Eleanor Wilner's sixth collection creates a mythology that sees a planet too small and a universe too immense to support humanity's illusions of importance. Her poems become a "choral work of the imagination" in which science is re-envisioned, gender assumptions challenged and beliefs rigorously questioned. As the old gods are reabsorbed into the modern world, Wilner discovers new insights into culture and the human psyche.

"I have always treasured Wilner's poetry for its visionary amplitude and revolutionary intelligence."--Alicia Ostriker

Eleanor Rand Wilner is the author of six books of poetry and the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. She lives in Philadelphia, teaches at Warren Wilson College, and is a lifelong activist for civil rights and peace.

Eleanor Wilner is blessed with an amazing gift of seemingly perpetual transformation. With an ear for the line that is utterly captivating and an uncompromising vision, her poems are at once passionate and elegant as they range among subjects as diverse as Greek mythology, the space program, her favorite bookstore, or modern painting. Following in the tradition of the Hebrew prophets and ancient Chinese sages, her poetry offers startling insights into myth, culture, and the human psyche.

A major new collection from the winner of the 2019 Frost Medal for distinguished lifetime achievement in poetry Before Our Eyes gathers more than thirty new poems by Eleanor Wilner, along with representative selections from her seven previous books, to present a major overview of her distinguished body of work. A poet who engages with history in lyrical language, Wilner creates worlds that reflect on and illuminate the actual one, drawing on the power of communal myth and memory to transform them into agents of change. In these poems, well-known figures step out of old texts to alter their stories and new figures arise out of the local air-a girl with a fury of bees in her hair, homesick statues that step down from their pedestals, a bat cave whose altar bears a judgment on our worship of war, and a frog whose spring wakening invites our own. In the process, ancient myths are naturalized while nature is newly mythologized in the service of life. Before Our Eyes features widely anthologized works such as "Sarah's Choice" and "Reading the Bible Backwards." In the new poems, Wilner records the bewildering public shocks of the current moment, when civic life is under threat, when language itself is attacked, and when poetry's lens of collective imagination becomes a way to resist falsity, to seek meaning, and to really see what is before our eyes.

The Penn Greek Drama Series presents original literary translations of the entire corpus of classical Greek drama: tragedies, comedies, and satyr plays. It is the only contemporary series of all the surviving work of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, and Menander.This volume includes translations by Eleanor Wilner with Ines Azar (Medea), Marilyn Nelson ("Hecuba"), Donald Junkins ("Andromache"), and Daniel Mark Epstein ("The Bacchae").

A major new collection from the winner of the 2019 Frost Medal for distinguished lifetime achievement in poetry Before Our Eyes gathers more than thirty new poems by Eleanor Wilner, along with representative selections from her seven previous books, to present a major overview of her distinguished body of work. A poet who engages with history in lyrical language, Wilner creates worlds that reflect on and illuminate the actual one, drawing on the power of communal myth and memory to transform them into agents of change. In these poems, well-known figures step out of old texts to alter their stories and new figures arise out of the local air-a girl with a fury of bees in her hair, homesick statues that step down from their pedestals, a bat cave whose altar bears a judgment on our worship of war, and a frog whose spring wakening invites our own. In the process, ancient myths are naturalized while nature is newly mythologized in the service of life. Before Our Eyes features widely anthologized works such as "Sarah's Choice" and "Reading the Bible Backwards." In the new poems, Wilner records the bewildering public shocks of the current moment, when civic life is under threat, when language itself is attacked, and when poetry's lens of collective imagination becomes a way to resist falsity, to seek meaning, and to really see what is before our eyes.