Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry“One of the truly imaginative writers of our time.” —Los Angles Times Book ReviewYou never know what Charles Simic is up to until you reach the end of the line or the bottom of the paragraph. Waiting for you might be a kiss. Or a bludgeon. A smile at the absurdities of society, or a wistful, grim memory of World War II.He puns, pulls pranks. He can be jazzy and streetwise. Or cloak hims...

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning former poet laureate, a collection of elegiac, irreverent new poems—an American master at the height of his talentThe latest volume of poetry from Charles Simic hums with the liveliness of the writer’s pen. Scribbled in the Dark brings the poet’s signature sardonic sense of humor, piercing social insight, and haunting lyricism to diverse and richly imagined landscapes. Peopled by policemen, presidents, kids in Halloween masks, a fortune-teller, a fly...

"This 20th collection from the former U.S. poet laureate departs only by degrees from his poems of earlier decades—but it could just be his best book." — Publishers Weekly (starred review)In his first volume of poetry since his tenure as poet laureate, Charles Simic shows he is at the height of his poetic powers. These new poems mine the rich strain of inscrutability in ordinary life, until it is hard to know what is innocent and what ominous. There is some...

Whether he draws for inspiration on American blues, Serbian folktales, or Greek myths, Simic's words have a way of their own. Each of these forty-four poems is a powerful mixture of concrete images. Each records the reality and myth of the world around us-and in us. "Short, perfectly shaped, Simic's poems float past like feathers, turning one way, then another" (Village Voice).

The Pulitzer Prize–winning poet "illuminates the shadow side of life in poems as perfectly formed and directed as the beam of a flashlight" ( Booklist).The poems in Charles Simic's new collection evoke a variety of settings and images, from New York City to small New England towns; from crowds spilling onto the sidewalk on a hot summer night to an abandoned wooden church and a car graveyard overgrown with weeds. His subjects range from a bakery early in the...

From one of America's most beloved poets, a piercing new collection reflecting on the characters and encounters that haunt us through this life and into the nextLeading us into a city stirring with gravediggers and beggars, lovers and dogs, Charles Simic returns with a brilliant collection full of his singular wit, dark humor, and tenderheartedness. In poems that are often as spare as they are monumental, he captures the fleeting moments of modern life—peering insi...

From Pulitzer Prize winner and former Poet Laureate Charles Simic comes a dazzling collection of poems as original, meditative, and humorous as the legendary poet himself.This latest volume of poetry from Charles Simic, one of America’s most celebrated poets, demonstrates his revered signature style—a mix of understated brilliance, wry melancholy, and sardonic wit. These seventy luminous poems range in subject from mortality to personal ads, from the simple wonders of nature to his...

A NEW YORK REVIEW E-BOOK ORIGINALAs former U.S. poet laureate Charles Simic has said, the secret to our identities lies not in grand events, but in the parentheses between events--and in these brief essays, we get a taste of this great poet's parenthetical observations and recollections. He takes us from his rattling house on a stormy New Hampshire night, to a park bench in Washington Square where two old men sitdiscussing the women they've known, to a business convention in ...

A collection of new and selected essays by the Pulitzer Prize–winner and former Poet Laureate.In addition to being one of America’s most famous and commended poets, Charles Simic is a prolific and talented essayist. The Life of Images brings together his best prose work written over twenty-five years.A blend of the straightforward, the wry, and the hopeful, the essays in The Life of Images explore subjects ranging from literary criticism to philosophy, photography to Simic’...

An insightful and haunting new collection from Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Charles SimicIrreverent and sly, observant and keenly imagined, Come Closer and Listen is the latest work from one of our most beloved poets. With his trademark sense of humor, open-hearted empathy, and perceptive vision, Charles Simic roots his poetry in the ordinary world while still taking in the wide sweep of the human experience.From poems pithy, wry, and cutting—“Time—that murderer/that no has ...

The Book of Blam, Aleksandar Tišma’s “extended kaddish . . . [his] masterpiece” (Kirkus Reviews), is a modern-day retelling of the book of Job. The war is over. Miroslav Blam walks along the former Jew Street, and he remembers. He remembers Aaron Grün, the hunchbacked watchmaker; and Eduard Fiker, a lamp merchant; and Jakob Mentele, a stove fitter; and Arthur Spitzer, a grocer, who played amateur soccer and had non-Jewish friends; and Sándor Vértes, a lawyer who was a Communist. A...

In his thirteenth collection, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Charles Simic melds folklore and black magic with everyday life.Hamlet’s ghost wandering the halls of a Vegas motel, a street corner ventriloquist using passersby as dummies, and Jesus panhandling in a weed-infested Eden are just a few of the startling conceits Simic unleashes in this collection.“Few contemporary poets have been as influential-or inimitable-as Charle...