"A Meteor of Intelligent Substance" "Something was Missing in our Culture, and Here It Is" Liberties - A Journal of Culture and Politics features new essays and poetry from some of the world's best writers and artists to inspire and impact the intellectual and creative lifeblood of our current culture and today's politics. This summer issue of Liberties includes: Elliot Ackerman on Veterans Are Not Victims; Durs Grunbein on Fascism and the Writer; R.B. Kitaj's Three Tales; Thomas Chatterton Williams on The Blessings of Assimilation; Anita Shapira on The Fall of Israel's House of Labor; Sally Satel on Woke Medicine; Matthew Stephenson On Corruption's Honey and Poison; Helen Vender on Wallace Stevens; David Haziza on Illusions of Immunity; Paul Berman on the Library of America; Clara Collier's nostalgia for strong women in film; Michael Kimmage on American Inquisitions; Leon Wieseltier (editor) on the high price of Stoicism; Celeste Marcus (managing editor) on a Native American Tragedy; and new poetry from Adam Zagajewski, A.E. Stallings, and Peg Boyers.

Following her 2010 publication dedicated to roses, Cologne-based artist Sabine Moritz here turns her attention to lilies, which she first began depicting in the mid 1990s. Working on paper to produce fifty-nine charcoal, pastel and oil pastel drawings, similiarly she often approaches works as studies or exercises in observation and representation. During the development of this publication, which was originally conceived as a collection of Moritz s drawings of lilies, the artist had the idea to introduce another ongoing body of work drawings of objects alongside the lilies. These objects are primarily statues, statuettes and figurines hand-made works of art from different periods in history, such as a classical torso, an African figurine, and a Buddhist head. Moritz s drawings of objects reflect a range of ideas and registers, moods and sentiments. Including the objects alongside the lilies opens up questions of time, life, death, belief, truth, human psychology and the very process o

One of the most vibrant voices of our time, Adam Zagajewski is a modern master of the poetic form. His clear-eyed verse acknowledges atrocities past and present, as well as the everyday traumas of contemporary life, without ever sinking into cynical pessimism. Imbued with a uniquely sanguine perspective, his internationally acclaimed poems elevate and celebrate quotidian joys and fleeting moments of satisfaction. This collection, deftly translated by Clare Cavanagh, finds the poet revisiting those themes that have long preoccupied him - the enduring imprint of history, the beauty of nature, the place of the exile. Unseen Hand is a moving meditation on the sublimity of everyday life.

"The highway became the Red Sea.
We moved through the storm like a sheer valley.
You drove; I looked at you with love.""
--from "Storm"
"One of the most gifted and readable poets of his time, Adam Zagajewski is proving to be a contemporary classic. Few writers in either poetry or prose can be said to have attained the lucid intelligence and limpid economy of style that have become a matter of course with Zagajewski. It is these qualities, combined with his wry humor, gentle skepticism, and perpetual sense of history's dark possibilities, that have earned him a devoted international following. This collection, gracefully translated by Clare Cavanagh, finds the poet reflecting on place, language, and history. Especially moving here are his tributes to writers, friends known in person or in books--people such as Milosz and Sebald, Brodsky and Blake--which intermingle naturally with portraits of family members and loved ones. "Eternal Enemies" is a luminous meeting of art and everyday life.

Ardor, inspiration, the soul, the sublime: Such terms have long since fallen from favor among critics and artists alike. In his new collection of essays, Adam Zagajewski continues his efforts to reclaim for art not just the terms but the scanted spiritual dimension of modern human existence that they stake out.
Bringing gravity and grace to his meditations on art, society, and history, Zagajewski wears his erudition lightly, with a disarming blend of modesty and humor. His topics range from autobiography (his first visit to a post-Soviet Lvov after childhood exile; his illicit readings of Nietzsche in Communist Poland); to considerations of artist friends past and present (Zbigniew Herbert, Czeslaw Milosz); to intellectual and psychological portraits of cities he has known, east and west; to a dazzling thumbnail sketch of postwar Polish poetry.
Zagajewski gives an account of the place of art in the modern age that distinguishes his self-proclaimed liberal vision from the "right-wing radicalism" of such modernist precursors as Eliot or Yeats. The same mixture of ardor and compassion that marks Zagajewski's distinctive contribution to modern poetry runs throughout this eloquent, engaging collection.

