In this collection, winner of the 1990 Pulitzer Prize, Charles Simic puns, pulls pranks. He can be jazzy and streetwise. Or cloak himself in antiquity. Simic has new eyes, and in these wonderful poems and poems-in-prose he lets the reader see through them.

First published in 1976, this astonishing anthology from two U.S. Poet Laureates, Charles Simic and Mark Strand, compiles a selection of the finest translated literature of the time, showcasing the then-little-known writers who had a profound influence on the current generation of poets.

From Pulitzer Prize winner and former Poet Laureate Charles Simic comes a dazzling collection of poems as original, meditative, and humorous as the legendary poet himself. This latest volume of poetry from Charles Simic, one of America's most celebrated poets, demonstrates his revered signature style-a mix of understated brilliance, wry melancholy, and sardonic wit. These seventy luminous poems range in subject from mortality to personal ads, from the simple wonders of nature to his childhood in war-torn Yugoslavia. For over fifty years, Simic has delighted readers with his innovative form, quiet humor, and his rare ability to limn our interior life and concisely capture the depth of human emotion. These stunning, succinct poems-most no longer than a page, some no longer than a paragraph-validate and reinforce Simic's importance and relevance in modern poetry.

Laure-Anne Bosselaar's poetry captures the lives of "lost souls roaming" -- be they young girls in convents, merchants, whores, widows, soldiers. Old Europe still lives in Bosselaars's rich language: Entre chien et loup, as it's known in Flanders -- the time at dusk when a wolf can be mistaken for a dog.

Novica Tadic is Serbia's leading poet and the linguistic heir to Vasko Popa. With this translation, US Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize-winner Charles Simic brings the full range of Tadic's dark beauty to light:

"I dream how on a flat surface"
"I set down knives of various"
" shapes and sizes."
"Already there are so many of them"
"I can't count them, "
"or see them all. Someone's being done in"
"by those knives."

Novica Tadic has won most major Serbian literary awards, including the prestigious Laureat Nagrade. Charles Simic's latest poetry collection is "That Little Something" (Harcourt, 2008).

An insightful and haunting new collection from Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Charles Simic Irreverent and sly, observant and keenly imagined, Come Closer and Listen is the latest work from one of our most beloved poets. With his trademark sense of humor, open-hearted empathy, and perceptive vision, Charles Simic roots his poetry in the ordinary world while still taking in the wide sweep of the human experience. From poems pithy, wry, and cutting-"Time-that murderer/that no has caught yet"-to his layered reflections on everything from love to grief to the wonders of nature, from the story of St. Sebastian to that of a couple weeding side by side, Simic's work continues to reveal to us an unmistakable voice in modern poetry. An innovator in form and a chronicler of both our interior lives and the people we are in the world, Simic remains one of our most important and lasting voices on the page.

"Decades after immigrating to the States in 1954, [Simic] retains an outsider's perspective: inquisitive, incredulous, amazed by the apparently ordinary-all excellent qualities for an essayist. There's ample warmth and charm here." -New York Times Book Review In addition to being one of America's most famous and commended poets, Charles Simic is a prolific and talented essayist. The Life of Images brings together his best prose written over twenty-five years. A blend of the thoughtful, comic, and tragic, the essays in The Life of Images explore subjects ranging from poetry to philosophy, photography, politics, and art, to Simic's childhood in a war-torn country. Culled from five collections, these works demonstrate the qualities that make Simic's poetry so original yet accessible. Whether he is pondering the relationship between history and the individual, or recalling growing up in Belgrade and New York City, Simic shares his distinctive take on the world and offers an intimate look into the life and mind of an immigrant.

"Nabokovian in his caustic charm and sexy intelligence, Simic perceives the mythic in the mundane and pinpoints the perpetual suffering that infuses human life with both agony and bliss. . . . And he is the master of juxtaposition, lining up the unlikeliest of pairings and contrasts as he explores the nexuses of madness and prophecy, hell and paradise, lust and death."--Donna Seaman, Booklist

"As one reads the pithy, wise, occasionally cranky epigrams and vignettes that fill this volume, there is the definite sense that we are getting a rare glimpse into several decades worth of private journals--and, by extension are privy to the tickings of an accomplished and introspective literary mind."--Rain Taxi

Written over many years, this book is a collection of notebook entries by our current Poet Laureate.

