Wry and witty poems from an avant-garde great, collected in one volume for the first time. The Collected Poems of Anselm Hollo gathers over five decades of the poet’s multifaceted work into one elegant volume. All of Hollo’s trademark humor, wisdom, and charm is on display here for students and fans of contemporary poetry. Warm, insightful, and delightfully observant, this comprehensive collection from the author of over forty books serves as a reminder that poetry isn’t just an aspiration or avocation, but a way of life.

Winner of the Venice Film Festival's Golden Lion Award for 1987, Louis Malle's Au revoir les enfants has been acclaimed as a masterpiece wherever it has been shown. One of the great filmmakers of our time, Malle both wrote and directed this delicate and heartbreaking portrait of a friendship -- between Julian, a Catholic boy, and his schoolmate Jean, one of several Jewish children being sheltered at a boarding school during the Nazi occupation of France. It is once a moving, unforgettable story and an evocation of a deeply personal formative experience in Malle's life.

Braided River consists of a major selection from forty years of Anselm Hollo's published work, as well as a selection from his most recent, uncollected work. It describes a "braided" lifetime's endeavours to generate text that reflects a twentieth century existence in Europe, including England, and the United States of America. A native of Finland, Hollo has been anthologized and discussed as a "British" poet in the Sixties and early Seventies, later on, as an "American" one. A lifelong associate of the Beat, Black Mountain, New York (One and Two), and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E schools of U.S. American Poetry, Hollo hopes to convey to younger writers the amazing variety and strength of the writing (both poetry and prose) that has emerged from those quarters in the past fifty-odd years, and that has been strongly connected to the most active work created in the United Kingdom. This body of work represents the United States' true contribution to modern and postmodern world literature, and it exists, to this day, in glorious independence from what poet/essayist Charles Bernstein has called 'official verse culture.' Hollo's aim is to acquaint younger writers with this vigorous, multifarious, rhizomic tradition of U.S. American writing. He also hopes to demonstrate the multi- and cross-cultural connections that have influenced it, something he practises in his Boulder classes, examining twentieth century European poetry and French poetry in particular, and in his translation workshops.

An imaginative tour de force, Starfall consists of three dramatic dialogues among real people in imagined settings. Anchoring each of the dialogues is the great Russian film director and theoretician Sergei Eisenstein, whose artistic theories (in all their formations and reformations) run throughout the book, illustrating the influences that affected the Soviet art world in the period between the two world wars. In The Aquarians Eisenstein meets Bertolt Brecht in the first-class compartment of a train heading from Berlin to Moscow in 1932. They spend the night discussing and arguing about everything from the use of Renaissance magic in art tosome kind of Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk, in which everything in art is connected. The Sorcerer's Apprentices takes place at a meeting held in Moscow on April 14, 1935, on the occasion of performances given during a visit by a noted Chinese actor, Mei Lan-Fang, and his troupe, the prime representatives of early twentieth-century classical Chinese theater. Conceived as a series of speeches by noted members of the Soviet theater and film circles (Eisenstein again), The Sorcerer's Apprentices contrasts the Russian theater with that of the Chinese, the German (antifascist, emigre theater of Brecht and Erwin Piscator), and even the avant-garde British drama (as represented by Gordon Craig). Ash Wednesday has Eisenstein engaged in a dialogue with Mikhail Bakhtin. They speak about German culture -- in particular Eisenstein's desire to stage Wagner's The Valkyrie, which Bakhtin appears to object to on both political and artistic grounds; the influence of astrology in Soviet literary circles; and jazz music as a symbol of pure art. Filledwith references familiar and arcane, biographical and political, steeped in literary history from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth, and peppered with references to the writings of such dissimilar thinkers as Giordano Bruno, Rabelais, Goethe, and Antonin Artaud, Starfall will appeal to all readers interested in the developments of twentieth-century dramatic art.

"With his signature penchant for irony and impiety, the poet revels in an eccentric play of language to reveal the absurdities of the contemporary world....satisfyingly unpredictable and provocative."--"Publishers Weekly"