From the Pulitzer Prize winning poet comes this “nearly perfect collection issued to celebrate his being named poet laureate of the United States” (The New York Times).Charles Simic has been widely celebrated for his slyly original poetic imagery; his social, political, and moral alertness; his uncanny ability to make the ordinary extraordinary; and, not least, his sardonic humor. Gathering much of his material from the seemingly mundane minutiae of Americ...

“Simic offers many sinister delights . . . the whole collection establishes Simic once again as a reliable master of his particular, melancholy, wry mode.” —Publishers WeeklyThis collection of poems from Charles Simic demonstrates once again his wit, moral acuity, and brilliant use of imagery. His settings are a farmhouse porch, a used-clothing store, empty station platforms; his subjects love, futility, and the sense of an individual life lived among a cr...

This retrospective collection by the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet contains “some of the strangest, most opalescent poems of the past half century” (Boston Globe).Over the course of his long career, former United States Poet Laureate Charles Simic has been celebrated for his brilliant and innovative imagery, his sardonic wit, and a voice all his own. In this new volume, he distills his life’s work, combining for the first time the best of his early poems wit...

The Pulitzer Prize–winning poet "illuminates the shadow side of life in poems as perfectly formed and directed as the beam of a flashlight" ( Booklist).The poems in Charles Simic's new collection evoke a variety of settings and images, from New York City to small New England towns; from crowds spilling onto the sidewalk on a hot summer night to an abandoned wooden church and a car graveyard overgrown with weeds. His subjects range from a bakery early in the...

“A loopy pilgrimage from a haunted past into a hopped-up, mad new world” from the Pulitzer Prize winner and former US poet laureate (Newsday).Loneliness, loss, sadness, and mystery mark this wonderful volume of forty-nine poems by Charles Simic, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for The World Doesn’t End and praised as “one of the truly imaginative writers of our time” by the Los Angeles Times.“A Charles Simic poem s...

“Poems . . . like folk tales told by a child with an impishly surrealistic streak” from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The World Doesn’t End (Library Journal).In this volume, “Simic writes so simply that his words fall like drops of water, but they ripple outward to evoke an ominous and numinous world” (The Washington Post Book World). He fills the wee hours of his poetry with angels and pigs, riddles and cemeteries. With empty offi...

"This 20th collection from the former U.S. poet laureate departs only by degrees from his poems of earlier decades—but it could just be his best book." — Publishers Weekly (starred review)In his first volume of poetry since his tenure as poet laureate, Charles Simic shows he is at the height of his poetic powers. These new poems mine the rich strain of inscrutability in ordinary life, until it is hard to know what is innocent and what ominous. There is some...

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry“One of the truly imaginative writers of our time.” —Los Angles Times Book ReviewYou never know what Charles Simic is up to until you reach the end of the line or the bottom of the paragraph. Waiting for you might be a kiss. Or a bludgeon. A smile at the absurdities of society, or a wistful, grim memory of World War II.He puns, pulls pranks. He can be jazzy and streetwise. Or cloak hims...

In this evocative memoir by one of America's most revered contemporary poets, Charles Simic recounts his journey from a childhood in war-torn Yugoslavia to his coming-of-age experiences as a young bohemian in New York City, then as a reluctant draftee in the United States Army. Simic’s early years in Belgrade, a city bombed first by the Nazis in 1941 and then by the Allies in 1944, recall memories of bombs, broken glass, and visits from the Gestapo. His family is jailed for trying to flee ...

A NEW YORK REVIEW E-BOOK ORIGINALAs former U.S. poet laureate Charles Simic has said, the secret to our identities lies not in grand events, but in the parentheses between events--and in these brief essays, we get a taste of this great poet's parenthetical observations and recollections. He takes us from his rattling house on a stormy New Hampshire night, to a park bench in Washington Square where two old men sitdiscussing the women they've known, to a business convention in ...

Whether he draws for inspiration on American blues, Serbian folktales, or Greek myths, Simic's words have a way of their own. Each of these forty-four poems is a powerful mixture of concrete images. Each records the reality and myth of the world around us-and in us. "Short, perfectly shaped, Simic's poems float past like feathers, turning one way, then another" (Village Voice).

From one of America's most beloved poets, a piercing new collection reflecting on the characters and encounters that haunt us through this life and into the nextLeading us into a city stirring with gravediggers and beggars, lovers and dogs, Charles Simic returns with a brilliant collection full of his singular wit, dark humor, and tenderheartedness. In poems that are often as spare as they are monumental, he captures the fleeting moments of modern life—peering insi...