Excerpts:

Stupidity is the secret spice historians have difficulty identifying in this soup we keep slurping.

Ars poetica: trying to make your jailers laugh.

American identity is really about having many identities simultaneously. We came to America to escape our old identities, which the multiculturalists now wish to restore to us.

Ambiguity is the world's condition. Poetry flirts with ambiguity. As a "picture of reality" it is truer than any other. This doesn't mean that you're supposed to write poems no one understands.

The twelve girls in the gospel choir sang as if dogs were biting their asses.

What an outrage! This very moment gone forever!

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Charles Simic introduces and translates one of Serbia's most important contemporary poets Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Charles Simic has done more than anyone since Czeslaw Milosz to introduce English-language readers to the greatest modern Slavic poets. In Oranges and Snow, Simic continues this work with his translations of one of today's finest Serbian poets, Milan Djordjevic. An encounter between two poets and two languages, this bilingual edition-the first selection of Djordjevic's work to appear in English-features Simic's translations and the Serbian originals on facing pages. Simic, a native Serbian speaker, has selected some forty-five of Djordjevic's best poems and provides an introduction in which he discusses the poet's work, as well as the challenges of translation. Djordjevic, who was born in Belgrade in 1954, is a poet who gives equal weight to imagination and reality. This book ranges across his entire career to date. His earliest poems can deal with something as commonplace as a bulb of garlic, a potato, or an overcoat fallen on the floor. Later poems, often dreamlike and surreal, recount his travels in Germany, France, and England. His recent poems are more autobiographical and realistic and reflect a personal tragedy. Confined to his house after being hit and nearly killed by a car while crossing a Belgrade street in 2007, the poet writes of his humble surroundings, the cats that come to his door, the birds he sees through his window, and the copies of one of his own books that he once burnt to keep warm. Whatever their subject, Djordjevic's poems are beautiful, original, and always lyrical.

A baby that keeps losing its brain, a cow in a wedding gown, a woman whose chest is a radio - bizarre and whimsical figures populate this collection of dreamlike prose poems from Russell Edson (1935-2014), with a Foreword by Pulitzer Prize winner Charles Simic. A seminal voice in American prose poetry from the sixties onward, Edson's whole career is surveyed in a single volume edited for our times, presenting a new and contemporary view of a poet of startling imagination and strangeness. Craig Morgan Teicher calls us to witness Edson's obsessions with the curious, the absurd, and the peculiar, and the ways in which they can haunt our daily lives. The prose poems in this collection mold our everyday into something extraordinary and unsettling. Edson's poems are surreal fables in which his characters experience all that life throws at them- marriage, parenthood, technological advances, aging, dying, the afterlife- through irreverent dialogue and vivid imagery in turns both humorous and grotesque. Russell Edson is a vital and ever-contemporary poet with a unique moral and comedic vision, whose literary career quietly yet definitively shaped the prose poetry subgenre as we know it now.

“Eight years after moving from New York City to Berlin, a feeling of alienation still haunts me. I wander the streets alone at night, camera in hand, trying to find my place in my latest 'home.’” What does "home" mean when one is a stranger living in another country? Artist Romeo Alaeff explores this question in In der Fremde: Pictures from Home, a haunting, cinematic, and evocative survey of Berlin as seen through the lens of an eternal outsider. Framed by Alaeff’s complex familial background, spanning from Yemen to the former USSR, Poland, Israel, and the United States, the photographs are tinged with a deep sense of longing and touch on themes of migration, belonging, and the search for home. Inspiring essays by Yuval Noah Harari, Christian Rattemeyer, Charles Simic, Eva Hoffman, Rory MacLean, Joseph Kertes, and Romeo Alaeff illuminate a wide horizon of perspectives.

This is the first comprehensive English-language collection of verse by the most celebrated Slovenian poet of modern times and one of Europe's most notable postwar poets, Edvard Kocbek (1904-1981).

The selections introduce the reader to the full spectrum of Kocbek's long and distinguished career, starting with the pantheist and expressionist nature poems of his early period and continuing through the politically engaged poetry written during and after World War II, to the philosophical and metaphysical meditations of his fecund late period.

