Conversation in the Mountains

Conversation in the Mountains
Literature by Paul Celan
Translated from German by Rosmarie Waldrop

“I am supposed to tell you some of the words I heard deep down in the sea where there is much silence and so much happens.” So begins the first text in this indispensable volume, which includes: “Edgar Jené and the Dream about the Dream,” “Backlight,” “The Meridian,” and the piece which Celan himself deemed his most important, “Conversation in the Mountains.” George Steiner wrote in The New Yorker that Celan’s prose was “transforming the landscape of poetic theory and of the philosophy of language.” This collection of essays, speeches, and letters (as well as notes on Alexander Blok and Osip Mandelstam) is a great gift to readers and to anyone who wishes to understand the twentieth century. As the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer wrote, “Paul Celan’s poems reach us, but we miss them.” Perhaps through these rare prose texts we may find the key to what we missed.

Apples and Oranges

Apples & Oranges: Adventures in Poetics
by Stuart Cooke
Puncher & Wattmann, 2025

The essays of Apples & Oranges are selected from a decade of sustained enquiry into the possibilities for poetics in the Anthropocene. Drawing on Cooke’s experiences as a poet, critic, traveller and translator, the book traverses Antarctic, Australasian, and North & South American landscapes. New continental, intellectual and affective formations emerge here as hybrids of memoir, travelogue and literary criticism. Or a plethora of songs and signs are rescued from the wastelands of colonial imaginaries. Often, the explorations lead to poems; sometimes they lead to the contours of Cooke’s own life. Indeed, the logics are poetic rather than sequential: allusion, collage, fragment and metaphor compose recurrent, occasionally symphonic structures. As a series of adventures, the book interrogates – and often transgresses – boundaries between poetry & prose, art & science, and human & non-human. As the planet cooks into catastrophe, leaf-cutter ants make symbiotic sculptures, lyrebirds make forest operas, steel becomes sentient, the Brazilian Amazon blends with the Australian Outback, and Roman ruins foreshadow giant bergs breaking from the Antarctic ice sheet.

The American Sonnet

The American Sonnet
An Anthology of Poems and Essays
Dora Malech and Laura T. Smith, editors
University of Iowa Press, 2022

Poet and scholar team Dora Malech and Laura T. Smith collect and foreground an impressive range of sonnets, including formal and formally subversive sonnets by established and emerging poets, highlighting connections across literary moments and movements. Poets include Phillis Wheatley, Fredrick Goddard Tuckerman, Emma Lazarus, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Gertrude Stein, Fradel Shtok, Claude McKay, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Ruth Muskrat Bronson, Langston Hughes, Muriel Rukeyser, Gwendolyn Brooks, Dunstan Thompson, Rhina P. Espaillat, Lucille Clifton, Marilyn Hacker, Wanda Coleman, Patricia Smith, Jericho Brown, and Diane Seuss. The sonnets are accompanied by critical essays that likewise draw together diverse voices, methodologies, and historical and theoretical perspectives that represent the burgeoning field of American sonnet studies.

Poetry Is A Disease

Poetry Is A Disease
by Derek JG Williams

Greying Ghost, 2022.

Poetry is a disease More to the point, being a poet is an illness. What drives one to take part in this never-ending ritual of self-flagellation? The ceaseless nights spent sorting words, the constant editing, the ruthless cruelty of rejections and acceptance, while grueling, is ultimately besieged by a very minute aim: to be great. In his wildly relatable essay, Derek JG Williams carjacks the reader and fearlessly drives them through the backroads of every poet's [and writer's] psyche. It's a treatise on that ageless chasm that exists in every poet's mind: what do we want to say and how do we want our words to be remembered when we're gone? If poetry is indeed a disease, Poetry Is A Disease is the reassuring, soothing salve.

