The remarkable first two books of poetry by the Pulitzer Prize finalist and former U.S. poet laureate—now combined in a single volume with a new preface by the authorAward-winning poet Robert Pinsky’s first two collections—Sadness And Happiness and An Explanation of America—announced the arrival of a major new voice in American poetry. Now, these acclaimed books are presented together in a single volume featuring a new preface by ...

Discover the darker side of the Garden State with this anthology of gritty mystery stories.Akashic Books continues its award-winning series of original noir anthologies, launched in 2004 with Brooklyn Noir. Each volume is compromised of all-new stories, each one set in a distinct location within the geographical area of the book. In New Jersey Noir, a star-studded cast of authors sifts through the hidden dirt of the Garden State.Featuring br...

“****Robert Pinsky belongs to that rarest category of talents, a poet-critic.”—Robert LowellTwo important books of criticism by the Pulitzer Prize finalist and former U.S. poet laureate—now combined in a single volume with a new preface by the authorFor Robert Pinsky, poetry’s individual, human scale as a fundamentally vocal medium—with poems brought to life by one person at a time—gives poetry a unique importance in American and democratic...

From Sadness and Happiness: Poems by Robert Pinsky:CEREMONY FOR ANY BEGINNINGRobert PinskyAgainst weather, and the randomHarpies--mood, circumstance, the lawsOf biography, chance, physics--The unseasonable soul holds forth,Eager for form as a renownedPedant, the emperor's man of worth,Hereditary arbiter of manners.Soul, one's life is one's enemy.As the small children learn, what happens...

A new book of poems by the three-time poet laureate Robert Pinsky, a writer "rarely equalled" (Louise Glück).Robert Pinsky, one of our most ambitious, inventive, and finely tuned poets, takes an original approach to the fraught, central matter of borders in Proverbs of Limbo, his first new book of poetry in eight years.In this collection, the poet mines and maps limbal regions: those spaces between differences that can be at once creative and oppre...

C. P. Cavafy (1863-1933) lived in relative obscurity in Alexandria, and a collected edition of his poems was not published until after his death. Now, however, he is regarded as the most important figure in twentieth-century Greek poetry, and his poems are considered among the most powerful in modern European literature.This revised bilingual edition of Collected Poems offers the reader the original Greek texts facing what are now recognized as the standard English transla...

**"Truly the voice of the Jersey Shore." —Bruce Springsteen“Evocative.”—New York Times Book ReviewAn alternatingly funny and poignant memoir from three-term poet laureate Robert Pinsky.**In late-1940s Long Branch, a historic but run-down Jersey Shore resort town, in a neighborhood of Italian, Black, and Jewish families, Robert Pinsky began his unlikely journey to becoming a poet. Descended from a bootlegger grandfather, an athletic father, and a rebellious t...

Robert Pinsky, distinguished poet and man of letters, selects the top 100 poems from twenty-five years of The Best American PoetryThis special edition celebrates twenty-five years of the Best American Poetry series, which has become an institution. From its inception in 1988, it has been hotly debated, keenly monitored, ardently advocated (or denounced), and obsessively scrutinized. Each volume consists of seventy-five poems chosen by a major Amer...

History of My Heart, winner of the William Carlos Williams Prize, first appeared in 1984. In The New Republic, J.D. McClatchy called it "one of the best books of the past decade." It is Pinsky's third volume of poems--and an ideal introduction to the work of a vital and original contemporary American poet.

Intense verbal music with a jazz feeling; invention against the grain of expectation; intelligence racing among materials with the variety of a busy street—these have been the qualities of Robert Pinsky's work since his first book, Sadness and Happiness (1975), celebrated for setting a new direction in American poetry. At that time, responding to a question about that book, Pinsky said: "I would like to write a poetry which could contain every kind of thing, while keeping all the ...

Impassioned, Personal Poems From America's Poet Laureate"It spends itself regardless into the ocean.It stains and scours and makes things dark or bright:Sweat of the moon, a shroud of benediction,The chilly liquefaction of day to night,The Jersey rain, my rain, soaks all as one:It smites Metuchen, Rahway, Saddle River,Fair Haven, Newark, Little Silver, Bayonne.I feel i...

From the former U.S. Poet Laureate, "a keenly idiosyncratic account of the place of poetry in our time . . . not only interesting but suspenseful to read" (James Logenbach, The Nation )."Poetry is a vocal, which is to say a bodily, art," Robert Pinsky declares in The Sounds of Poetry. "The medium of poetry is the human body: the column of air inside the chest, shaped into signifying sounds in the larynx and the m...