Readers will be struck by the originality and freshness of Kocbek's sinewy and intense vision, rendered into fluid and idiomatic English by two experienced translators. The Slovenian texts appear on the facing pages.

"The opening stanza of "Moon with a Halo""

"The man beside me was killed.
He had a mother who bore him
and a father who made him toys,
he had a brother and a playful uncle
and a little girl with blond braids,
he had a wooden cart and a wooden horse,
a trunkful of colored dreams
and a brook where he used to fish."

Written by 100 American poets, Isn't It Romantic offers an engaging look at how contemporary poets respond afresh to the well-trammeled territory of the love poem. Award-winning poets from across the country lend their voices to this important document of contemporary poetry. The book also features a bonus full-length audio CD of love songs by independent recording artists. Anthology Contributors include: Karen Volkman, Joe Wenderoth, Eleni Sikelianos, Juliana Spahr, Brenda Shaughnessy, Matthew Rohrer, Claudia Rankine, D.A. Powell, Hoa Nguyen, Noelle Kocot, Lisa Jarnot, Kevin Young, Brian Henry, Christine Hume, Matthea Harvey, Arielle Greenberg, Thalia Field, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Timothy Donnelly, Olena Kalytiak Davis, Stephen Burt, Joshua Beckman, and more. Contributors to the audio CD include: David Berman, Richard Buckner, Vic Chesnutt, Ida, Doug Martsch, Mark Mulcahy, Megan Reiley, Jenny Toomey and more. Editor Brett Fletcher Lauer is the poetry in motion director at the Poetry Society of America and poetry editor of CROWD Magazine. He is the co-editor of Poetry In Motion from Coast to Coast (W. W. Norton, 2002) and his poems have appeared in BOMB, Boston Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn. Editor Aimee Kelley is the editor and publisher of CROWD Magazine. She received her BA in English from UC Berkeley and her MFA from the New School for Social Research. She has worked at non-profit organizations such as the Council of Literary Magazines & Presses and the Academy of American Poets. Her poems have appeared in Denver Quarterly, Spinning Jenny, 811 Books and elsewhere. Charles Simic (Introduction) is the author of many books of poems, including The World Doesn't End, winner of the 1990 Pulitzer Prize. He teaches writing at the University of New Hampshire.

"American Odysseys" is an anthology of twenty-two novelists, poets, and short-story writers drawn from the shortlist for the 2011 Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Literature. Including Ethiopian-born Dinaw Mengestu, the recipient of the Prize; Yugoslavian-born T?a Obreht, the youngest author to receive the Orange Prize in Fiction; and Chinese-born Yiyun Li, a MacArthur Genius grantee, what these authors all have in common -- and share with US Poet Laureate Charles Simic, who has contributed a foreword -- is that they are immigrants to the United States, now excelling in their fields and dictating the terms by which future American writing will be judged by the world. Running the gamut from desperate realism to whimsical fantasy -- from Miho Nonaka's poetry, inspired by fourteenth-century Noh theater, to Ismet Prcic's wrenching stories set in the aftermath of the Bosnian war -- "American Odysseys" is proof, if any be needed, that the heterogeneity of American society is its greatest asset.

The "Battle of Kosovo" cycle of heroic ballads is generally considered the finest work of Serbian folk poetry. Commemorating the Serbian Empire's defeat at the hands of the Turks in the late fourteenth century, these poems and fragments have been known for centuries in Eastern Europe. With the appearance of the collections of Serbian folk poems by Vuk Stefanovic Karasdzic, the brilliance of the poetry in the Kosovo and related cycles of ballads was affirmed by poets and critics as deeply influential as Goethe, Jacob Brimm, Adam Mickiewicz, and Alexander Pushkin. Although translations into English have been attempted before, few of them, as Charles Simic notes in his preface, have been persuasive until now. Simic compares the movement of the verse in these translations to the "variable foot" effect of William Carlos Williams's later poetry, and argues that John Matthias "grasps the poetic strategies of the anonymous Serbian poet as well as Pound did those of Chinese poetry."
First published in 1987, the translation of the "Battle of Kosovo" is now reprinted both because of its intrinsic merits and because the recent crisis in Kosovo itself compels the entire world to understand the nature of the ancient conflicts and passions that fuel it. Although Matthias and Simic have elected to retain their original preface and introduction, Christopher Merrill, a scholar of the region and author of Only the Nails Remain, has contributed a brief afterword explaining the importance of this poetry in the context of NATO's first military action ever against a sovereign nation.

