Description
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 Bio
Harry Mathews was born in 1930 in New York City and studied musical composition at Princeton and Harvard. He lived for many years in France, where he co-founded the influential journal Locus Solus with John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler in 1961; joined the Oulipo in 1972; and served as Paris editor of The Paris Review from 1989-2003. His novels include The Solitary Twin; My Life in CIA: A Chronicle of 1973; The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium; and Tlooth. His short stories and essays are collected in The Human Country and The Case of the Persevering Maltese. Other books include 20 Lines a Day and Singular Pleasures, COLLECTED POEMS: 1946-2016 (Sand Paper Press, 2020), THE NEW TOURISM (Sand Paper Press, 2010), and OUT OF BOUNDS (Burning Deck, 1989). He also translated works by writers including Georges Perec and Marie Chaix, the French novelist whom he married in 1992. Mathews was honored by the French government as an Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters and earned awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Endowment for the Arts. He died in 2017 in Key West, Florida, where he had vacationed as a boy, and where he had lived since 1991.
Author City: NEW YORK, NY USA