Poets In Hell

The best, the worst, and ugliest bards in perdition vie for Satan's favor as poets slam one another, Satan's Fallen Angels smirk up their sleeves, and the illiterati have their day. Find out why the damned deserve their fates as Hell's hacks sink to new poetical depths! The first Bible writer drafts a deal with the Devil. Attila the Hun learns his punishment's just begun. Mary Shelley and Victor Frankenstein make a monstrous mistake. Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp get their unjust deserts. Hell's Undertaker goes on holiday. The Damned Poets Society slams away. A nameless soul shows Dorothy Parker that fame is a bitch. In the underworlds, injustice always reigns: Join us and our damnedest poets for the crookedest poetry festival in perdition where language comes to die and no rhyme goes unpunished.

Flagship poetry anthology defining and presenting the underground Babarian genre and social movement in America.

Los Angeles poet Ed Rosenthal's hiking vacation turns deadly in soaring Mojave heat; his true survival story leaves you with chills.

A Season in Hell is an extended poem written and published by French writer Arthur Rimbaud. The book had a considerable influence on later artists and poets, for example the Surrealists. Henry Miller was important in introducing Rimbaud to America in the sixties. He once attempted an English translation of the book and wrote an extended essay on Rimbaud and A Season in Hell titled The Time of the Assassins. The poem is loosely divided into nine parts, some of which are much shorter than others. They differ markedly in tone and narrative comprehensibility, with some, such as "Bad Blood," 'being much more obviously influenced by Rimbaud's drug use than others, some argue. Academic critics have arrived at many varied and often entirely incompatible conclusions as to what meaning and philosophy may or may not be contained in the text, and will continue to do so.

Mandatory reading for devotees of the long poem

A reissue of Rimbaud’s highly influential work, with a new preface by Patti Smith and the original 1945 New Directions cover design by Alvin lustig. New Directions is pleased to announce the relaunch of the long-celebrated bi- lingual edition of Rimbaud’s A Season In Hell & The Drunken Boat — a personal poem of damnation as well as a plea to be released from “the examination of his own depths.” Rimbaud originally distributed A Season In Hell to friends as a self-published booklet, and soon afterward, at the age of nineteen, quit poetry altogether. New Directions’s edition was among the first to be published in the U.S., and it quickly became a classic. Rimbaud’s famous poem “The Drunken Boat” was subsequently added to the first paperbook printing. Allen Ginsberg proclaimed Arthur Rimbaud as “the first punk” — a visionary mentor to the Beats for both his recklessness and his fiery poetry. This new edition proudly dons the original Alvin Lustig–designed cover, and a introduction by another famous rebel — and now National Book Award–winner — Patti Smith.

Eleanor Wilner’s poems attempt to absorb the shock of the wars and atrocities of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In their litany of loss, in their outrage and sorrow, they retain the joy in life, mercy for the mortal condition, and praise for the plenitude of nature and the gifts of human artistry. As with her six earlier collections, these poems are drawn from the transpersonal realm of history and cultural memory, but they display an increasing horror at the bloody repetitions of history, its service of death, and the destructive savagery of power separated from intelligence and restraint. The poems describe “a sordid drama” in which the players wear “eyeless masks,” and the only thing time changes is the name of the enemy. Underneath it all, driving “the art that” in both senses “keeps nothing at bay,” swim the enormous formal energies of life, the transitive figure that moves on in the depths, something glimpsed in the first light, something stronger than hope. “It is a relief to come across work in which a moral intelligence is matched by aesthetic refinement, in which the craft of the poems is equal to their concerns.”--Christian Wiman, Poetry