A paperback originalA vibrant collection of the lasting, essential work of the Nobel Prize–winning poet Wisława SzymborskaWisława Szymborska’s work is known for its precision, cleverness, deceptive simplicity, and the way the poet plays out domestic and human concerns against the tapestry of history. With a probing, skeptical, and witty eye, Szymborska presents readers with intellectual challenges and philosophical quandaries while remainin...

A stunning, intimate collection by the late great Polish poet Adam Zagajewski.. . . I think I sought wisdom(without resignation) in poemsand also a certain calm madness.I found, much later, a moment's joyand melancholy's dark contentment.In True Life, the Polish writer Adam Zagajewski, one of the world's most admired and beloved poets, turns his gaze to the past with piercing clarity and a tone of wry, lyrical mel...

The highway became the Red Sea.We moved through the storm like a sheer valley.You drove; I looked at you with love.—from "Storm"One of the most gifted and readable poets of his time, Adam Zagajewski is proving to be a contemporary classic. Few writers in either poetry or prose can be said to have attained the lucid intelligence and limpid economy of style that have become a matter of course with Zagajewski. It...

A new essay collection by the noted Polish poetFor Adam Zagajewski—one of Poland's great poets—the project of writing, whether it be poetry or prose, is an occasion to advance what David Wojahn has characterized as his "restless and quizzical quest for self-knowledge." Slight Exaggeration is an autobiographical portrait of the poet, arranged not chronologically but with that same luminous quality that distinguishes Zagajewski's spellbinding poetry—an affini...

At once kind and hilarious, this compilation of the Nobel Prize-winning poet’s advice to writers is illustrated with her own marvelous collagesIn this witty “how-to” guide, Wislawa Szymborska has nothing but sympathy for the labors of would-be writers generally: “I myself started out with rotten poetry and stories,” she confesses in this collection of pieces culled from the advice she gave—anonymously—for many years in the well-known Polish journal Literary Lif...

Through three editions over more than four decades, The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics has built an unrivaled reputation as the most comprehensive and authoritative reference for students, scholars, and poets on all aspects of its subject: history, movements, genres, prosody, rhetorical devices, critical terms, and more. Now this landmark work has been thoroughly revised and updated for the twenty-first century. Compiled by an entirely new team of editors, the fourth...

One of the most gifted poets of our time, Adam Zagajewski is a contemporary classic. Few writers in poetry or prose have attained the lucid intelligence and limpid economy of style that are the trademarks of his work. His wry humor, gentle skepticism, and perpetual sense of history's dark possibilities have earned him a devoted international following. This collection, gracefully translated by Clare Cavanagh, finds the poet returning to the themes that have defined his career—moving medita...

If modernism marked, as some critics claim, an "apocalypse of cultural community," then Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938) must rank among its most representative figures. Born to Central European Jews in Warsaw on the cusp of the modern age, he could claim neither Russian nor European traditions as his birthright. Describing the poetic movement he helped to found, Acmeism, as a "yearning for world culture," he defined the impulse that charges his own poetry and prose. Clare Cavanagh has written ...

With a splendid selection from a half century of marvelous poems, a major Polish poet appears in English at lastOne of Poland's greatest living poets—now in English at last—Ryszard Krynicki was born in 1943 in a Nazi labor camp, the son of Polish slave laborers. His 1969 volume, Act of Birth, marked the emergence of a major voice in the "New Wave" of Polish poetry. In Krynicki's work, political and poetic rebellion converged during the 1970s and '80s, he w...