Poetry. Paul Oppenheimer's fourth collection of poems presents a love story told almost entirely in brisk, often racy modern sonnets and set against a background of the rural Hudson Valley and New York City--before, during and after the catastrophe of 9/11. "I need a form that I did not invent," he writes, "tuned by ancient anguish to impart/the strain of modern doubt: an instrument/just right, just now, on which to test my heart." His test turns into a struggle that sweeps up history, elusive love itself, preparations for war and the war in Iraq in more than ninety eerily redemptive, shocking and accomplished renderings of poetry's oldest and still most powerful form.

Author City: NEW YORK, NY USA

Paul Oppenheimer is a novelist, journalist, translator and widely published short story writer, as well as the author of three previous volumes of poetry. His broadly cited investigation of the origin of the sonnet in thirteenth-century Italy, The Birth of the Modern Mind: Self, Consciousness and the Invention of the Sonnet, has also been lauded for its more than fifty translations of sonnets by such poets as Goethe, Lorca, Cellini, Michelangelo, Rimbaud and Rilke. The winner of an Alfred Hodder Fellowship and a Fulbright Senior Scholar Award to Germany, he teaches at The City College and The Graduate Center of the City University of New York.