George Oppen's New Collected Poems gathers in one volume all of the poet's books published in his lifetime (1908-84), as well as his previously uncollected poems and a selection of his unpublished work. Oppen, whose writing was championed by Ezra Pound when it was first published by The Objectivist Press in the 1930s, has become one of America's most admired poets. In 1969 he won a Pulitzer Prize for his collection Of Being Numerous, which The New Yorker recently said is "unmatched by any book of American poetry since." The New Collected Poems is edited by Michael Davidson of the University of California at San Diego, who also writes an introduction about the poet's life and work and supplies generous notes that will give interested readers an understanding of the background of the individual books as well as keys to references in the poems. The award-winning essayist and translator Eliot Weinberger offers a personal remembrance of the poet in his preface, "Oppen Then." This newly revised paperback edition also includes a generous CD of the poet reading from each of his poetry collections.

"Nostalgia for Death" is the sole book of Villaurrutia, who was one of the few openly homosexual Latin American writers and one of Mexico's most important authors of the early twentieth century. "The latest of Eliot Weinberger's brilliant translations of Latin American poets brings to English the major volume of an impeccable Mexican modernist."--"Booklist"

Angels have soared through Western culture and consciousness from Biblical to contemporary times. But what do we really know about these celestial beings? Where do they come from, what are they made of, how do they communicate and perceive? The celebrated essayist Eliot Weinberger has mined and deconstructed, resurrected and distilled centuries of theology into an awe-inspiring exploration of the heavenly host.        From a litany of angelic voices, Weinberger’s lyrical meditation then turns to the earthly counterparts, the saints, their lives retold in a series of vibrant and playful capsule biographies, followed by a glimpse of the afterlife.        Threaded throughout Angels & Saints are the glorious illuminated grid poems by the eighteenth-century Benedictine monk Hrabanus Maurus. These astonishingly complex, proto-“concrete� poems are untangled in a lucid afterword by the medieval scholar and historian Mary Wellesley.

Like A New Sun features poetry from Huastecan Nahuatl, Isthmus Zapotec, Mazatec, Tsotsil, Yucatec Maya, and Zoque languages. Co-edited by Isthmus Zapotec poet Victor Teran and translator David Shook, this groundbreaking anthology introduces six indigenous Mexican poets--three women and three men--each writing in a different language. Well-established names like Juan Gregorio Regino (Mazatec) appear alongside exciting new voices like Mikeas Sanchez (Zoque). Each poet's work is contextualized and introduced by its translator. Foreword by Eliot Weinberger. Poets include Victor Teran (Isthmus Zapotec), Mikeas Sanchez (Zoque), Juan Gregorio Regino (Mazatec), Briceida Cuevas Cob (Yucatec Maya), Juan Hernandez (Huastecan Nahuatl), and Enriqueta Lunez (Tsotsil).

A book-length poem by “our best living literary essayist” (Forrest Gander).

For over fifty years Eliot Weinberger has been celebrated for his innovative literary and political essays―translated into over thirty languages―as well as his trailblazing translations from the Spanish. In his exquisite new book The Life of Tu Fu, Weinberger has composed a montage of fifty-eight poems that capture the life and times of the great Tang Dynasty poet Tu Fu (712–770 AD). As he writes in a note to the edition, “This is not a translation of individual poems, but a fictional autobiography of Tu Fu derived and adapted from the thoughts, images, and allusions in the poetry.”

Through lines as penetrating as a classical tanka and as fluid as a mountain stream, themes of endless war and ongoing pandemic surround the wandering life of the ancient Chinese master.

in the mirror there is always this moment this moment leads to the door of rebirth the door opens to the sea the rose of time Bei Dao The Rose of Time: New & Selected Poems presents a glowing selection of poetry by contemporary China s most celebrated poet, Bei Dao. From his earliest work, Bei Dao developed a wholly original poetic language composed of mysterious and arresting images tuned to a distinctive musical key. This collection spans Bei Dao s entire writing life, from his first book to appear in English, The August Sleepwalker, published a year after the Tiananmen tragedy, to the increasingly interior and complex poems of Landscape Over Zero and Unlock, to new never-before-published work. This bilingual edition also includes a prefatory note by the poet, and a brief afterword by the editor Eliot Weinberger. A must-read book from a seminal poet who has been translated into over thirty languages."

The difficulty (and necessity) of translation is concisely described in Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, a close reading of different translations of a single poem from the Tang Dynasty-from a transliteration to Kenneth Rexroth's loose interpretation. As Octavio Paz writes in the afterword, "Eliot Weinberger's commentary on the successive translations of Wang Wei's little poem illustrates, with succinct clarity, not only the evolution of the art of translation in the modern period but at the same time the changes in poetic sensibility."

In a new cycle of linked nonfiction prose-pieces, Eliot Weinberger creates another "vortex for the entire universe." ("Boston Review")
"If you dream of a jaguar, people are coming.
If the jaguar bites you, they are not people."
--Eliot Weinberger, from "Lacandons"
Internationally acclaimed as one of the most innovative writers today, Eliot Weinberger has taken the essay into unexplored territories on the borders of poetry and narrative where the only rule, according to the author, is that all the information must be verifiable. With "An Elemental Thing," Weinberger turns from his celebrated political chronicles to the timelessness of the subjects of his literary essays. With the wisdom of a literary archaeologist-astronomer-anthropologist-zookeeper, he leads us through histories, fables, and meditations about the ten thousand things in the universe: the wind and the rhinoceros, Catholic saints and people named Chang, the Mandaeans on the Iran-Iraq border and the Kaluli in the mountains of New Guinea. Among the thirty-five essays included are a poetic biography of the prophet Muhammad, which was praised by the London Times for its "great beauty and grace," and "The Stars," a reverie on what's up there that has already been translated into Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, and Maori.

