August Kleinzahler has earned admiration for his musical, precise poems that are grounded in the people, places and language among which he has lived. Snow Approaching On The Hudson is a collection of poetry that moves back and forth across the country and abroad, and through the realm of dreams, past and present, and inner and outer landscapes. The haunting, shifting atmosphere Kleinzahler creates is peopled by characters intimate, historical and imaginary. Kleinzahler's signature rhythmic propulsion serves as the engine for his newest collection, and his always-masterful free verse conveys a life thoroughly lived and brilliantly perceived.

'I write about love, I write about friendship,' remarked Thom Gunn: 'I find that they are absolutely intertwined.' These core values permeate his correspondence with friends, family, lovers, and fellow poets, and shed new light on 'one of the most singular and compelling poets in English during the past half-century' (Times Literary Supplement). These letters reveal the evolution of Gunn's work and illuminate the fascinating life that informed his poems: his struggle to come to terms with his mother's suicide; his changing relationship with his life partner, Mike Kitay; the LSD trips that led to his celebrated collection Moly (1971); and the deaths of friends from AIDS that inspired the powerful, unsparing elegies of The Man with Night Sweats (1992).

August Kleinzahler has earned admiration for his musical, precise, wise, and sometimes madcap poems that are grounded in the wide array of places, people, and most especially voices he has encountered in his real and imaginative worlds. Snow Approaching on the Hudson is a collection that moves seamlessly through the often hypnogogic, porous realms of dreams, the past and present, inner and outer landscapes. His haunting, shifting atmospheres are peopled by characters, intimately portrayed, who are at one historical and invented. The poet's signature rhythmic propulsion serves as the engine for his newest collection, and his always masterful free verse conveys a life thoroughly lived and brilliantly perceived.

When August Kleinzahler won the 2004 Griffin Poetry Prize for his collection The Strange Hours Travelers Keep, the judges' citation referred to his work as 'ferociously on the move, between locations, between forms, between registers'. They might also have added 'between New Jersey and San Francisco', the places Kleinzahler has spent his life travelling between, both on the road and on the page. This collection assembles the best of his New Jersey and San Francisco poems for the first time, organised according to place.

Providing readers with a gorgeous guide to Kleinzahler's interior geography, Before Dawn on Bluff Road (New Jersey) and Hollyhocks in the Fog (San Francisco) function as both word-maps and word-anatomies of one of our greatest poet's lifelong passions and preoccupations.

Thom Gunn (1929-2004) was educated at Cambridge University, and had his first collection of poems, Fighting Terms, published while still an undergraduate. He moved to northern California in 1954 and taught in American universities until his death. His last collection was Boss Cupid (2000). In this series, a contemporary poet selects and introduces a poet of the past. By their choice of poems and by the personal and critical reactions they express in their prefaces, the editors offer insights into their own work as well as providing an accessible and passionate introduction to some of the greatest poets of our literature.

Kleinzahler's poetry is, as ever, concerned with permeability: voices, places, the real and the dreamed, the present and the past, colliding and intersecting and spilling over into each other. Whether the voice embodied is that of 'an adult male of late middle age, // about to weep among the avocados and citrus fruits / in a vast, overlit room next to a bosomy Cuban grandma' as in 'Whitney Houston' or that of the title character in 'Hootie Bill Do Polonius' who is bidding 'adios compadre // To a most galuptious scene Kid', Kleinzahler locates and exhibits in his poetry the human heart at the core of lived experience. This is a poet searching for - and finding - a cadence capable of describing life as it is lived today. Kleinzahler's poetry is, as noted in the judges' citation for the 2004 Griffin Poetry Prize (which he won for his collection The Strange Hours Travelers Keep), 'ferociously on the move, between locations, between forms, between registers.' The Hotel Oneira finds Kleinzahler at his shape-shifting, acrobatic best, unearthing the 'moments of grace' buried amongst the detritus of our hectic, modern lives.

A thrilling new collection from one of the most original poets of his generation
"His work is a modernist swirl of sex, surrealism, urban life, and melancholy with a jazzy backbeat." While this praise appeared in the pages of "The New York Times" in 2005, it applies no less to August Kleinzahler's newest collection.
Kleinzahler's poetry is, as ever, concerned with permeability: voices, places, the real and the dreamed, the present and the past, all mingle together in verses that always ring true. Whether the poem is three lines long or spans several pages--whether the voice embodied is that of "an adult male of late middle age, // about to weep among the avocados and citrus fruits / in a vast, overlit room next to a bosomy Cuban grandma" as in "Whitney Houston," or that of the title character in "Hootie Bill Do Polonius," who is bidding ""adios compadre" // To a most galuptious scene Kid"--Kleinzahler finds the throbbing human heart at the core of experience.
This is a poet searching for--and finding--a cadence to suit life as it's lived today. Kleinzahler's verses are, as noted in the judges' citation for the 2004 Griffin Poetry Prize for his collection "The Strange Hours Travelers Keep," "ferociously on the move, between locations, between forms, between registers." "The Hotel Oneira" finds Kleinzahler at his shape-shifting, acrobatic best, unearthing the "moments of grace" buried under the detritus of our hectic, modern lives.

