The Sophist was first published by Sun & Moon Press in 1987 and has been unavailable for well over a decade. A pivotal book for Bernstein, The Sophist demonstrated his great range of subject matter, style, and genre. By contrasting wildly different approaches to poetry, Bernstein not only questions the intrinsic value of any given form but also provides a model for his later heterogeneous books, including My Way and With Strings. If sophism is the opposite of both philosophy and the lyric,...

This audio version of acclaimed poet Charles Bernstein's most expansive and unruly collection to date is read in inimitable fashion by the author. It features poems, both tiny and grand, that speak to a world turned upside down. Our time of “covidity,” as Bernstein calls it in one of the book’s most poignantly disarming works, is characterized in equal measure by the turbulence of both the body politic and the individual. Likewise, in Topsy-Turvy, novel and traditional forms jostl...

Long anticipated, Recalculating is Charles Bernstein’s first full-length collection of new poems in seven years*.* As a result of this lengthy time under construction, the scope, scale, and stylistic variation of the poems far surpasses Bernstein’s previous work. Together, the poems of Recalculating take readers on a journey through the history and poetics of the decades since the end of the Cold War as seen through the lens of social and personal turbulence and tragedy.

Praised in recent years as a “calculating, improvisatory, essential poet” by Daisy Fried in the New York Times, and as “the foremost poet-critic of our time” by Craig Dworkin, Charles Bernstein is a leading voice in American poetry. Near/Miss, Bernstein’s first poetry collection in five years, is the apotheosis of his late style, thick with off-center rhythms, hilarious riffs, and verbal extravagance.This collection’s title highlights poetry’s ability to graze rea...

Praised in recent years as a “calculating, improvisatory, essential poet” by Daisy Fried in the New York Times, and as “the foremost poet-critic of our time” by Craig Dworkin, Charles Bernstein is a leading voice in American poetry. Near/Miss, Bernstein’s first poetry collection in five years, is the apotheosis of his late style, thick with off-center rhythms, hilarious riffs, and verbal extravagance.This collection’s title highlights poetry’s ability to graze rea...

Praised in recent years as a “calculating, improvisatory, essential poet” by Daisy Fried in the New York Times, Charles Bernstein is a leading voice in American literary theory. Pitch of Poetry is his irreverent guide to modernist and contemporary poetics.Subjects range across Holocaust representation, Occupy Wall Street, and the figurative nature of abstract art. Detailed overviews of formally inventive work include essays on—or “pitches” for—a set of key poets, ...

A celebration of the radical poetics of invention from Charles Bernstein.For more than four decades, Charles Bernstein has been at the forefront of experimental poetry, ever reaching for a radical poetics that defies schools, periods, and cultural institutions. The Kinds of Poetry I Want is a celebration of invention and includes not only poetry but also essays on aesthetics and literary studies, interviews with other poets, autobiographical sketches, and ...

Creative Non-fiction. A multifaceted set of lively writings by two poet-intellectuals (A. D. Coleman and Charles Bernstein) about the veracity of an avant-garde essay by third (David Antin) regarding realities within a publishing house run by the parents of one of them, Allan Douglass Coleman, this author.Coleman’s leftist family founded a high- end sci-tech press. He and David Antin worked there. Antin wrote about it. Coleman took issue and created poetic license / poetic justice....

Jewish art has always been with us, but so has a broader canvas of Jewish imaginings: in thought, in emotion, in text, and in ritual practice. Imagining the Jewish God was there in the beginning, as it were, engraved and embedded in the ways Jews lived and responded to their God.This book attempts to give voice to these diverse imaginings of the Jewish God, and offers these collected essays and poems as a living text meant to provoke a substantive and nourishing dialogue. A responsive, liv...

A comprehensive examination of one of the twentieth century's most innovative writers and critics.This collection of essays offers an authoritative examination and appraisal of the French-American novelist Raymond Federman's many contributions to humanities scholarship, including Holocaust studies, Beckett studies, translation studies, experimental fiction, postmodernism, and autobiography. Although known primarily as a novelist, Federman (1928–2009) is also the au...

The bold essays that make up Reading the Difficulties offer case studies in and strategies for reading innovative poetry.Definitions of what constitutes innovative poetry are innumerable and are offered from every quarter. Some critics and poets argue that innovative poetry concerns free association (John Ashbery), others that experimental poetry is a “re-staging” of language (Bruce Andrews) or a syntactic and cognitive break with the past (Ron Silliman and Lyn Hejinian). ...

Transpoetic Exchange illuminates the poetic interactions between Octavio Paz (1914-1998) and Haroldo de Campos (1929-2003) from three perspectives--comparative, theoretical, and performative. The poem Blanco by Octavio Paz, written when he was ambassador to India in 1966, and Haroldo de Campos’ translation (or what he calls a “transcreation”) of that poem, published as Transblanco in 1986, as well as Campos’ Galáxias, written from 1963 to 1976, are the ...