Out of print for decades, this is the legendary American poet's tribute to Federico García Lorca, including translations of the great Spanish poet's work. Jack Spicer was one of the outstanding figures of the mid-twentieth-century San Francisco Renaissance, bent on fashioning a visionary new lyricism. Spicer called his poems “dictations,” and they combine outrageous humor, acid intelligence, brilliant wordplay, and sheer desolation to incandescent effect. “Frankly I was quite surprised when Mr. Spicer asked me to write an introduction to this volume,” writes the dead Federico García Lorca at the start of After Lorca, Spicer’s first book and one that, since it originally appeared in 1957, has exerted a powerful influence on poetry in America and abroad. “It must be made clear at the start that these poems are not translations,” Lorca continues. “In even the most literal of them Mr. Spicer seems to derive pleasure in inserting or substituting one or two words which completely change the mood and often the meaning of the poem as I had written it. More often he takes one of my poems and adjoins to half of it another of his own, giving rather the effect of an unwilling centaur. (Modesty forbids me to speculate which end of the animal is mine.) Finally there are an almost equal number of poems that I did not write at all (one supposes that they must be his).” What so puzzles Lorca continues to delight and inspire readers of poetry today.

A reflection on Federico García Lorca’s life, his haunting death, and the fame that reinvigorated the marvelous in the modern world “A galaxy of critical insights into the cultural shock waves circling and crisscrossing Lorca’s execution and his unknown resting place, there is not a single book on Lorca like this one.”—Andrés Zamora, Vanderbilt University There is something fundamentally unfinished about the life and work of Federico García Lorca (1898–1936), and not simply because his life ended abruptly. Noël Valis reveals how this quality gives shape to the ways in which he has been continuously re-imagined since his death. Lorca’s execution at the start of the Spanish Civil War was not only horrific but transformative, setting in motion many of the poet’s afterlives. He is intimately tied to both an individual and a collective identity, as the people’s poet, a gay icon, and fabled member of a dead poets’ society. The specter of his violent death continues to haunt everything connected to Lorca, fueling the desire to fill in the gaps in the poet’s biography.

Verde Que Te Quiero Verde is an anthology of poems after Federico Garcia Lorca, the great Spanish poet. It is filled with poems in English (with two in Spanish with translation). The authors reflect on Lorca or embody his spirit as they consider what is happening in the world around them right now. Lorca himself was assassinated in 1936 for being who he was--an artist and a rabble-rouser. He refused to conform. Let's refuse with him. Contributors include: Sandra Alcosser, Ralph Angel, Arlene Biala, Lorna Knowles Blake, Jolene Brink, Heather Cahoon, Eduardo Chirinos, Chris Dombrowski, Annie Finch, Henrietta Goodman, Tami Haaland, Katherine Hastings, Claire Hibbs, Bob Kaufman, Adrian Kien, Keetje Kuipers, Romy LeClaire Loran, Antonio Machado, Kaylen Mallard, Tod Marshall, Rachel Mindell, Sharon Olds, Natalie Peeterse, Amy Ratto Parks, Shann Ray, Ryan Scariano, Karin Schalm, Daniel E. Shapiro, Sharma Shields, ML Smoker, Catherine Theis, Nance Van Winkle, Miles Waggener, Ellen Welcker

For the first time in a quarter century, a major new volume of translations of the beloved poetry of Federico García Lorca, presented in a beautiful bilingual edition The fluid and mesmeric lines of these new translations by the award-winning poet Sarah Arvio bring us closer than ever to the talismanic perfection of the great García Lorca. Poet in Spain invokes the "wild, innate, local surrealism" of the Spanish voice, in moonlit poems of love and death set among poplars, rivers, low hills, and high sierras. Arvio's ample and rhythmically rich offering includes, among other essential works, the folkloric yet modernist Gypsy Ballads, the plaintive flamenco Poem of the Cante Jondo, and the turbulent and beautiful Dark Love Sonnets--addressed to Lorca's homosexual lover--which Lorca was revising at the time of his brutal political murder by Fascist forces in the early days of the Spanish Civil War. Here, too, are several lyrics translated into English for the first time and the play Blood Wedding--also a great tragic poem. Arvio has created a fresh voice for Lorca in English, full of urgency, pathos, and lyricism--showing the poet's work has grown only more beautiful with the passage of time.

