nevada better than anyone. Progressive in terms of environmental ethics and comparable to the writings of Emerson, Thoreau, Aldo Leopard, Annie Dillard, and Gary Snyder, Rexroth's poetry and prose described the way Californians have always experienced and loved the High Sierra. Contained in this marvelous collection are transcendent nature poems, as well as prose selections from his memoir An Autobiographical Novel, newspaper columns, published and unpublished WPA guidebooks, and correspondence. Famed science-fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson has compiled a gift for lovers of mountains and poetry both. This volume also contains Robinson's introduction and notes, photographs of Rexroth, a map of Rexroth's travels, and an amazing astronomical analysis of Rexroth's poems by the fiction writer Carter Scholz.

Mysteriosos and Other Poems, Michael McClure's newest book of poetry, explores the last seven years. These new poems speak of working toward freedom and beauty during a time of interminable war and the destruction of our natural surroundings. In the Introduction, McClure clarifies his playfulness with time, how within the moment of his writing all moments and memories exist. His "willingness of unwearied senses to be what they perceive" as Anne Waldman says, opens our perceptions. Included in this new collection is: a long travel poem to an Indian forest where an enraged elephant charges then recognizes an old human friend and turns back into the trees; "Double Moire" which "reads like a fulfillment of Goethe's prophesy and Shelley's: the whole universe seems to be in it, down to the smallest and up to the most vast. It is absolutely what the ultimate nature poem might be" (Jerome Rothenberg). The poems against war are fierce and canny while the "Mysteriosos" and "Cameos" can be as gentle as lullabies inventing love. "Dear Being," a garland of thirty-seven stanzas, uses the freedoms of Buddhist hwa yen.

A boozing, sex-obsessed writer finds himself employed by the Catholic Church (an institution he loathes) to proofread a 1,100 page report on the army's massacre and torture of thousands of indigenous villagers a decade earlier, including the testimonies of the survivors. The writer's job is to tidy it up: he rants, "that was what my work was all about, cleaning up and giving a manicure to the Catholic hands that were piously getting ready to squeeze the balls of the military tiger." Mesmerized by the strange Vallejo-like poetry of the Indians' phrases ("the houses they were sad because no people were inside them"), the increasingly agitated and frightened writer is endangered twice over: by the spell the strangely beautiful heart-rending voices exert over his tenuous sanity, and by real danger-after all, the murderers are the very generals who still run this unnamed Latin American country.

"It makes me feel good to know there is a comparatively unknown little magazine in the heart of Second Avenue (ghetto to the world) in which l am granted full freedom of speech," wrote Henry Miller to his friend Irving Stettner, editor of Stroker. In 1978-80, the last three years of his life, Miller generously contributed letters, drawings, and various prose pieces for this magazine's use, both previously unpublished works from an earlier date and, of special interest, much that was newly written. Presented here are the best of these Miller pieces, including letters he wrote to Stettner in which the author remarks on anything and everything: painting, Brooklyn, Isaac Bashevis Singer's Nobel Prize acceptance speech, books and writers, his daily doings. Among the prose selections are pieces on the theatre, "Memory and Forgettery," "America, America," "A Few Chaotic Recollections," and a short story, "Vienna and Back." His "Toccata for Half-Wits," an essay on the movie Bonnie and Clyde written in 1968, is the only exception to the concept of this book as a presentation of the fruits of Miller's very last years. "Squeeze all the color out of the tubes," Miller advises a young painter friend. As this collection indeed testifies, "Brother Henry," as he sometimes signed himself, did just that as the end of his life approached.

Some of the most rewarding pages in Henry Miller's books concern his self-education as a writer. He tells, as few great writers ever have, how he set his goals, how he discovered the excitement of using words, how the books he read influenced him, and how he learned to draw on his own experience.

A stellar new collection of poems by "the Balanchine of the architecture dance" (The New York Times) and winner of the 2006 National Book Award in poetry.

