Poetry has always been at the heart of Farrar, Straus and Giroux's identity, ever since Robert Giroux first brought T. S. Eliot to the company. FSG's personality and literary profile have been defined by both the poets and the prose writers who have made it an imprint with a unique place in American letters. The FSG Poetry Anthology includes work by every one of the more than one hundred poets FSG has published in its seventy-five-year history. Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, John Berryman, and Randall Jarrell were central to the first generation of those poets, followed by the international figures and Nobel laureates Nelly Sachs, Seamus Heaney, Joseph Brodsky, and Derek Walcott. Over time the list expanded to include James Schuyler, John Ashbery, C. K. Williams, Charles Wright, Yusef Komunyakaa, Grace Paley, Gjertrud Schnackenberg, Yehuda Amichai, Paul Valery, Marianne Moore, Mina Loy, Ted Hughes, and Adam Zagajewski. Today Carl Phillips, Maureen N. McLane, Ange Mlinko, Ishion Hutchinson, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, Frederick Seidel, Henri Cole, francine j. harris, and Valzhyna Mort are among the poets who continue FSG's tradition as a premier discoverer and promoter of the most vital and distinguished contemporary poetic voices. Poetry and prose are two indissoluble sides of the same coin. This anthology offers a unique perspective on the best of contemporary literature over the past three generations. FSG president and long-time poetry editor Jonathan Galassi contributes a lively history of the role of poetry in the publishing house.

That Smell is Sonallah Ibrahim's modernist masterpiece and one of the most influential novels written in Arabic since WWII. Composed after a five-year term in prison, the semi-autobiographical story follows a recently released political prisoner as he wanders through Cairo, adrift in his native city. Living under house arrest, he tries to write of his tortuous experience, but instead smokes, spies on the neighbors, visits old lovers, and marvels at Egypt's new consumer culture. Published in 1966, That Smell was immediately banned and the print-run confiscated. The original, uncensored version did not appear in Egypt for another twenty years.

For this edition, translator Robyn Creswell has also included an annotated selection of the author's Notes from Prison, Ibrahim's prison diaries--a personal archive comprising hundreds of handwritten notes copied onto Bafra-brand cigarette papers and smuggled out of jail. These stark, intense writings shed unexpected light on the sources and motives of Ibrahim's groundbreaking novel. Also included in this edition is Ibrahim's celebrated essay about the writing and reception of That Smell.

How poetic modernism shaped Arabic intellectual debates in the twentieth century and beyond City of Beginnings is an exploration of modernism in Arabic poetry, a movement that emerged in Beirut during the 1950s and became the most influential and controversial Arabic literary development of the twentieth century. Robyn Creswell introduces English-language readers to a poetic movement that will be uncannily familiar-and unsettlingly strange. He also provides an intellectual history of Lebanon during the early Cold War, when Beirut became both a battleground for rival ideologies and the most vital artistic site in the Middle East. Arabic modernism was centered on the legendary magazine Shi'r ("Poetry"), which sought to put Arabic verse on "the map of world literature." The Beiruti poets-Adonis, Yusuf al-Khal, and Unsi al-Hajj chief among them-translated modernism into Arabic, redefining the very idea of poetry in that literary tradition. City of Beginnings includes analyses of the Arab modernists' creative encounters with Ezra Pound, Saint-John Perse, and Antonin Artaud, as well as their adaptations of classical literary forms. The book also reveals how the modernists translated concepts of liberal individualism, autonomy, and political freedom into a radical poetics that has shaped Arabic literary and intellectual debate to this day.