A reflection on Federico García Lorca's life, his haunting death, and the fame that reinvigorated the marvelous in the modern world "A galaxy of critical insights into the cultural shock waves circling and crisscrossing Lorca's execution and his unknown resting place, there is not a single book on Lorca like this one."--Andrés Zamora, Vanderbilt University There is something fundamentally unfinished about the life and work of Federico García Lorca (1898-1936), and not simply because his life ended abruptly. Noël Valis reveals how this quality gives shape to the ways in which he has been continuously re-imagined since his death. Lorca's execution at the start of the Spanish Civil War was not only horrific but transformative, setting in motion many of the poet's afterlives. He is intimately tied to both an individual and a collective identity, as the people's poet, a gay icon, and fabled member of a dead poets' society. The specter of his violent death continues to haunt everything connected to Lorca, fueling the desire to fill in the gaps in the poet's biography.

With a rare blend of grace, warmth, and scholarship, Leslie Stainton raises the stakes of our appreciation for the greatest of Spain's modern poets, Federico Garca Lorca. Drawing on fourteen years of research; more than a hundred letters unknown to prior biographers; exclusive interviews with Lorca's friends, family, and acquaintances; and dozens of newly discovered archival material, Stainton has brought her subject to life as few writers can. She describes his carefree childhood in rural Andalusia; his residencies in Madrid and Granada, then in New York, Havana, and Buenos Aires; his potent interaction with other Spanish artists, such as Salvador Dal, Luis Buuel, and the composer Manuel de Falla; and, finally, Stainton shows how Lorca's marginal political activity during the Spanish Civil War still cost him his life. Throughout, Stainton meticulously but unobtrusively relates the oeuvre to the life. Her biography is quickly becoming the standard one-volume work on the poet.

Federico García Lorca (1898–1936) had enormous impact on the generation of American poets who came of age during the cold war, from Robert Duncan and Allen Ginsberg to Robert Creeley and Jerome Rothenberg. In large numbers, these poets have not only translated his works, but written imitations, parodies, and pastiches—along with essays and critical reviews. Jonathan Mayhew’s Apocryphal Lorca is an exploration of the afterlife of this legendary Spanish writer in the poetic culture of the United States. The book examines how Lorca in English translation has become a specifically American poet, adapted to American cultural and ideological desiderata—one that bears little resemblance to the original corpus, or even to Lorca’s Spanish legacy. As Mayhew assesses Lorca’s considerable influence on the American literary scene of the latter half of the twentieth century, he uncovers fundamental truths about contemporary poetry, the uses and abuses of translation, and Lorca himself.

“An extraordinary collection . . . Like the work of Emily Dickinson and W. B. Yeats, Spicer’s poems still seem to come from somewhere else.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) Winner of the Northern California Independent Booksellers Award for Poetry (2009) Winner of the American Book Award (2009) In 1965, when the poet Jack Spicer died at the age of forty, he left behind a trunkful of papers and manuscripts and a few copies of the seven small books he had seen to press. A West Coast poet, his influence spanned the national literary scene of the 1950s and ’60s, though in many ways Spicer’s innovative writing ran counter to that of his contemporaries in the New York School and the West Coast Beat movement. Now, more than forty years later, Spicer’s voice is more compelling, insistent, and timely than ever. During his short but prolific life, Spicer troubled the concepts of translation, voice, and the act of poetic composition itself. My Vocabulary Did This to Me is a landmark publication of this essential poet’s life work, and includes poems that have become increasingly hard to find and many published here for the first time. “One of the most important volumes of poetry published in the past 50 years. The poems are simply wonderful, and Spicer’s mature work is some of the best ever written by an American.” —Ron Silliman, author of N/O “You finish My Vocabulary Did This to Me feeling you’ve come in contact with an original artist and a genuine one . . . You also finish the book thinking that these poems are ready to find a new audience.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times