Lyn Hejinian

"In 1990 Sun & Moon Press published the first American translation of the brilliant Soviet poet Arkadii Dragomoschenko, Description. The book garnered a great deal of attention in the United States and led one critic, Marjorie Perloff, to ponder about the possibility of influence of contemporary Soviet poetry upon American writers. Perloff notes that Dragomoschenko's "is a poem of the body, of the 'skin of sun that turned into the reverse side of touch....' Parody, pastiche, even irony - these play a subordinate role to passion, and especially to vision." Writing in The Hungry Mind Review, American poet C. D. Wright concluded: "This is poetry. Immodest. Magisterial. More or less impenetrable. The relation of language is potential but not improvisational. The vocabulary for this is happily idiosyncratic.... Description is a radical exercise book for life."". "In his new collection, Xenia, Dragomoschenko continues to explore the world about him, a world in which the natural, in which nature is more radical than most psychologically motivated and realist-oriented poets have ever recognized it to be. "I spent a life / which no one here ever saw in dreams." As Dragomoschenko makes clear at the very beginning of this stunning and profound work: "We see only what / we see // only what / lets us be ourselves - / seen."". "Visionary that he is, Dragomoschenko allows the whole terrifying universe into his vision: "Yesterday there was still poplar down - but today / the children burned the ox.""--BOOK JACKET.

At every level of Anne Tardos's paintings, films, poetry and cross-genre work, the familiar is engaged while acknowledging the violently contested landscape of what we think we know. Connection is the dominant mode of composition. A brand new vernacular emerges when Tardos's unique voice announces itself in her rapid language switches, gleeful humor and rare willingness to blend the personal and political. With new and previously published work as well as an introductory interview with the author and prominent poet Lyn Hejinian, The Dik-dik's Solitude is the first comprehensive collection of work by this significant, avant-garde contemporary artist.

Written over the course of two decades, The Book of a Thousand Eyes was begun as an homage to Scheherazade, the heroine of The Arabian Nights who, through her nightly tale-telling, saved her culture and her own life by teaching a powerful and murderous ruler to abandon cruelty in favor of wisdom and benevolence. Hejinian?s book is a compendium of “night works”?lullabies, bedtime stories, insomniac lyrics, nonsensical mumblings, fairy tales, attempts to understand at day?s end some of the day?s events, dream narratives, erotic or occasionally bawdy ditties, etc. The poems explore and play with languages of diverse stages of consciousness and realms of imagination. Though they may not be redemptive in effect, the diverse works that comprise The Book of a Thousand Eyes argue for the possibilities of a merry, pained, celebratory, mournful, stubborn commitment to life.

"Lyn Hejinian is among the most prominent of contemporary American poets. Her poem My Life has garnered accolades and fans inside and outside academia. First published in 1980, and revised in 1987 and 2002, My Life is now firmly established in the postmodern canon. This Wesleyan edition includes the 45-part prose poem sequence along with a closely related ten-part work titled My Life in the Nineties. An experimental intervention into the autobiographical genre, My Life explores the many ways in which language--the things people say and the ways they say them--shapes not only their identity, but also the very world around them."--p. of cover.

"Over the course of nearly a decade (1983-1991), author Lyn Hejinian visited the USSR seven times, staying frequently with her friends the poet Arkadii Dragomoshchenko and his wife Zina in Leningrad. During this period, she embarked on translating into English several volumes of Dragomoshcheko's poetry, and the two poets began an extensive correspondence, exchanging hundreds of letters until Dragomoshchenko's death in 2012. During her fifth visit, in conversation with Dragomoshchenko and other poets, she decided to write a novel reflecting her experiences of literary and lived life in Leningrad and Moscow. Cognizant of a general sense that the Russian novel is stereotypically "long," she determined that hers would be "short." What resulted is an experimental novel whose structure (284 chapters, each 14 lines long) pays homage to Alexander Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, which is generally regarded to be the first Russian novel: a verse novel composed in 14-line stanzas. From time to time, various members of Dragomoshchenko's circle of friends offered suggestions for the novel, as readers will note. There's abundant narrative content, but anecdotes and events are presented in non-linear form, since they unfolded over extended periods of time and thus came to Hejinian's attention piecemeal. Oxota (which means variously "huntress," "hunt," and "desire" in Russian) is a novel in which contexts, rather than contents, are kept in the foreground."--Amazon.com.

Simple text and photographs present the sense of hearing and how it works.

The Unfollowing is a sequence of elegies, mourning public as well as personal loss. The grief is not coherent. Though the poems are each fourteen lines long, they are not sonnets but anti-sonnets. They are composed entirely of non sequiturs, with the intention of demonstrating, if not achieving, a refusal to follow aesthetic proprieties, and a rejection of the logic of mortality and of capitalism. Outrage, hilarity, anxiety, and ribaldry are not easily separated in the play of human emotions. And they are all the proper, anarchic medium for staying alive.