Arthur Sze

Sze, in drawing connections between the pastoral and the catastrophic, speaks to a contemporary condition in which we are constantly fragmented and made whole again as we are presented with a saturation of narratives. In his scenes of the quotidian, musings on life and death, and traversals between the natural and the artificial, Sze opens us to multitudinous lines of sight.

Sight Lines

Compass Rose

The ginkgo light

Arthur Sze incorporates history and science, Native American and Asian perspectives, into a transformative vision.

The Ginkgo Light

Arthur Sze approaches translation of Chinese poetry as an award-winning poet who was raised in a bilingual setting. Here Sze has gathered over 70 poems by poets who have had a profound effect on Chinese culture, American poetics, and Sze’s own maturation as an artist. Silk Dragon features poets who have become literary icons to generations of Chinese readers and scholars; included are the poems of the great, rarely translated female poet Li Ching Chao, and the remorseful exile poems of Su Tung-p’o. Sze’s essay on the methods and processes involved in translating ideogrammic poetry is illuminating. This book will prove a necessary and insightful addition to the library of any reader of poetry in translation.

Translations from the Chinese

Silk Dragon

In Quipu, Arthur Sze’s eighth book of poetry, he writes with imaginative rigor and urgency poems that move across cultures and time, from elegy to ode, to find a precarious splendor. “Quipu” was a tactile recording device for the pre-literate Inca, an assemblage of colored knots on cords. Sze utilizes quipu as a central metaphor, knotting and stringing luminous poems that each have an essential place and integrity, each contributing to the recurrent “knotting” in the book. Sze’s language is taut and startling, and what appears stable may actually be volatile. In Quipu, Sze harnesses the particulars of our lives and spins them into something enduring. He makes us envision the terrors and marvels of our contemporary world in this collection of crucial poems of our time.

Quipu

Archipelago was the winner of the 1996 American Book Award in Poetry. By turns spiritual and creative, meditative and active, Archipelago draws upon both Buddhist and Native American art and culture and is inspired by the Zen garden at Ryōan-ji. The fifteen poems, like stones set in a sea of raked gravel, are seen only within the context of a larger interdependence.

Poems

Archipelago

Like wind on a lake, Arthur Sze’s twelfth book of poetry, Into the Hush, extends a language that ripples and stills, widens and deepens. Through an earned and profound simplicity, these poems move with imaginative power and emotional force and gather a startling array of contrasts—from wildfires to a sprig of sunrise, from gunshots to a spirit evoked by swaying candles—to address the challenges of our nuclear age. Here, poems shadow sonnets and appear as haibun and ekphrasis, pantoum and segmented zuihitsu. They borrow the voice of an eraser and the voice of a jaguar. Even the aspen leaves speak. Sze harnesses a range of innovative forms to respond to the challenges of climate change, exploring what it means to live on an endangered planet. Written at the height of his powers, Into the Hush is a landmark publication. Sze enacts a thrilling journey from silence into sound, from emptiness into the rich panoply of existence.

Into the Hush

2015 Pulitzer Prize finalist "Compass Rose [is] a collection in which the poet uses capacious intelligence and lyrical power to offer a dazzling picture of our inter-connected world."—Pulitzer Prize finalist announcement [Sze] brings together disparate realms of experience—astronomy, botany, anthropology, Taoism—and observes their correspondences with an exuberant attentiveness."—The New Yorker A child playing a game, tea leaves resting in a bowl, an abandoned dog, a foot sticking out from a funeral pyre, an Afghan farmer pausing as mortars fire at the enemy: in Arthur Sze's tenth book, the world spins on many points of reference, unfolding with full sensuous detail. Arthur Sze is the author of The Ginkgo Light (2009), Quipu (2005), and The Redshifting Web (1998). He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

"This book is an overwhelming feast, a treasure, and more than enough proof that Sze is a major poet." —NPR National Book Award winner Arthur Sze is a master poet, and The Glass Constellation is a triumph spanning five decades, including ten poetry collections and twenty-six new poems. Sze began his career writing compressed, lyrical poems influenced by classical Chinese poetry; he later made a leap into powerful polysemous sequences, honing a distinct stylistic signature that harnesses luminous particulars, and is sharply focused, emotionally resonant, and structurally complex. Fusing elements of Chinese, Japanese, Native American, and various Western experimental traditions—employing startling juxtapositions that are always on target, deeply informed by concern for our endangered planet and troubled species—Arthur Sze presents experience in all its multiplicities, in singular book after book. This collection is an invitation to immerse in a visionary body of work, mapping the evolution of one of our finest American poets.

New and Collected Poems

The Glass Constellation

An insightful, accessible anthology of some of China's greatest poets.

Bruce Smith

Bianca Stone

Bruce Bond

Carolyn Finney

Colum McCann

Philip Metres

Kazim Ali

Diana Whitney

Ru Freeman

Jerome Rothenberg

Fred D'Aguiar

Jeff Talarigo

Sheryl St. Germain

William Heyen

Cynthia Hogue

Nin Andrews

Dominique Christina

Kristina Marie Darling

Remica Bingham-Risher

Shara McCallum

Shin Yu Pai

Mihaela Moscaliuc

Tanure Ojaide

Carol Moldaw

Michael Waters

Angelique Palmer

Rita Banerjee

Tim Seibles

Haleh Liza Gafori

Morowa Yejide

Christal Brown

Dante DiStefano

Claire Bateman

Nell-Lynn Perera

D. M. Aderibigbe

Christine Gelineau

H.L. Hix

Kaylynn Sullivan TwoTrees

Felice Belle

Alycia D. Jenkins

Diane Raptosh

Lynn Kozak

Steven Reese

Jeff Diteman

Damon Honeycutt

Rashidah Ismaili Abu-Baker

Sign & Breath is a new critical anthology that takes a different approach to exploring these questions: What is poetry? What defines voice? Featuring a range of contemporary artists, many of whom work across different mediums and genres, Sign & Breath introduces the reader to one page that sings in any genre – prose, fiction, poetry, spoken word, hybrid forms, and song – across diverse traditions. Rather than define poetry as a genre with conventions, traditions, codes, and modalities, this book features poetry as a faculty that thrums in all written and spoken art. Readers are introduced to a text followed by a discussion with the author about creating the piece, ties to creative lineage, and the definition of voice through their practice. This anthology contributes to the dialogue among genres which will reframe understanding of poetry as an aesthetic experience of language. With one page that sings in any genre, Sign & Breath presents a new, inclusive perspective on poetry while two questions remain: Do we have a clearer understanding of what defines poetry? Do we have a clearer understanding of voice?

Sign & Breath

Arthur Sze

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