This new bilingual edition (with German on facing pages) of Selected Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin, has the clarity of Richard Sieburth's translations, while representing, like Michael Hamburger, all the major forms and periods of Hölderlin's production. Thanks to this new translation, contemporary readers will be able to see Hölderlin's central position in the development of modern poetry, and why the later works are considered to be strangely prophetic of current modern and postmodern tendencies. Revealing the full poetic force of Holderlin's work, this translation demonstrates why he is considered one of the world's greatest poets (1770-1843), the foundational poet of European Romanticism, and an influence upon Nietzsche, Hegel, Rilke, and Heidegger. Included, as preface to the poems, is a comprehensive introduction by the translators.

Listen to Chernoff and Hoover...

Tyrone Williams's first book of poetry, titled C.C ., was published by Krupskaya in 2002. His poetry chapbooks include Musique Noir (Overhere Press, 2006), AAB (Slack Buddha), and Futures, Elections (Dos Madres Press, 2004). His poems have been published in magazines, including Chicago Review, Denver Quarterly, The Kenyon Review, Caliban, Colorado Review, and Xcp. And his poems have been anthologized in anthologies, including Rainbow Darkness: An Anthology of African American Poetry (Miami University Press, 2005) and Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present (Scribner, 2003). He received his Doctorate of English from Wayne State University. He teaches at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio. He was born and raised in Detroit, Michigan.

In On Spec , Tyrone Williams reveals that every act of communication is a speculation, and that the spectacles we must use to see and assess it--those  of our own particular condition and conditioning--are never without qualifying contour and coloration. Williams is a keen observer of the distortions of such lenses, as the titles of the two sections of this collection suggest-first is an "Eshuneutics" (interpretation purportedly infused with an Eshu's sensibility). But the trickster's eye can turn to mock even its own powers of analysis, as Williams deftly demonstrates by calling the second section "Pseudo-eshuneutics." While the issues that Williams confronts come directly from an attempt say what it might mean to understand aspects of the African American condition of diaspora in the United States, these poems also implicate and illuminate the speculative enterprise that we each venture into whenever we attempt to articulate what we see and what we believe about it. At once immediately readable, intensely meditative, and brilliantly braced with philosophical reference, these tours through our human need to speak, and to understand, travel beyond the boundaries that constrain most poetry collections. Poems, plays, plays upon the making of such genre distinctions, are only some of the locations one will visit in these pages.

Listen to Tyrone Williams...

Lyn Hejinian is a poet, essayist, and translator. Her groundbreaking book of poetry, My Life, published by Sun & Moon / Green Integer, has had five re-printings from 1980-2002. Her most recent books include A Border Comedy (Granary Books, 2001), Slowly and The Beginner (both published by Tuumba Press, 2002), and The Fatalist (Omnidawn, 2003). The University of California Press published a collection of her essays entitled The Language of Inquiry in 2000. In the spring of 2007, she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. She teaches in the English Department at the University of California, Berkeley.

Saga / Circus, by the esteemed poet Lyn Hejinian, brings us two distinctly different long poems in which the tropes of narrative and lyric-their feints and demands-stake claims amongst the actual characters presented. In this playful yet penetrating pair of poems, it is the character of Lyn Hejinian's thought meeting our character of thought that is one of the most exciting and most constant dramatic events of the book-the richly sensational & subversive crescendos register as both melodic and discordant soundtrack.

Listen to Lyn Hejinian....

Hank Lazer has published 12 books of poetry, most recently The New Spirit (Singing Horse, 2005), Elegies & Vacations (Salt, 2004), and Days (Lavender Ink, 2002). He has given poetry readings and talks in the United States, Canada, China, Spain, France, and the Canary Islands. Lazer's poetry has been nominated for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize and the 2004 Forward Prize. With Charles Bernstein, he edits the Modern and Contemporary Poetics Series for the University of Alabama Press. His two-volume collection of essays, Opposing Poetries, was published by Northwestern University Press (1996). For the past twelve years, his essays on innovative poetry, new modes of lyricism, and representations of spiritual experience have appeared in a variety of journals, including Facture, The Boston Review, Jacket, American Poetry Review, and Talisman. Hank Lazer is a Professor of English at the University of Alabama where he is also an administrator serving as Associate Provost for Academic Affairs.

This selected -- the first compilation of essays by Hank Lazer following his ground-breaking and much revered two volume Opposing Poetries -- offers twelve years of incisive writing at the intersection of two of the more contentiously debated topics in current letters. Drawing on poetic traditions as seemingly disparate as Language writing and Buddhist poetry, Lazer pursues a way of reading that is rich in the music and spirit of the word, attuning readers to the pleasures and range of possibilities for innovative poetry. In a very accessible writing style, and with flashes of brilliance, Lazer explores and identifies new approaches to the lyric and to the writing of spiritual experience in American poetry of the past one hundred years. In this book of essays, interviews, reflections, and more, Lazer focuses on two topics central to the poetry of our time: the changing nature of beauty in the lyric and the necessity of finding new ways of embodying spirituality. By bringing a wide range of perspectives to his readings -- from the jazz of Monk and Coltrane to the philosophy of Heidegger and Derrida -- Lazer's essays inspire readers to enter into a renewed and renewing relationship with poetry.

Listen to Hank Lazer....