Rosmarie Waldrop

Three pivotal works conceived by the avant-garde poet as a trilogy and now together in one volume at last. Rosmarie Waldrop's "Curves to the Apple" brings together three highly praised and influential titles: "The Reproduction of Profiles, Lawn of Excluded Middle," and "Reluctant Gravities," Though originally published separately, these prose poems have always been intended as a loose trilogy of thought and feeling--or of thought manifested as feeling. The author comments: "Just as the title "Curves to the Apple" combines the organic and geometry (not to mention myth and history of science) the poems navigate the conflicting, but inextricable claims of body and mind, especially the female body and feelings in a space of logic and physics. The poems could all be called dialogic, reaching out across a synaptic (sometimes humorous) gap to a possible 'you' (though it may be rhetorical, another point of view in the same mind). But while the 'I' dominates the first two volumes, the third gives both voices equal space and chance."

Curves to the Apple

These two novels explore the themes of physical and emotional exile and between-ness. In the first, the narrator writes to her sister, trying to come to terms with her ancestry and with what her parents did in Nazi Germany. The second is set in Mexico City and explores a web of disparate ideas.

And, A Form of Taking it All

The Hanky of Pippin's Daughter

The Reproduction of Profiles, Lawn of Excluded Middle, Reluctant Gravities

A Form of Taking it All

Letters between two sisters who grew up in Nazi Germany, explore their family history and assess their complicity with Nazism.

Lavish Absence is a comprehensive yet intimate introduction to the writing and thought of Edmund Jabès, a critical figure for 20th-century poetry and philosophy. It is also a welcome articulation of Rosmarie Waldrop's own poetics, which are among the most influential in contemporary American poetry. --Charles Bernstein.

Recalling and Rereading Edmond Jabès

Lavish Absence

Elizabeth Bishop

Louise Glück

Anne Sexton

Susan Howe

Lorine Niedecker

Sylvia Plath

Adrienne Rich

Marianne Moore

Hilda Doolittle

María Negroni

10 poetas norteamericanas del siglo XX ; semblanzas y traducciones

Una especie de fe

Paul Auster

Jean Frémon

Michael Palmer

John Ashbery

Poetry. Translation. Translated from the French by Norma Cole, Lydia Davis, Serge Gavronsky and Cole Swensen. The serial poems in DISTANT NOISE present spare scenes shot through with surprise and the kind of truth found only in disorientation. Emperors and students gaze across landscapes of uncertainty, and ordinary human interaction has become a game of stilted gestures and official regulations. "Sublime and compelling and like no other work that exists today--whether French, American or Chinese. Jean Fr‚mon is a wholly singular artist, a writer who lives in the radiant zone where poetry, philosophy and storytelling meet"--Paul Auster. Cover by Louise Bourgeois.

Distant Noise

Edmond Jabès

The late Edmond Jabes was a major voice in French poetry in the latter half of this century. An Egyptian Jew, he was haunted by the question of place and the loss of place in relation to writing. He focused on the space of the book, seeing it as the true space in which exile and the promised land meet in poetry and in question. Jabes's mode of expression has been variously described: a new and mysterious kind of literary work - as dazzling as it is difficult to define, cascading aphorisms, a theater of voices in a labyrinth of forms. The manner of his writing embodies the meaning of his writing. Jabes's book is a manifesto not only of his own poetry, but of the most advanced critical poetry written during this century, one in which he engages in dialogue with some of its outstanding philosophers (Blanchot, Levinas, and Derrida)

The Little Book of Unsuspected Subversion

A philosophical tour de force melding astrophysics and grief by the American maestra of the prose poem “If memory serves, it was five years ago that yours began to refuse,” Rosmarie Waldrop writes to her husband in The Nick of Time. “Does it feel like crossing from an open field into the woods, the sunlight suddenly switched off? Or like a roof without edge or frame, pushed sideways in time?” Ten years in the making, Waldrop’s phenomenally beautiful new collection explores the felt nature of existence as well as gravity and velocity, the second hemisphere of time, mortality and aging, language and immigration, a Chinese primer, the artist Hannah Höch, and dwarf stars. Of one sequence, “White Is a Color,” first published as a chapbook, the Irish poet Billy Mills wrote, “In what must be less than 1000 words, Waldrop says more about the human condition and how we explore it through words than most of us would manage in a thousand pages.” Love blooms in the cut, in the gap, in the nick between memory and thought, sentence and experience. Like the late work of Cézanne, Waldrop’s art has found a new way of seeing and thinking that “vibrates on multiple registers through endless, restless exploration” (citation for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize).

The Nick of Time

A philosophical verse masterpiece that melds astrophysics with art and grief by the American maestra of the prose poem.

The latest book of prose poems by one of America's premier philosophical poets. For the title of her newest collection of prose poems, Rosmarie Waldrop adopts a term"blindsight" used by the neuroscientist Antonio R. Damasio to describe a condition in which a person actually sees more than he or she is consciously aware. "This is one reason," explains Waldrop, "for using collage: joining my fragments to other people's fragments in a dialogue, a net relation that might catch a bit more of the 'world.'" The collectionthe author's fourth with New Directionsis divided into four thematic sections. The first, "H lderlin Hybrids," resonates against the German poet's twisted syntax, while using rhythmic punctuation in counterpoint to sense. "'As Were, '" says Waldrop, "began with looking at the secondary occupations of artistsfor example, Mallarme teaching English, Montaigne serving as mayor of Bordeauxbut this soon gave way to playing more generally with particular aspects of historical figures." The title section, "Blindsight," is most consistent in its use of collage, juxtaposing words and images to jolting, epiphanic effect. "Cornell Boxes," in contrast, has a formal unity, inspired by the constructions of Joseph Cornell, each prose poem "box" composed in a structure of fours: four paragraphs of four sentences each, with four footnotes.

Blindsight

"Dissatisfaction With Language" as Theme and as Impulse Towards Experiments in Twentieth Century Poetry

Against Language?

Or, What-you-may-find

The Relaxed Abalone

Incisive essays on modern poetry and translation by a noted poet, translator, and critic. As an immigrant to the United States from Germany, Rosmarie Waldrop has wrestled with the problems of language posed by the discrepancies between her native and adopted tongues, and the problems of translating from one to the other. Those discrepancies and disjunctions, instead of posing problems to be overcome, have become for Waldrop a generative force and the very foundation of her interests as a critic and poet. In this comprehensive collection of her essays, Waldrop addresses considerations central to her life’s work: typical genres and ways of countering the conventions of genre; how concrete poets have made syntax spatial rather than grammatical; and the move away from metaphor in poetry toward contiguity and metonymy. Three essays on translation struggle with the sources and targets of translation, of the degree of strangeness or foreignness a translator should allow into any English translation. Finally, other essays examine the two-way traffic between reading and writing, and Waldrop’s notion of reading as experience.

Dissonance (if you are interested)

An essential edition of a major avant-garde poet: "Waldrop compels us to seek out new superlatives" (Ben Lerner, Jacket)

Selected Poems

Gap Gardening

A new poetry collection of startling beauty and thought by a great American poet.

Driven to Abstraction

The first anthology to span the oeuvre of the late writer Edmond Jabès, including pieces previously unpublished in English.

Rosmarie Waldrop

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