The tyrant of Horacio Castellanos Moya's ambitious new novel is the actual pro-Nazi mystic Maximiliano Hernändez Marti¿nez - known as the Warlock - who came to power in El Salvador in 1932. An attempted coup in April, 1944, failed, but a general strike in May finally forced him out of office. Tyrant Memory takes place during the month between the coup and the strike. Its protagonist, Hayde¿e Aragon, is a well-off woman, whose husband is a political prisoner and whose son, Clemente, after prematurely announcing the dictator's death over national radio during the failed coup, is forced to flee when the very much alive Warlock starts to ruthlessly hunt down his enemies. The novel moves between Hayde¿e's political awakening in diary entries and Clemente's frantic and often hysterically comic efforts to escape capture. Tyrant Memory - sharp, grotesque, moving, and often hilariously funny - is an unforgettable incarnation of a coun- try's history in the destiny of one family.

A hybrid of history and biography, Maurice Collis's The Land of the Great Image concerns a little-known Portuguese friar abroad in early seventeenth-century Asia. The book chronicles the great diplomatic coup of Friar Manrique's career, opening the kingdom of Arakan, now Burma (land of the "great image" of the Buddha) to the Church and to Portuguese trade, Dispatched from Goa, capital of the now almost forgotten Portuguese empire in Asia, Manrique made his way across and around the Bay of Bengal, surviving shipwreck, tigers, and pirates, to reach the court of King Thiri-thu-dhamma. And all along Manrique's way the author waits at every turn with another curiosity, another historical tidbit for the reader to relish. Collis notes how trials of the Inquisition were run (which too had set up shop in Goa); the luxury enjoyed by Europeans in the East; what was served for dinner at court; how elephant warfare was waged; and what went into a potion magically brewed to bring glory to King Thiri-thu-dhamina (the hearts of 2,000 white doves, 4,000 white cows, and 6,000 of his subjects).

This collection of stories and essays takes its title from a long prose reverie in which Henry Miller, after his return to the United States, thinks back to the happy years of middle life which he spent in France. The qualities that make the French unique have seldom been so movingly expressed. The America he had rediscovered does not come off very well by contrast-particularly the Hollywood state of mind, which gets a thoroughly Milleresque going over in the burlesque "Astrological Fricassee."What Miller likes on the American scene are the individuals who have broken through the pattern of conformity, the rare and often isolated creative personalities who are resisting the dehumanization of our so-called "civilization." He gives us vivid portraits of the painters Abe Rattner, Jean Varda and Beauford Delaney; the sculptor Bufano; and Jasper Deeter, director of the hedgerow Theatre.Two of Henry Miller's greatest essays are also in this volume: "Murder the Murderer" (on war), a declaration which ranks with Randolph Bourne's War and the Intellectuals, and, with particular relevance to the censorship codes which kept his Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn out of this country for so long, "Obscenity and the Law of Reflection."

With his hallmark discernment, George Steiner presents in The Poetry of Thought his magnum opus, staking out his claim for the essential oneness of great thought and great style. Steiner spans the entire history of Western philosophy as it entwines with literature, finding that, as Sartre stated, in all philosophy there is "a hidden literary prose."

This bundle of four Poetry Pamphlets (9-12 in the series) includes:Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Blasts Cries LaughterOsama Alomar's Fullblood ArabianOliverio Girondo's Poems to Read on a StreetcarFifteen Iraqi Poets (edited by Dunya Mikhail)

Piano Stories presents fifteen wonderful works by the great Uruguayan author Felisberto Hernández, "a writer like no other," as Italo Calvino declares in his introduction: "like no European or Latin American. He is an 'irregular,' who eludes all classifications and labellings - yet he is unmistakable on any page to which one might randomly open one of his books." Piano Stories contains classic tales such as "The Daisy Dolls," "The Usher," and "The Flooded House."

Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Blasts contains blasts, blessings, and curses in the vortex of today, taking its cues from the original little magazine, Blast, published by Wyndham Lewis with Ezra Pound in 1914-15 that helped create the modernist movement in literature and the visual arts. In these fearless new poems, Ferlinghetti, America's everyman bard, speaks for the poor, the forgotten, the beaten, and the bombed.

Virtually unknown in the English-speaking world, Girondo is one of the pioneers of Latin American literature. This selection offers a glimpse of a precise and playful writer who insisted that a poem "should be constructed like a watch and sold like a sausage."

A prominent practitioner of the Arabic "very short story" (al-qisa al-qasira jiddan), Osama Alomar's poetic fictions embody the wisdom of Kahlil Gibran filtered through the violent gray absurdity of Assad's police state. Fullblood Arabian is the first publication of Alomar's strange, often humorously satirical allegories, where good and evil battle with indifference, avarice, and compassion using striking imagery and effervescent language.