Powerful New work by a modern master.
You must listen, listen, listen.
Tired springs breathe under water.
At four in the morningthe last, lonely bolt of lightning
scribbles something quickly in the sky.
It says "No." Or "Never.
"Or "Take courage, the fire's not dead."
-from "The Last Storm"
"Mysticism for Beginners" is the third and most beautiful of Adam Zagajewski's collections to appear in English. The poems are about nature, history, the life of cities, the transformations of art, the spiritual essence of everyday life. Their remarkable staying power derives from the gentle meditative authority of Zagajewski's voice, here expertly rered into English by Clare Cavanagh. Zagajewski's committed, compassionate poems offer access to the mysteries at the heart of experience.

Canvas, Zagajewski's second book to appear in English, features all of this poet's distinctive traits. In these sixty-one poems, syntax explodes, masses of detail spill from profuse catalogs, lines break in ways apt but unexpected, and compressed lyrics alternate with extended riffs. European culture is the poet's native province throughout these explorations, and time is a recurrent metaphysical concern.

A stunning new collection from Poland's leading poet Give me back my childhood, republic of loquacious sparrows, measureless thickets of nettles and the timid wood owl's nightly sobs. One of the most vibrant voices of our time, Adam Zagajewski is a modern master of the poetic form. In Asymmetry, his first collection of poems in five years, he revisits the themes that have long concerned him: the enduring imprint of history, the beauty of nature, the place of the exile. Though as sanguine as ever, Zagajewski often turns to elegy in this deeply powerful collection, remembering loved ones he's lost: a hairdresser, the philosopher Krzystzof Michalski, and, most poignantly, his parents. A moving reflection on family, the sublimity of everyday life, death, and happiness, Asymmetry is a magnificent distillation of an astounding poetic voice.

A new essay collection by the noted Polish poet For Adam Zagajewski--one of Poland's great poets--the project of writing, whether it be poetry or prose, is an occasion to advance what David Wojahn has characterized as his "restless and quizzical quest for self-knowledge." Slight Exaggeration is an autobiographical portrait of the poet, arranged not chronologically but with that same luminous quality that distinguishes Zagajewski's spellbinding poetry--an affinity for the invisible. In a mosaic-like blend of criticism, reflections, European history, and aphoristic musings, Zagajewski tells the stories of his life in glimpses and reveries--from the Second World War and the occupation of Poland that left his family dispossessed to Joseph Brodsky's funeral on the Venetian island of San Michele--interspersed with intellectual interrogations of the writers and poets (D. H. Lawrence, Giorgos Seferis, Zbigniew Herbert, Paul Valery), composers and painters (Brahms, Rembrandt), and modern heroes (Helmuth James Graf von Moltke) who have influenced his work. A wry and philosophical defense of mystery, Slight Exaggeration recalls Zagajewski's poetry in its delicate negotiation between the earthbound and the ethereal, "between brief explosions of meaning and patient wandering through the plains of ordinary days." With an enduring inclination to marvel, Zagajewski restores the world to us--necessarily incomplete and utterly astonishing.

Adam Zagajewski is one of the most important poets to have emerged from the European continent in decades. This selection, made by the author himself, draws from his English-language collections both in and out of print. Vivid, attentive to the world, the poems in these lucid translations share the vocation that allows us, in Zagajewski's words, 'to experience astonishment and to stop still in that astonishment for a long moment or two'. 'Seldom has the muse . . . spoken to anyone with such clarity and urgency as in Zagajewski's case.' Joseph Brodsky