Inhabit the Poem: Last Essays

Inhabit the Poem: Last Essays
by Helen Vender

Library of America, 2025.
ISBN: 978-1-59853-827-4
279 pages

In 13 essays, the great poetry critic offers her final word on the poets who have meant the most to her, from Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson to Wallace Stevens and Sylvia Plath

Helen Vendler was our greatest reader of poetry, a scholar who illuminiated its inner mechanisms and emotional roots for a wide audience.

Always attentive to the stylistic and imaginative features of a poem, Vendler addresses the work of a wide range of American, English, and Irish poets—both the canonical and the unexpected—in 13 essays:

• Walt Whitman, author of the first PTSD poem
• Sylvia Plath, and the lost poetry of motherhood
• William Cowper, James Merrill, and A. R. Ammons on poetric charm
• Emily Brontë and Emily Dickinson, linked by a poetic mystery
• Ocean Vuong and the shaping imagination of poetry today
• Wallace Stevens and the enigma of beauty.

In these and other essays Vendler demonstrates once again why the Irish poet Seamus Heaney called her “the best close reader of poems to be found on the literary pages.” The thirteen poignant essays gathered here were all published in the last three years of Vendler’s life, in the journal Liberties, and intended as her final book. The author’s preface was completed only three days before her death, at age ninety.

What is the Grass

What Is the Grass
Walt Whitman in My Life
by Mark Doty

W.W. Norton, 2021, 288 pages.

Mark Doty has always felt haunted by Walt Whitman’s perennially new American voice, and by his equally radical claims about body and soul. In What Is the Grass, Doty effortlessly blends biography, criticism, and memoir to keep company with Whitman and his Leaves of Grass, tracing the resonances between his own experience and the legendary poet’s life and work.

Meditations

Meditations
The Assorted Prose of Barbara Guest Barbara Guest

Edited Joseph Shafer

Foreword Marjorie Welish

Meditations gathers together in one volume for the first time an extensive collection of the prose work of Barbara Guest (1920–2006), one of the major voices of twentieth century American literature. Known primarily as a poet, Guest worked in many styles, all represented herein: essays, lectures, art criticism, literary and art reviews, as well as forms of fiction, biography, poetic prose, drama, comics, and other mixed-genre pieces.

Ghosts and the Overplus

Ghosts and the Overplus: Reading Poetry in the Twenty-First Century
by Christina Pugh

U. of Michigan Press, 2024.

Ghosts and the Overplus is a celebration of lyric poetry in the twenty-first century and how lyric poetry incorporates the voices of our age as well as the poetic “ghosts” from the past. Acclaimed poet and award-winning teacher Christina Pugh is fascinated by how poems continually look backward into literary history. Her essays find new resonance in poets ranging from Emily Dickinson to Gwendolyn Brooks to the poetry of the present. Some of these essays also consider the way that poetry interacts with the visual arts, dance, and the decision to live life as a nonconformist.

Make it Broken

Make It Broken: Toward a Poetics of Late Modernism
by Patrick Pritchett
Black Square Editions, 2025.

After the disaster of World War II, Ezra Pound’s exhortation to poets to “make it new” lay in shambles. The essays in MAKE IT BROKEN assert that a certain group of poets, taking their cue from both Pound and George Oppen, employed modernist strategies of interruption, negation, and seriality to recharge poetry with a moral acuity and formal audacity. By writing from inside the ruins, poets like Michael Palmer, Lorine Niedecker, Gustaf Sobin, and Fanny Howe use the very brokenness of language to redeem the poem in the wake of catastrophe.

Talking All Night

Talking All Night
The New York Poets: Interviews, Photos and Letters
by Mark Hillringhouse

Serving House Press, 2025.

