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Reflections on life from a perspicacious observer, the subjects ranging from love to murder. In Theme Park America, he writes: "it's interesting / he's not screaming now / he's doubled over / and we don't have to worry / what it means / nothing is supposed to mean / that will come later / when there's more information / about the information."
The nine essays in this volume, presented at a symposium on Irving Feldman at Bucknell University, are about how Feldman spans stylistic differences, how he weaves thematic narratives, builds conceptual topoi, develops motifs, and consigns moral values. Illustrated.
This volume from the two-time National Book Award-finalist offers “splashes of beauty, yes–but also a fountain of shameless knowing and inspired telling” (Cynthia Ozick). This tenth collection of Irving Feldman’s poems extends what readers and critics have long recognized to be a body of work singular in its extravagant wit, powerful storytelling, variety of voices and range of feeling—playful, tender, ardent, biting, enthralled. Here, among the major poems of Beautiful False Things: the stand-up comic Larry Sunrise of “Funny Bones’ duels with death in Florida; in “Oedipus Host,” Oedipus arrives from his millennia-long trek to host a TV talk show; and the plucky, feminist h...
How W. H. Auden’s emigration to the United States changed the course of postwar American poetry W. H. Auden's emigration from England to the United States in 1939 marked more than a turning point in his own life and work—it changed the course of American poetry itself. The Age of Auden takes, for the first time, the full measure of Auden's influence on American poetry. Combining a broad survey of Auden's midcentury U.S. cultural presence with an account of his dramatic impact on a wide range of younger American poets—from Allen Ginsberg to Sylvia Plath—the book offers a new history of postwar American poetry. For Auden, facing private crisis and global catastrophe, moving to the Unit...
From a two-time National Book Award finalist and one of America’s most revered poets comes a glorious gathering of poems that displays his entire career and confirms his place among the great poets of our time. Irving Feldman is a master chronicler of our collective experience and an overlooked treasure of American poetry. Feldman’s rich body of work exhibits his mastery of language from the biblical to the conversational, his Yiddish flair for the comic, his profound social insight and lucidity. He writes about everything from the Coney Island days of his childhood and his bohemian years in postwar New York to the art of Picasso and George Segal, from the Holocaust to its aftermath—in...
Willard Spiegelman is considered one of the finest critics of poetry writing today and this volume collects his best work on the subject, offering essays that span his entire career and chart his changing relationship to an elusive form. He takes the measure of a wide spectrum of poetry, ranging from the Romantic era to the present, through an examination of those poets whose language, formal experiments, and music have fascinated him throughout his career. With his trademark engaging and stylish prose, Spiegelman takes readers on a tour of the rich and diverse landscape of British and American poetry, as he provides nuanced, insightful readings of works by William Wordsworth, John Keats, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, and John Ashbery, to name just a few.
An investigation into the transformation of publishing in the United States from a field in which Jews were systematically excluded to one in which they became ubiquitous “From the very first page, this book is funnier and more gripping than a book on publishing has any right to be. Anyone interested in America’s intellectual or Jewish history must read this, and anyone looking for an engrossing story should.”—Emily Tamkin, author of Bad Jews In the 1960s and 1970s, complaints about a “Jewish literary mafia” were everywhere. Although a conspiracy of Jews colluding to control publishing in the United States never actually existed, such accusations reflected a genuine transformatio...
I Speak of the City is the most extensive collection of poems ever assembled about New York. Beginning with an early piece by Jacob Steendam (from when the city was called New Amsterdam) and continuing through poems written in the aftermath of 9/11, this anthology features voices from more than a dozen countries. It includes two Nobel Prize recipients, fifteen Pulitzer Prize winners, and many other recognizable names, but it also preserves the work of long-neglected poets who celebrate the wild possibilities and colossal achievements of this epic city. Poets capture New York's major moments and transformations, writing of Hudson's arrival, Stuyvesant's prejudice, and the city's astonishing g...
Detroit's Infamous Purple Gang is a photographic history of one of the most notorious organized crime groups of the 20th century. The photographs chronologically follow the evolution of the Purples from their days as a juvenile street gang through their rise to power and eventual self-destruction. Using rare police department mug shots and group photographs, the book transports readers through the dark side of Prohibition-era Detroit history. Detroit had a gold rush atmosphere and a thriving black market during the 1920s that attracted gangsters and unsavory characters from all over the country.
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