Thom Gunn was an Elizabethan poet in modern guise, though there's nothing archaic, quaint, or sepia-toned about his poetry. His method was dispassionate and rigorous, uniquely well suited for making a poetic record of the tumultuous time in which he lived. Gunn's dozens of brilliantly realized poems about nature, friendship, literature, sexual love, and death are set against the ever-changing backdrop of San Francisco--the druggy, politically charged sixties and the plague years of AIDS in the eighties. Perhaps no contemporary poet was better equipped--by temperament, circumstance, or poetic gift--to engage the subjects of eros and thanatos than Thom Gunn. This new Selected Poems, edited and with an introduction by the poet August Kleinzahler, supplants the 1979 "Selected," presenting more of the later work and providing a fuller retrospective account of the breadth and magnitude of Gunn's extraordinary achievement.

"Cutty, One Rock" takes the reader on a wild journey by airplane, bus, ferry, and foot from childhood to early manhood in the company of a New Jersey family in equal measures cultivated and deranged. We witness scenes of passionate, even violent intensity that give rise to meditations on eros and literature, the solitariness of travel, and the poetics of place.
These individual pieces, most of which first appeared in "The London Review of Books "and won an international cult following, are by turns "poignant, surreal, down home and lyrical, a mixture of qualities that inheres in his language with uncommon delicacy and effect" (Leonard Michaels). Together they make up an intellectual and emotional autobiography on the run. The book's final section, about Kleinzahler's adored, doomed older brother, is unforgettable, and since its appearance last year in the "LRB," has already entered the literature as one of the most moving contemporary memoirs.

Continued is a selection of poems by Piotr Sommer, spanning his career to date. A kind of poetic utterance, these "talk poems" are devoid of any singsong quality yet faithfully preserve all the melodies and rhythms of colloquial speech. Events and objects of ordinary, everyday life are related and described by the speaker in a deliberately deadpan manner. Yet a closer look at the language he uses, with all its ironic inflections and subtle "intermeanings," reveals that the poem's "message" should be identified more with the way it is spoken than with what it says. The poems in this volume were translated into English with the help of other notable poets, writers, and translators, including John Ashbery, D.J. Enright, and Douglas Dunn.

The early poems of an American master

"I have loved the air outside Shop-Rite Liquor
on summer evenings
better than the Marin hills at dusk
lavender and gold
stretching miles to the sea.

At the junction, up from the synagogue
a weeknight, necessarily
and with my father--
a sale on German beer.

Air full of living dust:
bus exhaust, air-borne grains of pizza crust
wounded crystals
appearing, disappearing
among streetlights and unsuccessful neon."
--"Poetics"

August Kleinzahler's first collections won him a cult following but have long been out of print and hard to find. Here Kleinzahler--acclaimed by The Times (London) for the "vision and confident skill to make American poetry new"--has selected the best of the poems collected in Storm over Hackensack (1985) and Earthquake Weather (1989) and added an autobiographical Preface.

This is a book of jazzy, edgy, adventuresome poems from the author of "Earthquake Weather" and "Like Cities, Like Storms." Ever aware, ever vivid, ever focused, Kleinzahler's are some of the finest lyrics being produced in American poetry today. "Pieces of ordinary talk are Kleinzahler's strong suit," as Helen Vendler observed in "Parnassus," "because they occur in his glancing, alert rhythms. . . . [His] jaunty skips and riffs solace the ear." "Red Sauce, Whiskey and Snow" presents an experimental poetry of exceptional wit and control.

Sixteen years' worth of incisive essays by the great poet and memoirist "Witty, gritty poet and memoirist Kleinzahler" (Publishers Weekly) has gathered the best of sixteen years' worth of essays, remembrances, and reviews in this scabrous and essential collection, setting down his thoughts about great poets and bad poets, about kvetching fiction writers and homicidal musicians, about eccentric critics and discerning nobodies, always with insight and humor, and never suffering fools gladly. Here, in Sallies, Romps, Portraits, and Send-Offs, August Kleinzahler eulogizes famous friends, warts and all (Thom Gunn, Christopher Middleton, Leonard Michaels); leads the charge in carving up a few bloated reputations (E. E. Cummings, Richard Brautigan); and sings the praises of unjustly neglected masters (Lucia Berlin, Kenneth Cox). He also turns the spotlight on himself in several short, delightful memoirs, covering such subjects as his obsessive CD collecting, the eerie effects of San Francisco fog, and the terrible duty of selling of his childhood home.

A collection of August Kleinzahler's best poems, divided--like his life--between New Jersey and San Francisco When August Kleinzahler won the 2004 Griffin Poetry Prize for his collection The Strange Hours Travelers Keep, the judges' citation referred to his work as "ferociously on the move, between locations, between forms, between registers." They might also have added "between New Jersey and San Francisco," the places Kleinzahler has spent his life traveling between, both on the road and on the page. This collection assembles the best of his New Jersey and San Francisco poems for the first time, organized according to place, with each city receiving its own title and cover. Providing readers with a gorgeous guide to Kleinzahler's interior geography, Before Dawn on Bluff Road (New Jersey) and Hollyhocks in the Fog (San Francisco) function as both word-maps and word-anatomies of one of our greatest poet's lifelong passions and preoccupations.