Mark Hillringhouse, in his book of interviews with the poets of the New York School, lets the poets speak for themselves in their own words about the poetry they were writing, giving readers for the first time, a full picture of how they created and forged a new poetics. By interviewing the poets in their homes, he lets readers see inside their world during the years they were at their peak. Along with the interviews, Hillringhouse, who is also a photographer, includes never before seen photographic portraits of each of the poets and personal letters that they wrote. It is a full account of how these poets were influenced and how they interacted with each other as they explain what brought them to poetry and how they developed their poetic craft. Hillringhouse provides an in-depth introduction to each of the interviews that includes John Ashbery, Amiri Baraka, Ted Berrigan, Edwin Denby, Barbara Guest, Bob Holman, Kenneth Koch, Bernadette Mayer, W.S. Merwin, Howard Moss, Simon Pettet, James Schuyler, Tony Towle, Gerald Stern, Paul Violi, and Anne Waldman.

Black Buffalo Woman - Lucille Clifton

Black Buffalo Woman: An Introduction to the Poetry & Poetics of Lucille Clifton
By: Kazim Ali

Boa Editions, 2024.

Black Buffalo Woman is a deep, comprehensive dive into Clifton’s work through the eyes of celebrated poet and scholar, Kazim Ali. Collecting chapters of Clifton’s early manuscripts, late drafts, and integrating her books of children’s literature, Ali’s meticulously researched volume provides a brilliant and fresh perspective on Clifton’s life and work.

Various chapters examine Clifton’s treatment of the body as a site of both joy and danger, spirituality, and an interrogation of American history, politics, and popular culture. The result of Ali’s scholarship and care highlights a dazzling array of Clifton’s poetic techniques and forms that will continue to inspire poets, readers, and Lucille Clifton fans—past, present and future—for decades to come.

Poetry as Enchantment

Poetry as Enchantment
by Dana Gioia

Paul Dry Books, 2024

In the essays in Poetry as Enchantment—more personal than any of his earlier works—Dana Gioia shares a lifetime of thought and experience about poetry. Gioia, the author of Can Poetry Matter?, talks about poetry in a radically different way than it is currently being taught or discussed. In the title essay, he explains that poetry is speech raised to the level of song, and though poetry may often be misunderstood as intellectual, it moves us the way music does. Poetry charms its readers, creating a heightened experience of attention. It addresses readers in the fullness of their humanity, simultaneously speaking to the mind, emotions, imagination, memory, and physical senses. Without academic jargon, Poetry as Enchantment relates literature to the questions of life.

The Kinds of Poetry I Want

The Kinds of Poetry I Want
Essays & Comedies
by Charles Bernstein
With a Foreword by Paul Auster

U. of Chicago Press, 2024

A celebration of the radical poetics of invention from Charles Bernstein.

For more than four decades, Charles Bernstein has been at the forefront of experimental poetry, ever reaching for a radical poetics that defies schools, periods, and cultural institutions. The Kinds of Poetry I Want is a celebration of invention and includes not only poetry but also essays on aesthetics and literary studies, interviews with other poets, autobiographical sketches, and more.

Horace: Poet on a Volcano

Horace: Poet on a Volcano

Yale University Press, 2025

The Ancient Lives series from Yale University Press continues with Horace: Poet on a Volcano by classicist and former Times Literary Supplement editor Peter Stothard. Some of the subjects taken up by the series have been more obscure than others (Demetrius, Phocion, etc.), but Stothard’s subject, Quintus Horatius Flaccus, was for 2000 years the exact opposite: not just known but beloved, not just familiar but family. Even before his death in AD 8, Horace was a godsend to teachers of literature and Latin, a great writer who could be enjoyed by even the stupidest students, a master of the language who was also fun.

Nothing Stays Put

Nothing Stays Put
The Life and Poetry of Amy Clampitt

By Willard Spiegelman

Knopf, 2023.

s With the publication of her first book of poems in her sixty-third year, Amy Clampitt rose meteorically to fame, launching herself from obscurity to the upper ranks of American poetry all but overnight, and living a whirlwind eleven years, until her death in 1994. Years later, as renowned poetry scholar Willard Spiegelman wades into her papers and poems, he discovers a woman of dazzling intellect, staunch progressive politics, and an inexhaustible sense of wonder for the world and the words we’ve invented to describe it.

