Poetry. Letterpress, 2 colors, saddlestitched. A wonderfully inventive, formally bold long poem from the author of Cigarettes and The Sinking of the Odyadek Stadion. Formal experimentation reaches into the past and seizes conceits, forms and rhythms from the history of poetry, appropriating with a free hand a range of language seldom used by contemporary poets. Yet the poem is absolutely contemporary, especially in its license in pillaging the rich past to furbish the poet's vivid present. "Long renowned for his masterful and duplicitous fiction, Harry Mathews the poet has been little known until now, making this important and long-overdue collection all the more welcome. His poetry is both bizarre and deeply moving"--John Ashbery.

Author City: NEW YORK, NY USA

Born in New York in 1930, Harry Mathews settled in Europe in 1952 and has since then lived in Spain, Germany, Italy, and (chiefly) France. When Mathews published his first poems in 1956, he was associated with the so-called New York School of poets, with three of whom (John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler) he founded the review Locus Solus in 1961. Through his friendship with Georges Perec, he became a member of the Oulipo in 1972. The author of six novels and several collections of poetry, recent publications are THE NEW TOURISM (Sand Paper Press, 2010), Sainte Catherine, a novella written in French (Éditions P.O.L, 2000), The Human Country: the Collected Short Stories (Dalkey Archive Press, 2002), The Case of the Persevering Maltese: Collected Essays (Dalkey Archive Press, 2003), OULIPO COMPENDIUM (co-edited with Alastair Brotchie; Atlas Press and Make Now Press, 2005), and My Life in CIA: A Chronicle of 1973 (Dalkey Archive Press, 2005).