Praised in recent years as a “calculating, improvisatory, essential poet” by Daisy Fried in the New York Times, and as “the foremost poet-critic of our time” by Craig Dworkin, Charles Bernstein is a leading voice in American poetry. Near/Miss, Bernstein’s first poetry collection in five years, is the apotheosis of his late style, thick with off-center rhythms, hilarious riffs, and verbal extravagance.This collection’s title highlights poetry’s ability to graze rea...

This audio version of acclaimed poet Charles Bernstein's most expansive and unruly collection to date is read in inimitable fashion by the author. It features poems, both tiny and grand, that speak to a world turned upside down. Our time of “covidity,” as Bernstein calls it in one of the book’s most poignantly disarming works, is characterized in equal measure by the turbulence of both the body politic and the individual. Likewise, in Topsy-Turvy, novel and traditional forms jostl...

The Sophist was first published by Sun & Moon Press in 1987 and has been unavailable for well over a decade. A pivotal book for Bernstein, The Sophist demonstrated his great range of subject matter, style, and genre. By contrasting wildly different approaches to poetry, Bernstein not only questions the intrinsic value of any given form but also provides a model for his later heterogeneous books, including My Way and With Strings. If sophism is the opposite of both philosophy and the lyric,...

Jewish art has always been with us, but so has a broader canvas of Jewish imaginings: in thought, in emotion, in text, and in ritual practice. Imagining the Jewish God was there in the beginning, as it were, engraved and embedded in the ways Jews lived and responded to their God.This book attempts to give voice to these diverse imaginings of the Jewish God, and offers these collected essays and poems as a living text meant to provoke a substantive and nourishing dialogue. A responsive, liv...

A comprehensive examination of one of the twentieth century's most innovative writers and critics.This collection of essays offers an authoritative examination and appraisal of the French-American novelist Raymond Federman's many contributions to humanities scholarship, including Holocaust studies, Beckett studies, translation studies, experimental fiction, postmodernism, and autobiography. Although known primarily as a novelist, Federman (1928–2009) is also the au...

Praised in recent years as a “calculating, improvisatory, essential poet” by Daisy Fried in the New York Times, and as “the foremost poet-critic of our time” by Craig Dworkin, Charles Bernstein is a leading voice in American poetry. Near/Miss, Bernstein’s first poetry collection in five years, is the apotheosis of his late style, thick with off-center rhythms, hilarious riffs, and verbal extravagance.This collection’s title highlights poetry’s ability to graze rea...

Close Listening brings together seventeen strikingly original essays, especially written for this volume, on the poetry reading, the sound of poetry, and the visual performance of poetry. While the performance of poetry is as old as poetry itself, critical attention to modern and postmodern poetry performance has been surprisingly slight. This volume, featuring work by critics and poets such as Marjorie Perloff, Susan Stewart, Johanna Drucker, Dennis Tedlock, and Susan Howe, is th...

Close Listening brings together seventeen strikingly original essays, especially written for this volume, on the poetry reading, the sound of poetry, and the visual performance of poetry. While the performance of poetry is as old as poetry itself, critical attention to modern and postmodern poetry performance has been surprisingly slight. This volume, featuring work by critics and poets such as Marjorie Perloff, Susan Stewart, Johanna Drucker, Dennis Tedlock, and Susan Howe, is th...

Creative Non-fiction. A multifaceted set of lively writings by two poet-intellectuals (A. D. Coleman and Charles Bernstein) about the veracity of an avant-garde essay by third (David Antin) regarding realities within a publishing house run by the parents of one of them, Allan Douglass Coleman, this author.Coleman’s leftist family founded a high- end sci-tech press. He and David Antin worked there. Antin wrote about it. Coleman took issue and created poetic license / poetic justice....

Outstanding poets and critics present cultural readings of the Objectivist poets, a group whose works have been largely unexamined."Objectivist" writers, conjoined through a variety of personal, ideological, and literary-historical links, have, from the late 1920s to the present, attracted emulation and suspicion. Representing a nonsymbolist, postimagist poetics and characterized by a historical, realist, antimythological worldview, Objectivists have retai...

Transpoetic Exchange illuminates the poetic interactions between Octavio Paz (1914-1998) and Haroldo de Campos (1929-2003) from three perspectives--comparative, theoretical, and performative. The poem Blanco by Octavio Paz, written when he was ambassador to India in 1966, and Haroldo de Campos’ translation (or what he calls a “transcreation”) of that poem, published as Transblanco in 1986, as well as Campos’ Galáxias, written from 1963 to 1976, are the ...

"What have I in common with Jews? I hardly have anything in common with myself!"--Franz KafkaKafka's quip--paradoxical, self-questioning, ironic--highlights vividly some of the key issues of identity and self-representation for Jewish writers in the 20th century. No group of writers better represents the problems of Jewish identity than Jewish poets writing in the American modernist tradition--specifically secular Jews: those disdainful or suspicious of organized re...