Hamlet's ghost wandering the halls of a Vegas motel, a street corner ventriloquist using passersby as dummies, and Jesus panhandling in a weed-infested Eden are just a few of the startling conceits Simic unleashes in this collection. "Few contemporary poets have been as influential-or inimitable-as Charles Simic" (New York Times Book Review).

Four paper dolls hold hands like a family. They are cut from a morning newspaper that runs an ad for "heavenly" coffee next to a picture from a war zone. On television, refugees are crowding a road, while on the pay-per-view channel lovers are trading hungry kisses and tearing off each other's clothes. In his new volume of poems, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Charles Simic juxtaposes the joys of the everyday - the unabashed pleasure of sex, the beauty of nature - against a haunting landscape of shattered windows, soldiers on the march, stray dogs, homeless men, and a God still making up His mind.

In this new volume, Pulitzer Prize-winning Charles Simic fills the wee hours of his poetry with angels and pigs, riddles and cemeteries. With empty offices and dolls that smile. With the sound of bare feet upstairs and a single kiss before the shadows converge. His is a rich, haunted world of East European memory and American present. It is a world of his own creation, one always full of luminous surprise.

Loneliness, loss, sadness, and mystery mark this wonderful volume of forty-nine poems by Charles Simic, winner of the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and praised as "one of the truly imaginative writers of our time" by the Los Angeles Times.

Whether he draws for inspiration on American blues, Serbian folktales, or Greek myths, Simic's words have a way of their own. Each of these forty-four poems is a powerful mixture of concrete images. Each records the reality and myth of the world around us-and in us. "Short, perfectly shaped, Simic's poems float past like feathers, turning one way, then another" (Village Voice).

"That Little Something "is the superb eighteenth collection from one of America's most vital and honored poets. Over the course of his singular career, Charles Simic has won nearly every accolade, including the Pulitzer Prize, and he served as the poet laureate of the United States from 2007 to 2008.His wry humor and darkly illuminating vision are on full display here as he moves close to the dark ironies of history and human experience. Simic understands the strange interplay between the ordinary and the odd, between reality and imagination. "That Little Something "is a stunning collection from "not only one of the most prolific poets but also one of the most distinctive, accessible, and enjoyable" ("New York Times Book Review").

Charles Simic has been widely celebrated for his brilliant poetic imagery; his social, political, and moral alertness; his uncanny ability to make the ordinary extraordinary; and not least, the sardonic humor all his own. Gathering much of his material from the seemingly mundane minutiae of contemporary American culture, Simic matches meditations on spiritual concerns and the weight of history with a nimble wit, shifting effortlessly to moments of clear vision and intense poetic revelation.
Chosen as one of the New York Library's 25 Books to Remember for 2003, "The Voice at 3: 00 A. M." was also nominated for a National Book Award. The recipient of many prizes, Simic most recently received Canada's Griffin Prize. The poems in this collection--spanning two decades of his work--present a rich and varied survey of a remarkable lyrical journey.
In the Street
Beauty, dark goddess,
We met and parted
As though we parted not.
Like two stopped watches
In a dusty store window,
One golden morning of time.

In this new collection of sixty-two poems Charles Simic paints exquisite and shattering word pictures that lend meaning to a chaotic world populated by insects, bridal veils, pallbearers, TV sets, parrots, and a finely detailed dragonfly. Suffused with hope yet unafraid to mock his own credulity, Simic's searing metaphors unite the solemn with the absurd. His raindrops listen to each other fall and collect memories; his wildflowers are drunk with kissing the red-hot breezes; and his God is a Mr. Know-it-all, a wheeler-dealer, a wire-puller. In this latest lyrical gathering, Simic continues to startle his fans with the powerful and surprising images that are his trademark-slangy images of the ethereal, fantastic visions of the everyday, foreign scenes of the all-American-and moments full of humor and full of heartache.