In his book Josef Hrdlička opens the question of what exactly constitutes Exile Poetry, and indeed whether it amounts to a category as fundamental as Romantic or Bucolic lyricism. He covers the intricately complex and diverse topic of exile by exploring selected literary texts from antiquity to the present, giving due attention to writers that have influenced the exile discourse; from Ovid, Goethe and Baudelaire to the thinkers and poets of the 20th century like Adorno or Saint-John Perse. Against this backdrop of exile poetics, he turns his attention to Czech poets who left their homeland after the Communist Coup of 1948 and were notable contributors to Czech literature abroad. Hrdlička considers the works of Ivan Blatný, Milada Součková, Ivan Diviš and Petr Král, to show the continuity and changes in the western poetic tradition and expressions of exile.

Explores the dynamic interactions among Latin poets, artists, and audiences in constructing and critiquing imperial power in Augustan Rome.

A major work by this prominent Caribbean author and philosopher, available for the first time in English

In response to being exiled to the Black Sea by the Roman emperor Augustus in 8 AD, Ovid began to compose the "Tristia" and "Epistulae ex Ponto" and to create for himself a place of intellectual refuge. From there he was able to reflect out loud on how and why his own art had been legally banned and left for dead on the margins of the empire. As the last of the Augustan poets, Ovid was in a unique position to take stock of his own standing and of the place of poetry itself in a culture deeply restructured during the lengthy rule of Rome's first emperor. This study considers exile in the "Tristia" and "Epistulae ex Ponto" as a place of genuine suffering and a metaphor for poetry's marginalization from the imperial city. It analyzes, in particular, Ovid's representation of himself and the emperor Augustus against the background of Roman religion, law, and poetry.

Ovid's poetry is haunted obsessively by a sense both of the living fullness of the texts and of the emptiness of these 'insubstantial pageants'. This major study touches on the whole of Ovid's output, from the Amores to the exile poetry, and is an overarching treatment of illusionism and the textual conjuring of presence in the corpus. Modern critical and theoretical approaches, accompanied by close readings of individual passages, examine the topic from the points of view of poetics and rhetoric, aesthetics, the psychology of desire, philosophy, religion and politics. There are also case studies of the reception of Ovid's poetics of illusion in Renaissance and modern literature and art. The book will interest students and scholars of Latin and later European literatures. All foreign languages are accompanied by translations.

Examines speech loss across all of Ovid's writings and the ways that motif is explored, developed, and modified in the poet's work after his exile from Rome.

Hard Damage works to relentlessly interrogate the self and its shortcomings. In lyric and documentary poems and essayistic fragments, Aria Aber explores the historical and personal implications of Afghan American relations. Drawing on material dating back to the 1950s, she considers the consequences of these relations--in particular the funding of the Afghan mujahedeen, which led to the Taliban and modern-day Islamic terrorism--for her family and the world at large. Invested in and suspicious of the pain of family and the shame of selfhood, the speakers of these richly evocative and musical poems mourn the magnitude of citizenship as a state of place and a state of mind. While Hard Damage is framed by free-verse poetry, the middle sections comprise a lyric essay in fragments and a long documentary poem. Aber explores Rilke in the original German, the urban melancholia of city life, inherited trauma, and displacement on both linguistic and environmental levels, while employing surrealist and eerily domestic imagery.

Selected by Marilyn Hacker as the 1998 Winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry.