The Galloping Hour French Poems

A beautifully produced and exquisitely translated edition of French poems by “the best exponent of the poetry of introversion and metaphorical delirium” (Italo Calvino) The Galloping Hour: French Poems—never before rendered in English and unpublished during her lifetime—gathers for the first time all the poems that Alejandra Pizarnik (revered by Octavio Paz and Roberto Bolano) wrote in French. Conceived during her Paris sojourn (1960–1964) and in Buenos Aires (1970–1971) near the end of her tragically short life, these poems explore many of Pizarnik’s deepest obsessions: the limitation of language, silence, the body, night, sex, and the nature of intimacy. Drawing from personal life experiences and echoing readings of some of her beloved/accursed French authors—Charles Baudelaire, Germain Nouveau, Arthur Rimbaud, and Antonin Artaud—this collection includes prose poems that Pizarnik would later translate into Spanish. Pizarnik’s work led Raúl Zurita to note: “Her poetry—with a clarity that becomes piercing—illuminates the abysses of emotional sensitivity, desire, and absence. It presses against our lives and touches the most exposed, fragile, and numb parts of humanity.”

An exciting new book about renewal by the winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry In the searing poems of his new collection, Twice Alive, the Pulitzer Prize–winner Forrest Gander addresses the exigencies of our historical moment and the intimacies, personal and environmental, that bind us to others and to the world. Drawing from his training in geology and his immersion in Sangam literary traditions, Gander invests these poems with an emotional intensity that illuminates our deep-tangled interrelations. While conducting fieldwork with a celebrated mycologist, Gander links human intimacy with the transformative collaborations between species that compose lichens. Throughout Twice Alive, Gander addresses personal and ecological trauma—several poems focus on the devastation wrought by wildfires in California where he lives—but his tone is overwhelmingly celebratory. Twice Alive is a book charged with exultation and tenderness.

Forrest Gander’s first book of poems since his Pulitzer finalist Core Samples from the World: a startling look through loss, grief, and regret into the exquisite nature of intimacy Drawing from his experience as a translator, Forrest Gander includes in the first, powerfully elegiac section a version of a poem by the Spanish mystical poet St. John of the Cross. He continues with a long multilingual poem examining the syncretic geological and cultural history of the U.S. border with Mexico. The poems of the third section—a moving transcription of Gander’s efforts to address his mother dying of Alzheimer’s—rise from the page like hymns, transforming slowly from reverence to revelation. Gander has been called one of our most formally restless poets, and these new poems express a characteristically tensile energy and, as one critic noted, “the most eclectic diction since Hart Crane.”

The first full-length collection in English by one of Latin America’s most significant twentieth-century poets. Revered by the likes of Octavio Paz and Roberto Bolano, Alejandra Pizarnik is still a hidden treasure in the U.S. Extracting the Stone of Madness: Poems 1962–1972 comprises all of her middle to late work, as well as a selection of posthumously published verse. Obsessed with themes of solitude, childhood, madness and death, Pizarnik explored the shifting valences of the self and the border between speech and silence. In her own words, she was drawn to "the suffering of Baudelaire, the suicide of Nerval, the premature silence of Rimbaud, the mysterious and fleeting presence of Lautréamont,” as well as to the “unparalleled intensity” of Artaud’s “physical and moral suffering.”

"Este libro ofrece el caso de estudio perfecto para explorar algo que me parece crucial para la poesía contemporánea: la relación del sinsentido con la belleza del lenguaje, con la belleza descrita provisionalmente como impresiones sensoriales, emocionales, intelectuales o imaginativas, fuertes y positivas, ya sea por sí sola o en alguna de estas combinaciones. Hace tiempo que pienso que lo indecible también debe participar de alguna manera en esta relación. Lo que plantea el tema de la relación entre el sinsentido y lo indecible. ¿Es el sinsentido un intento valiente de articular lo indecible? ¿O es una especie de juego de manos que nos permite vislumbrarlo? Bitter Green está lleno de ejemplos perfectos de bello sinsentido, como los cuatro versos que abren una de sus páginas: “Un alcatraz que atraviesa el óleo no puede / y un pardillo sin siquiera un canto / el invierno salda las cuentas todas / el agua sin cauce sobre la tierra”. "This offers the perfect case study for exploring something that I feel is crucial to contemporary poetry—the relationship of nonsense to beauty in language, particularly written language, with beauty provisionally described as strong and positive sensual, emotional, intellectual, or imaginative impressions, either alone or in some combination. I’ve long thought that the unsayable must somehow also be involved in this relationship. Which raises the question of the relationship between nonsense and the unsayable. Is nonsense a valiant attempt to articulate the unsayable? Or is it a kind of sleight of hand that allows us to catch a glimpse of it? Bitter Green is full of perfect examples of beautiful nonsense, such as the four lines that open one page: “A gannet thru the oil cannot / and a linnet sans a song / the winter is of every count / the water without ground.” - COLE SWENSEN 

The first book of poems by Pizarnik to be published in its entirety in the U.S., poetry at the edge of impossibility.

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This text is a reflection on the meaning of spiritual darkness - especially those difficult places in human experience where meaning seems to elude us, where we are emptied out and are compelled to dig deeper into who we truly are. Douglas E. Christie takes up this facet of experience, in ordinary human experience, but also in relation to the Christian contemplative and mystical traditions, where such experience is often understood to be both painful and transformative, allowing the mind and heart to open in love.