The Collected Poems Of Barbara Guest

Winner of the SFSU Poetry Center Book Award (2010) One of the most notable members of the New York School—and its best-known woman—Barbara Guest began writing poetry in the 1950s in company that included John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara, and James Schuyler. And from the beginning, her practice placed her at the vanguard of American writing. Guest’s poetry, saturated in the visual arts, extended the formal experiments of modernism, and played the abstract qualities of language against its sensuousness and materiality. Now, for the first time, all of her published poems have been brought together in one volume, offering readers and scholars unprecedented access to Guest’s remarkable visionary work. This Collected Poems moves from her early New York School years through her more abstract later work, including some final poems never before published. Switching effortlessly from the real to the dreamlike, the observed to the imagined, this is poetry both gentle and piercing—seemingly simple, but truly and beautifully dislocating.

Cultural Writing. From one of our most esteemed contemporary poets, a collection of essays about reading and poetics, written over many decades, and touching on many centuries. "We expect poets to give a first-hand account of what poetry is. But some poets, when they write criticism, produce a kind of prose that is itself on the verge of being poetry. Valery, Stevens and Marianne Moore belong to this "visionary company." And so does Barbara Guest, whose writings on poetry, collected here, are among the most inspiring works of their kind. It is a deep pleasure to know that such writing can still exist" --John Ashbery.

Poetry. "Barbara Guest's poetry and her novel, SEEKING AIR, have been fundamental to my work and life for twenty years. Of late, her work increases in acceleration. QUILL, SOLITARY APPARITION is of perfect weight. The whole is on a blade. I feel the poetry moves beyond me and fills in where I will go"- Mei Mei Berssenbrugge.

Evocative poems in deliberately small packaging.

Poetry. Art. Collectors and literature lovers alike will want to own a copy of this collaboration between Barbara Guest (poet) and Laurie Reid (artist). Reid's spidery watercolor lines mingle with the letterpress text of one of America's premier writers. A writer and an artist working together establish a Symbiosis, as in Nature, where dissimilar organisms productively live together. Limited edition of 1,500 copies.