Dien Cai Dau

This collection by the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet is “a major contribution to the body of literature grappling with Vietnam” (Poetry). Yusef Komunyakaa is renowned for his ability to blend memory and history with strikingly evocative poetic imagery. Born in the rural community of Bogalusa, Louisiana, Komunyakaa served in Vietnam as a correspondent and editor of The Southern Cross and received a Bronze Star for his service as a journalist. In Dien Cai Dau, he applies this unique sensibility to his experience of the Vietnam War. The resulting poems have been called some of the finest Vietnam testimony ever documented in verse or prose. “So finely tuned are Komunyakaa’s images, so faultless his vision, that the reader sees precisely what the poet recalls . . . A powerful must-read for those who have forgotten those days.” ―Booklist

Poetry that precisely conjures images of the war in Vietnam by an award-winning author.

Presents a collection of previously published works, early uncollected works, and eighteen new poems.

Adding his voice to the current debate about the US occupation of Iraq, in poems written in the tradition of such poets as Wilfred Owen, Yusef Komunyakaa (Dien Cai Dau), Bruce Weigl (Song of Napalm) and Alice James’ own Doug Anderson (The Moon Reflected Fire), Iraqi war veteran Brian Turner writes power-fully affecting poetry of witness, exceptional for its beauty, honesty, and skill. Based on Turner’s yearlong tour in Iraq as an infantry team leader, the poems offer gracefully rendered, unflinching description but, remarkably, leave the reader to draw conclusions or moral lessons. Here, Bullet is a must-read for anyone who cares about the war, regardless of political affiliation.

This Pulitzer Prize–winning collection pairs twelve new poems with work from seven previous volumes by “one of the most extraordinary poets writing today” (Kenyon Review). The poetry of Yusef Komunyakaa traverses psychological and physical landscapes, mining personal memory to understand the historical and social contexts that shape experience. Neon Vernacular charts the development of his characteristic themes and concerns by gathering work from seven of his previous collections, along with a dozen new poems that continue the autobiographical trajectory of his previous collection, Magic City. Here, Komunyakaa shares an intimate and evocative life journey, from his childhood in Bogalusa, Louisiana—once a center of Klan activity and later a focus of Civil Rights efforts—to his stormy relationship with his father, his high school football days, and his experience of the Vietnam War and his difficult return home. Many of the poems collected here are drawn from limited editions and are no longer available.

Warhorses is the haunting, electric work of a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet who never ceases to challenge and delight his readers. This powerful collection of Yusef Komunyakaa's poetry delves, with his characteristic allusiveness, intelligence, and intensity, into an age of war and conflict, both global and internal, racial and sexual. "Sweetheart, was I talking war in my sleep / again?" he asks, and the question is hardly moot: "Sometimes I hold you like Achilles' / shield," and indeed all relationships, in this telling, are sites of violence and battle. His line is longer and looser than in Taboo or Talking Dirty to the Gods, and in long poems like "Autobiography of My Alter Ego" he sounds almost breathless, an exhausted but desperate prophet. With the leaps and improvisational flourishes of a jazz soloist, Komunyakaa imagines "the old masters of Shock & Awe" daydreaming of "lovely Penelope / like a trophy."

In doing so, the author seeks to convince readers that Komunyakaa has never been solely interested in dealing with the complexities of race in his work, although he does so to stunning effect in such works as Dien Cai Dau, a volume invoking the horrors of the war in Vietnam."--Jacket.

The fullest culmination to date of an original voice and "a central poet of his generation" (Harold Bloom) Time was plunging forward, like dolphins scissoring open water or like me, following Jenny's flippers down to see the coral reef, where the color of sand, sea and sky merged, and it was as if that was all God wanted: not a wife, a house or a position, but a self, like a needle, pushing in a vein.—from "Olympia" In his fifth collection of verse, Henri Cole's melodious lines are written in an open style that is both erotic and visionary. Few poets so thrillingly portray the physical world, or man's creaturely self, or the cycling strain of desire and self-reproach. Few poets so movingly evoke the human quest of "a man alone," trying "to say something true that has body, / because it is proof of his existence." Middle Earth is a revelatory collection, the finest work yet from an author of poems that are "marvels—unbuttoned, riveting, dramatic—burned into being" (Tina Barr, Boston Review).