James Tate is one of America's most respected and senior poets, whose influence is increasingly widespread. However, his whimsical play has long challenged critics to read him with any depth. After winning the Yale Prize in 1967 for his first book, The Lost Pilot, published when he was just twenty-three, Tate has since gone on to win major literary awards including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Tanning Prize for Lifetime Achievement from the Academy of American Poets. This is the first monograph dedicated to Tate's oeuvre. The author provides a practical reading theory for Tate, complete with contextual frameworks. Close readings of Tate's work are informed by the purposeful purposelessness of Kant, the surrealist debt to Breton, and the problems and pleasures of language as explored by Derrida. Tate's great achievement is no less than a reconfiguring of the modern American lyric as a poetry of dramatic and dialogic narrative. Composed out of 'odds and ends ... of no great moment', as the poet himself writes, Tate's work extends the varied American traditions of writers such as William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, John Berryman, and John Ashbery.

The publication of this anthology comes a year into the Covid-19 pandemic. In the summer of 2020, we invited nineteen UK poets to partner with poets from around the world, to work collaboratively on poems responding to the virus. The poems herein are as personal as they are communal, and as local as they are international. Between them, the writers reside in all of the world's permanently populated continents, recognising that the pandemic has truly hit us everywhere. Their diversities of aesthetics and poetics, of Covid experiences - at a distance and/or embodied, anecdotal and/or dramatic - are further significant to their inclusion and their work. The pairs of contributors are: Sinéad Morrissey and Jan Wagner (trans. Iain Galbraith); Carol Leeming and Rakhshan Rizwan; George Szirtes and Alvin Pang; Vahni Capildeo and Vivek Narayanan; Rory Waterman and Togara Muzanenhamo; Rachael Allen and Ilya Kaminsky; Zoë Skoulding and Yana Lucila Lema Otavalo; Inua Ellams and Omar Musa; Matthew Welton and Hazel Smith; Vidyan Ravinthiran and Arvind Krishna Mehrotra; Anthony Caleshu and Mariko Nagai; Selima Hill and Wang Xiaoni (trans. Eleanor Goodman); Declan Ryan and Linda Stern Zisquit; David Herd and Sharmistha Mohant; Luke Kennard and Hwang Yu Won (trans. Jake Levine); André Naffis-Sahely and Stacy Hardy; Harriet Tarlo and Craig Santos Pérez; Jennifer Cooke and Jèssica Pujol Duran; Momtaza Mehri and A. E. Stallings.

In his new book of poems, Anthony Caleshu writes after the visual art of Julie Curtiss, Jadé Fadojutimi, Shara Hughes, Shio Kusaka, Henry Taylor, Emma Webster, and Jonas Wood (also included, a musical interlude after the music of Pixies). Poems move in and out of interiors, portraits, landscapes, abstractions, and the phenomena of xenia – Greek for ‘hospitality’, later adopted by the Romans as a category of ‘still-life’ painting featuring welcoming platters of fruit and the like. If ekphrastic in tradition, the poems privilege lyric and narrative in(ter)vention, springboarding from the visual arts into new spaces of speculation, transformation, and wonder.

“Caleshu’s new collection is magnificent. There’s something uniquely pleasurable and painful about the blinding insights in every prose poem. It’s like someone looking you in the eye and, unusually, feeling compelled to hold their gaze. What really moves me here is the way we hedge our disappointment, play our joy against our self-awareness. So much love and fear and grace and frustration: it’s at once uncomfortable and deeply life-affirming. It’s maybe a rare quality in contemporary poetry, but what makes this work so authentically alive, so urgent and poignant is that very ambivalence, delivered with a restless intellect and wit and turn of phrase that keeps you coming back.” —Luke Kennard

"Anthony Caleshu's Victor is a wild ride, an arctic adventure, a spirited quest narrative, a mad love poem to the imagination in all its unstrung wild joys. The exuberance of address in this poem is contagious, at once zany and intimate, descriptive and lyric, it's pedal to the metal and won't let up. Caleshu is an extremely gifted and accomplished poet and a true romantic to boot." -Peter Gizzi

A collection of essays based on the conference of the same name held at the Univeristy of Plymouth in April 2007. Contributors are Lyn Hejinian, Barrett Watten; Andrea Brady, Allen Fisher, Robert Hampson, Richard Kerridge, Peter Middleton, William Rowe, Robert Sheppard; Helene Aji, Andrew Browne, Matt Chambers, Brendan Cooper, Ian Davidson, Carrie Etter, Kit Fryatt, Piers Hugill, Michael Kindellan, Greg Lainsbury, Catherine Martin, Will Montgomery, Eva Mueller-Zettelman, Susan Nurmi-Schomers, Christopher Orchard, Robin Peel, Kathy-Ann Tan, Philip Terry and Scott Thurston.