by Station Hill Press

Corona
Paul Celan
Station Hill Press - 17.00€ -  out of stock

Paul Celan, arguably one of the mid-20th century's most important German-language poet, is commonly pigeonholed as a poet of the Holocaust, a term, however, he never used. Undoing facile assumptions about Celan, CORONA charts a more idiosyncratic and personal path through Celan's large oeuvre, choosing 103 poems from among the more than 900 Celan published.

The bilingual selection includes work from all of Celan's periods and genres. Without ignoring the poet's well-known work of memory and memorialization, it seeks to open a space for new appreciation of Celan's love poems, as well as his poems on political events, painful reflections on his stays in mental hospitals, and quasi-burlesque verse.

Susan H. Gillespie's translations are characterized by their ease of diction and their attention to the "somatic" and rhetorical aspects of Celan's lines, their sound, gait, tone, and gravity, as well as to their internal and external echoes. The latter, elucidated in notes to the poems, include references to other poets and to Celan's wide readings of everything from specialized dictionaries to other writers, what Roman Jakobson called their "poetic etymology." "Here, poetry is not what gets lost in translation," writes Gillespie in the Introduction, "it is, itself, an act of translation, of experience and thought, into new language."

A Form of Taking It All
Rosmarie Waldrop
Station Hill Press - 12.50€ -  out of stock

Just as the discovery of America in the fifteenth century forever altered the way Europeans viewed the world, so too did the theories of relativity and quantum physics radically alter the twentieth-century vision of the universe. Both encounters with otherness, on both a global and personal level, form the crux of Rosmarie Waldrop's extraordinary novel.

The story roams the political worlds of old Mexico and Washington, D.C., and goes on to fuse the two great perceptual revolutions of the fifteenth and twentieth centuries--so that it is Columbus, in her fiction, who discovers the unpredicted particles of the new quantum physics.

Waldrop's brilliant narrative shifts from stream of consciousness to first-person narration to poetry, in a unique meditation on love and politics, conquest and tolerance, and the effects of change.

Piece of Cake
Bernadette Mayer
Station Hill Press - 21.00€ -  out of stock

Bernadette Mayer and Lewis Warsh wrote Piece of Cake as a work of collaborative prose poetry, based on a process of each writing on alternate days in the course of August of 1976-the bicentennial year of the America's Declaration of Independence. It recounts the quotidian details of daily activities, negotiating the exigencies of young, married-with-children life, the artistic path and citizenship. It has the classic "I did this, I did that" of a New York School of Poetry text, as characterized by the poetry of Frank O'Hara, and is somewhat reminiscent of Mayer's work Studying Hunger Journal, written not long before taking up Piece of Cake. Another distinguishing feature of this work is that it is arguably the first significant male-female collaboration in 20th century American poetry. Regarding the possible derivation of the work's title, and exemplary of the work's tenor, is the start of Warsh's entry of August 29: "I also recall getting up and eating a piece of left-over cake (a very sweet store-bought cake with green or possibly pinkish icing) and drinking a glass of milk at the kitchen window. Empty streets, no moon. Michael and Twinkie asleep on the floor of Bernadette's room, Guy and Karen in mine, Bill on the couch in the living room. Marie in her crib. Everyone 'dead to the world,' a phrase I dislike, what a full house.

Bernadette Mayer was born in Brooklyn, New York, and received her B.A. from the New School for Social Research in 1967. She is the author of more than two dozen volumes of poetry. From 1972 to 1974, Mayer and conceptual artist Vito Acconci edited the journal 0 TO 9, and in 1977 she established United Artists Press with the poet Lewis Warsh. She has taught writing workshops at The Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church in New York City for many years, and she served as the Poetry Project's director.

Lewis Warsh is the author of over thirty volumes of poetry, fiction and autobiography, including Out of the Question: Selected Poems (Station Hill, 2017), Alien Abduction (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2015), One Foot Out the Door: Collected Stories (Spuyten Duyvil, 2014), A Place in the Sun (Spuyten Duyvil, 2010) and Inseparable (Granary Books, 2008). He was co-founder, with Bernadette Mayer, of United Artists Magazine and Books, and co-editor, with Anne Waldman, of The Angel Hair Anthology (Granary Books, 2001).

Published January 2020. 

cart (0)