The Ghosts of Birds offers thirty-five essays by Eliot Weinberger: the first section of the book continues his linked serial-essay, An Elemental Thing, which pulls the reader into "a vortex for the entire universe" (Boston Review). Here, Weinberger chronicles a nineteenth-century journey down the Colorado River, records the dreams of people named Chang, and shares other factually verifiable discoveries that seem too fabulous to possibly be true. The second section collects Weinberger's essays on a wide range of subjects-some of which have been published in Harper's, New York Review of Books, and London Review of Books-including his notorious review of George W. Bush's memoir Decision Points and writings about Mongolian art and poetry, different versions of the Buddha, American Indophilia ("There is a line, however jagged, from pseudo-Hinduism to Malcolm X"), Bela Balazs, Herbert Read, and Charles Reznikoff. This collection proves once again that Weinberger is "one of the bravest and sharpest minds in the United States" (Javier Marias).

With exacting rigor and wit, Howe pulls Dickinson free of all the sterile and stuffy belle-of-Amherst cotton wool and shows the poet in touch with elemental forces of nature, and as a prophet in all her radical zealotry and poetic glory. Her Emily Dickinson is a unique American genius, a demon lover of poetry no neurasthenic spider artist. Howe draws into her discussion Browning, Wuthering Heights, the Civil War, "Master," the great Puritan preachers, captivity narratives, Shakespeare, and phantom lovers. As she chases away narrow and reductive feminist readings of the poet, Howe finds instead a radically powerful and true feminism at work in Dickinson, focusing the whole on that heart-stopping poem "My Life had stood a Loaded Gun." A remarkable and passionate poet-on-poet engagement, My Emily Dickinson frees a great poet from the fetters of being read as a special female neurotic, and sets her against a fiery open sky where "Perception of an object means loosing and losing it...only Mutability certain." My Emily Dickinson won The Before Columbus Foundation Book Award."

It will come as a surprise to some readers that the greater part of Jorge Luis Borges's extraordinary writing was not in the genres of fiction or poetry, but in the various forms of non-fiction prose. His thousands of pages of essays, reviews, prologues, lectures, and notes on politics and culture--though revered in Latin America and Europe as among his finest work--have scarcely been translated into English.

Selected Non-Fictions presents a Borges almost entirely unknown to American readers. Here is the dazzling metaphysician speculating on the nature of time and reality and the inventions of heaven and hell, and the almost superhumanly erudite reader of the world's literatures, from Homer to Ray Bradbury, James Joyce to Lady Murasaki. Here, too, the political Borges, taking courageous stands against fascism, anti-Semitism, and the Peron dictatorship; Borges the moive critic, on King Kong and Citizen Kane and the Borgesian art of dubbing; and Borges the regular columnist for the Argentine equivalent of the Ladies' Home Journal, writing hilarious book reviews and capsule biographies of modern writers.

The first comprehensive selection of this work in any language, Selected Non-Fiction presents over 160 of these astonishing writings, from his youthful manifestos to his last meditations on his favorite books. More than a hundred of these pieces have never before appeared in English, and all have been rendered in brilliant new translations by Esther Allen, Suzanne Jill Levine, and Eliot Weinberger. This unique selection, the third and final volume in Penguin's centenary edition of the Collected Work in English, presents Borges as at once a deceptively self-effacing guide to the universe and the inventor of a universe that is an idispensable guide to Borges.

The Poems of Octavio Paz is the first retrospective collection of Paz's poetry to span his entire writing career from his first published poem, at age seventeen, to his magnificent last poem. This landmark bilingual edition contains many poems that have never been translated into English before, plus new translations based on Paz's final revisions. Assiduously edited by Eliot Weinberger-who has been translating Paz for over forty years-The Poems of Octavio Paz also includes translations by the poet-luminaries Elizabeth Bishop, Paul Blackburn, Denise Levertov, Muriel Rukeyser, and Charles Tomlinson. Readers will also find Weinberger's capsule biography of Paz, as well as notes on many poems in Paz's own words, taken from various interviews he gave throughout his long and singular life.

Muhammad is a shimmering, lyrical biography of the Prophet, composed from the words of Muslims throughout the centuries. Drawing on a variety of Islamic sources, from the hadith, or sayings of Muhammad and his companions, to Abbasid and Persian texts, Weinberger weaves a subtle, mystical prose poem, spanning Muhammad's birth and childhood; his adolescence, miracles and marriages; to the isra and miraj, his journey from Mecca to Jerusalem and ascent into heaven, with the angel Jibril (Gabriel) as his guide. The result is a vivid triptych that presents the final prophet of Islam with extraordinary clarity. At a time when the Muslim world is being demonized in much of the media Muhammad provides a sense of the awe surrounding this historical and sacred figure.

Often compared with Apollinaire as the first and liveliest avant-garde poet in his language, Vicente Huidobro was a one-man movement ("Creationism") in the modernist swirl of Paris and Barcelona between the two World Wars. His masterpiece was the 1931 book-length epic Altazor, a Machine Age paean to flight that sends its hero (Altazor, the "antipoet") hurtling through Einsteinian space at light speed. Perhaps the fastest-reading long poem of the century, and certainly the wildest, Altazor rushes through the universe in a lyrical babble of bird-languages, rose-languages, puns, neologisms, and pages of identical rhymes, finally ending in the pure sound of the language of the future. Universally considered untranslatable until the appearance of Eliot Weinberger's celebrated version in 1988, Altazor appears again in an extensively revised translation with an expanded introduction.