The most comprehensive collection available of Menashe’s concise and powerfully suggestive poetry Samuel Menashe (1925-2011) was the first recipient of The Poetry Foundation’s Neglected Masters Prize in 2004 and this volume was published in conjunction with that award. Born in New York City, Menashe practiced his art of “compression and crystallization” (in Derek Mahon's phrase) in poems that are brief in form but startlingly wide-ranging and profound in their engagement with ultimate questions. Dana Gioia has written: “Menashe is essentially a religious poet, though one without an orthodox creed. Nearly every poem he has ever published radiates a heightened religious awareness.” Intensely musical and rigorously constructed, Menashe's poetry stands apart in its solitary meditative power. But it is equally a poetry of the everyday, suffused, in the words of Christopher Ricks, with “the courage of comedy, flanked by the respect of innocence.” The humblest of objects, the minutest of natural forms here become powerfully suggestive, and even the shortest of the poems are spacious in the perspectives they open. About the American Poets Project Elegantly designed in compact editions, printed on acid-free paper, and textually authoritative, the American Poets Project makes available the full range of the American poetic accomplishment, selected and introduced by today’s most discerning poets and critics.

From Books Cover: From first to last, poetry was part of Edith Wharton's writing life. While rarely (after early youth) her primary focus, it always served her as a medium for recording the most vivid impressions and emotions, an intimate journal of longings and regrets. "Poetry was important to Wharton," writes editor Louis Auchincloss, "because it enabled her to express the deeply emotional side of her nature that she kept under such tight control, not only in her life but in the ordered sweep of her fiction." In later years her poetry also engaged with the public passions of wartime, as she found herself involved with the plight of allied soldiers in France. Her first models were Romantic, but in the course of her life she absorbed the influences of symbolism and modernism; and throughout her poetic career she showed a care for form even in her most private utterances, as in the erotic ode "Terminus" never published in her lifetime. This volume collects the bulk of Wharton's significant poetry, including much work previously uncollected or unpublished.

"Samuel Menashe was a master of the modern lyric poem. THE SHRINE WHOSE SHAPE I AM is the first volume to compile and critically appraise his complete oeuvre"--

A groundbreaking anthology containing the work of poets who have witnessed war, imprisonment, torture, and slavery. A companion volume to Against Forgetting, Poetry of Witness is the first anthology to reveal a tradition that runs through English-language poetry. The 300 poems collected here were composed at an extreme of human endurance—while their authors awaited execution, endured imprisonment, fought on the battlefield, or labored on the brink of breakdown or death. All bear witness to historical events and the irresistibility of their impact. Alongside Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth, this volume includes such writers as Anne Askew, tortured and executed for her religious beliefs during the reign of Henry VIII; Phillis Wheatley, abducted by slave traders; Samuel Bamford, present at the Peterloo Massacre in 1819; William Blake, who witnessed the Gordon Riots of 1780; and Samuel Menashe, survivor of the Battle of the Bulge. Poetry of Witness argues that such poets are a perennial feature of human history, and it presents the best of that tradition, proving that their work ranks alongside the greatest in the language.

"Poetry. Samuel Menashe "compresses thought into language intense and clear as diamonds"--Stephen Spender, New York Review of Books. Described by Donald Davie in the New Statesman as a "testcase for readers and a challenge to writers," Menashe's poetry has been enthusiastically reviewed in some of the most prestigious journals in the English-speaking world and praised by critics and poets as various and distinguished as Robert Graves, Kathleen Raine, Austin Clarke, Hugh Kenner, Calvin Bedient, Derek Mahon, Dana Gionia, and Barry Ahearn." --Amazon.com.

I Speak of the City is the most extensive collection of poems ever assembled about New York. Beginning with an early piece by Jacob Steendam (from when the city was called New Amsterdam) and continuing through poems written in the aftermath of 9/11, this anthology features voices from more than a dozen countries. It includes two Nobel Prize recipients, fifteen Pulitzer Prize winners, and many other recognizable names, but it also preserves the work of long-neglected poets who celebrate the wild possibilities and colossal achievements of this epic city. Poets capture New York's major moments and transformations, writing of Hudson's arrival, Stuyvesant's prejudice, and the city's astonishing growth and gentrification. They speak of the thrills of a skyscraper's observation deck and the privations of teeming tenements. They portray the immigrant experience at Ellis Island and the decay, fear, and unexpected kindness on a subway ride. They take place on sidewalks, bridges, and docks; in taxis, buses, and ferries; and even within nature. The Brooklyn Bridge, Times Square, Broadway, the Statue of Liberty, and other familiar landmarks are recast through the prism of individual experience yet still reflect the seeming invincibility of New York and its status as a cultural magnet for the freethinking and experimental. While certain subjects and themes can be found in all urban verse, poems about New York have their own restless rhythm and ever-changing style, much like the city itself. Whether writing sonnets, epics, or experimental or imagistic verse, each of these poets has been inspired by the marvels and madness, humor and heartbreak of an enduring city.