Sun & Moon classics

"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.

Part of Emile Zola's multigenerational Rougon-Macquart saga, The Belly of Paris is the story of Florent Quenu, a wrongly accused man who escapes imprisonment on Devil's Island. Returning to his native Paris, Florent finds a city he barely recognizes, with its working classes displaced to make way for broad boulevards and bourgeois flats. Living with his brother's family in the newly rebuilt Les Halles market, Florent is soon caught up in a dangerous maelstrom of food and politics. Amid intrigue among the market's sellers--the fishmonger, the charcutiere, the fruit girl, and the cheese vendor--and the glorious culinary bounty of their labors, we see the dramatic difference between "fat and thin" (the rich and the poor) and how the widening gulf between them strains a city to the breaking point. Translated and with an Introduction by the celebrated historian and food writer Mark Kurlansky, The Belly of Paris offers fascinating perspectives on the French capital during the Second Empire--and, of course, tantalizing descriptions of its sumptuous repasts.From the Trade Paperback edition.

This new volume brings together, for the first time, all the poems Carl Rakosi wrote as an "Objectivist," together with his other poems of the 1920s and 1930s, printed in their original versions. The purpose of this current volume is to provide, as far as possible, a reliable account of what Rakosi wrote in the 1920s and 1930s. Working with Rakosi, Andrew Crozier has produced a carefully edited volume that will point up the innovativeness and talent of Rakosi's early writing.

Begun on March 8, 1958, this never-before published document takes the reader through one of the richest literary periods of the great American poet's life, from the time of his first publication, The Hotel Wentley Poems, until 1960, the period he lived in San Francisco and participated in what now is described as the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance. Uncovered in his personal papers, 707 Scott Street represents the poet at the height of his powers, and in this important work he alternates between the personal and the general, between prose observations and diaristic entries ("Sur-real is the only way to endure the real we find heaped up in our cities.") and some of the very best of his poetic lyrics. In fact, 707 Scott Street might be best described as a series of poems in the form of a journal, which, given Wieners' belief in living as a form of poetry itself, should come as no surprise to his readers.

Defoe, Leslie Scalapino's new fiction, is an epic where images of battle become mediations, an epic wherein events flap in silence as the narrative moves toward a place where the reader and text become one. The images of this fiction don't resemble events, but are new occurences in time and space. In Part I, Waking Life, the heroine, in love with James Dean, discovers herself in a desert pocked with fires in which the "henna man"a drug dealer - is being carried in a white cocoon. And throughout Scalapino's work the reader is taken into a world where the written word creates "an event retrieved from so far back that it is separated from its memory."

First published in 1977, Selected Declarations of Dependence has, like all the books by Harry Mathews, grown in reputation over the years of its unavailability. Sun & Moon Press now returns this remarkable text to print with a new introduction and the original Alex Katz illustrations. Selected Declarations of Dependence is based on a set of forty-six familiar proverbs, used and abused in various ways. The proverbs provide the entire vocabulary of the opening story, "Their Words, For You." In the section called "Perverbs and Paraphrases," Mathews explores the narrative implications of the crossed proverb or "perverb," in which two regular proverbs are mixed ("A rolling stone leads to Rome."). The remaining uses of proverbs and perverbs and the "Sorites" - which bows to Lewis Carroll's demonstration of the form - all produce an hilarious text of familiar quotations gone amuck and reveal Mathews' involvement with the Oulipo.

Poetry of the surreal. In The Person, she writes: "Let's get isolated / The temporal is dread / Is there a name / for the imploding series / consciousness of consciousness / Realism and depth perception / The audacious science of the thought / of poetry / Person / holding picture of / person holding picture of ... / Anxiety in space."

One of the most noted of French poets writing today, Henri Deluy explores the various aspects of love in this major collection of poetry, first published in French in 1994. The love of love, of gestures, of smells, of the activities of the body, of the taste of food and alcohol, of the sea, of the ebb and flow of politics, of voluptuousness itself - these and others serve as subjects for Deluy's greatest loves: the love of writing, of the order and disorders of poetry, of the flavor of words. Carnal Love represents both a sensual and intellectual passion for the living and the dead. English-language readers will discover in the first translation of this great French poet a truly original voice that encompasses the ordinary and the unusual, the banal and the magical simultaneously.