How We Do It

How We Do It
Black Writers on Craft, Practice, and Skill
Edited by Jericho Brown and Darlene Taylor
HarperCollins, 2023.

More than 30 acclaimed writers—including diverse voices such as Nikki Giovanni, David Omotosho Black, Natasha Trethewey, Barry Jenkins, Jacqueline Woodson, Tayari Jones, and Angela Flournoy—reflect on their experience and expertise in this unique book on the craft of writing that focuses on the Black creative spirit.

How We Do It is an anthology curated by Black writers for the creation and proliferation of Black thought. While a creator’s ethnicity does not solely define them, it is inherently part of who they are and how they interpret the world.

The Heart of American Poetry

The Heart of American Poetry
by Edward Hirsch

Library of America, 2022.

In this landmark new book from Library of America, Hirsch offers deeply personal readings of forty essential American poems we thought we knew—from Anne Bradstreet’s “The Author to Her Book” and Phillis Wheatley’s “To S.M. a Young African Painter, on seeing his Works” to Garrett Hongo’s “Ancestral Graves, Kahuku” and Joy Harjo’s “Rabbit Is Up to Tricks”—exploring how these poems have sustained his own life and how they might uplift our diverse but divided nation.

“This is a personal book about American poetry,” writes Hirsch, “but I hope it is more than a personal selection. I have chosen forty poems from our extensive archive and songbook that have been meaningful to me, part of my affective life, my critical consideration, but I have also tried to be cognizant of the changing playbook in American poetry, which is not fixed but fluctuating, ever in flow, to pay attention to the wider consideration, the appreciable reach of our literature. This is a book of encounters and realizations.”

My Poetics

My Poetics
by Maureen N. McLane

U. of Chicago Press, 2024.

If, as Wallace Stevens wrote, “poetry is the scholar’s art,” My Poetics flies under a slightly different banner: study and criticism are also the poet’s art. Punctuated with McLane’s poems and drawing variously on Hannah Arendt, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Roland Barthes, Bruno Latour, and other writers and poets, My Poetics is a formally as well as intellectually adventurous work. Its artful arrangement of readings and divagations shows us a way to be with poems and poetics.

Robert Frost—Sixteen Poems to Learn by Heart

Robert Frost—Sixteen Poems to Learn by Heart
by Jay Parini

Library of America, 2024.

In this keepsake edition, acclaimed poet and biographer Jay Parini has chosen sixteen of Frost’s greatest works to learn by heart. In accompanying commentaries, Parini explores Frost’s stylistic genius and imaginative power and offers insight into what each poem can tell us about one of our most beloved and enduring poets, and about ourselves.

“The goal of this little book is to encourage readers to slow down—to listen to Frost’s words and phrases, to locate their deepest rhythms, and hear the tune of each poem as it unfolds,” Parini writes in his introduction. “Memorizing a poem can teach us much about a poem’s structure and argument, and about the resonance of particular words. And best of all, memorization makes a poem part of our inner lives. Once committed to memory, a poem is available to us for recall at any time—and the occasions for remembering it will make themselves known to us. It isn’t something we have to work at.”

Fernando Pessoa

Fernando Pessoa
Bartholomew Ryan

A critical biography of the modernist Portuguese writer.

As a young man Fernando Pessoa aspired to, as he put it, “be plural like the universe.” He would fulfill this desire by inventing over one hundred fictional alter-egos which he called heteronyms. Beginning with Pessoa’s early days in Portugal, this philosophical biography explores the life, work, and imaginative universe of this modernist pioneer. Bartholomew Ryan offers a detailed overview of Pessoa’s writings on radical politics, his ventures into esoteric realms, and his expertise in astrology. Along the way, Ryan unravels Pessoa’s real and literary relationships and explores his unfinished prose masterpiece, The Book of Disquiet. This is a compelling, timely exploration of Pessoa’s profound, innovative ideas.