“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

A critical monograph of the San Francisco Renaissance poet Jack Spicer, informed by much archival material.

Be Brave to Things shows legendary San Francisco Renaissance poet Jack Spicer at the top of his form, with his blistering intelligence, painful double-edged wit, and devastating will to truth everywhere on display. Most of the poetry here has never before been published, but the volume also includes much out-of-print or hard to find work, as well as Spicer's three major plays, which have never been collected. Here one finds major unfinished projects, early and alternate versions of well-known Spicer poems, shimmering stand-alone lyrics, and intricate extended "books" and serial poems. In writings that range in date from his first days in Berkeley in 1945 through to the final months of his life, 20 years later, one sees the full development of Spicer as a writer, in a volume that complements and completes the award-winning My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer. Readers familiar with Spicer will find countless lines, rhythms, and thoughts that cast new light on old favorites, while the plays reveal a different side of his dialectical and dialogic approach to writing. This new cache of Spicer material will be indispensable for any student of 20th century American poetry, proffering a trove of primary material for Spicer's growing readership to savor and enjoy.

Leopold Sedar Senghor was not only president of the Republic of Senegal from 1960 to 1981, he is also Africa's most famous poet. A cofounder of the Negritude cultural movement, he is recognized as one of the most significant figures in African literature. This bilingual edition of Senghor's complete poems made his work available for the first time to English-speaking audiences. His poetry, alive with sensual imagery, contrasts the lushness and wonder of Africa's past with the alienation and loss associated with assimilation into European culture. Translator Melvin Dixon places Senghor's writing in historical persepctive by relating it to both his political involvement and his intellectual development.

Poems.

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER! Jacqueline Woodson's first middle-grade novel since National Book Award winner Brown Girl Dreaming celebrates the healing that can occur when a group of students share their stories. It all starts when six kids have to meet for a weekly chat--by themselves, with no adults to listen in. There, in the room they soon dub the ARTT Room (short for "A Room to Talk"), they discover it's safe to talk about what's bothering them--everything from Esteban's father's deportation and Haley's father's incarceration to Amari's fears of racial profiling and Ashton's adjustment to his changing family fortunes. When the six are together, they can express the feelings and fears they have to hide from the rest of the world. And together, they can grow braver and more ready for the rest of their lives.

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.

This book presents the poetry and letters of the American writer Adelaide Crapsey (1878–1914). Her best poetry deserves to be enjoyed by a larger audience, and her letters and newly discovered biographical materials reveal new charm and meaning in an intriguingly elusive character. Crapsey did not live to see any of her mature poetry published: she received notice that her first poem had been accepted for publication only a week before she died. Posthumous editions of her Verse (in 1915, 1922, and 1934), however, brought her recognition and respect. Carl Sandburg paid her a poetic tribute. American critic Yvor Winters praised her as "a minor poet of great distinction" and felt that her poems remained "in their way honest and acutely perceptive." Her best work is compressed, terse, related in this respect to the work of another American poet who won posthumous recognition, Emily Dickinson. Crapsey is best known as the inventor of the cinquain, a poem of five short lines of unequal length: one-stress, two-stress, three-stress, four-stress, and one-stress. The cinquain is one of the few modern verse forms developed in English, and its brevity and characteristic thought pattern seem to have been influenced by Japanese forms. Crapsey's indebtedness to Japanese poetry and her relation to Imagism have long been subjects for debate. As Winters notes, the work of Crapsey "achieves more effectively than did almost any of the Imagists the aims of Imagism." The critical introduction by Professor Susan Sutton Smith examines these problems. Much of Crapsey's poetry is reticent, withdrawn, and private, and she believed strongly in the individual's right to privacy. Whatever new biographical materials reveal of her and of her relations with family and friends, however, shows a charming and courageous woman. Her courage and humor show especially well in her correspondence with her friend Esther Lowenthal and in the letters with her friend Jean Webster McKinney, author of Daddy Long-Legs, who died soon after Crapsey.