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Poet, diplomat, and literary critic George Seferis (1900-1971) won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1963. He is known to most readers as a myth-loving modernist. Book of Exercises II - a multi-genre volume, containing political, satiric, erotic, panegyric, and calligraphic poems drawn from the poet''s diaries between 1931 to 1971 - opens up a hitherto unknown Seferis to English-language readers, offering a closer look at his creative process, opinions, and personal life.

The Escapades builds on the Greek myth of a woman transformed into a horse by the obscure machinations of the Fates to tell the story of a human soul, both man and woman, that wanders among animals and children, haunted by the loss of its name, body, and voice. Agniau''s eminently humane surrealism articulates questions of profound importance: the place of silence and speech, absence and love, in a troubled world.

Jazra Khaleed''s poetry is electrifying, an unapologetic indictment of the wrongs faced by immigrants, by a rudderless young European generation, by leftist activists in a Greece and a Europe blighted by neoliberal policies of deregulation and privatization. Born in Chechnya in 1979, Khaleed is a poet who seems very Greek and not Greek at all; his language is sharp, refined, and controlled, with elegant rhythms and contemporary street speech that often has an undertow of a sophisticated language with moments of Byzantine and New Testament Greek. In his poetry there is a power, erudition, and control that Greek readers have trouble equating with a man named Jazra. The poems are always political, vehement, written at times from a very personal perspective, and at others from that of an objective outsider. It is a poetry that tears the untroubled reader back to a reality that may well be dangerous.

Swedish poet Judith Kiros''s widely-acclaimed debut stretches boundaries of genre, race, and gender in an alternative production of Shakespeare''s Othello that sidesteps black death for a multitude of futures. Taking a cue from Derek Walcott''s Omeros, Kiros employs metric verve and critical bite to add to Shakespeare a wide range of historical and contemporary works, producing a meditation on blackness that sets up a new reflective surface at every turn.

Mansour''s late poems chart constellations of desire, femininity, and dream. Considered by Andre Breton to be the preeminent Surrealist of the post-war period, Mansour brings this masculine movement into a feminine realm never-before-imagined. She insists on a forgotten or perhaps vehemently denied eventuality of women''s equality: their ability to do harm, to be violent: ''Why tear fire from the impalpable sky / When it already grows and smolders in me / Why throw your glove into the crowd / Tomorrow is a livid stump.'' In the Glittering Maw is poet C. Francis Fisher''s first published translation and includes a preface by eminent Surrealism scholar Mary Ann Caws.

The first English-language collection of Oscar Garcia Sierra, one of Spain''s most relevant young authors, performs and interrogates the desires and disillusionments of millennial culture. Garcia Sierra, one of the central figures of the Spanish young literature movement, constructs bold, strange, uncomfortable poems from everyday life, touching on mental illness, drugs, and heartbreak. His work appears in the alt-lit journal New Wave Vomit, the Tumblr Ciudades Esqueleto, Playground and Revista tn, among others. His first novel, Facendera, has brought him broad critical acclaim in Spain. Houston, I''m the Problem, a selection from his first poetry collection topped off with more recent poems, is the first of his books to appear in English translation.

Gansel opens this meditative volume of 53 prose poems with an epigraph from Gaston Bachelard: ''against all odds, the house invites us to say: I will be a citizen of the world despite the world.'' In these war-torn days of refugees fleeing to Europe, Gansel strives to describe what we have in common, creating a crossroads of people, places, and languages she has loved. For Gansel, a poet rebuilding her ''soul house,'' every word is a building block. At the same time that she welcomes the stranger to her lost house, poetry is her weapon - ''these migrant poems from all languages, these smuggled words that no border can stop'' - with which to fight persecution and exile. Sophie Ehrsam wrote, ''The ''soul house'' is anything that harbors a glimmer, a hope, including an open door or an outstretched hand.''

In her debut English-language collection, contemporary Greek poet Dimitra Kotoula takes on contemporary Greek society in challenging lyrical forms.IN THE SLOW HORIZON THAT BREATHES, a selection from her first three books, published between 2004 - 2022, Kotoula--a poet born after the military Junta--engages modern Greek struggles, including troubled relationships, the financial crisis, motherhood, and the act of writing. Translated by Maria Nazos in close collaboration with the author, and introduced by A.E. Stallings, this volume presents to English readers Kotoula's masterful transformation of private demons into a public resonance."These are poems that shimmer as they transform tragic, ironic histories and alienating religious doctrines into lyrical lines of immediate physical and visceral intensity. Kotoula's voice embraces an autonomous selfhood based on the female bodily experience which like seasonal landscapes can be both breathtaking and discordant: 'I want you to feel this blue / color of loneliness and uncertainty / and nothing else / while the air and earth inflame / a sudden blooming.' Maria Nazos brings her mastery as poet and translator to render Kotoula's irrepressible spirit on the page. We can be grateful for this collaboration for turning the rubble of contemporary life into something beautiful and lasting."--Dzvinia Orlowsky"Kotoula subtly and masterfully transforms ... private demons into a public resonance."--A.E. Stallings, The Poetry Review"Writing in dialogue with the twentieth-century poets of ancient myth (George Seferis and Angelos Sikelianos among them), Dimitra Kotoula brings fresh language and a feminine touch to familiar themes."--Karen Van Dyck, introduction to Austerity Measures (NYRB, 2016)Poetry. Women's Studies.

The lyrical, imaginatively-crafted debut collection by one of Germany's most important contemporary poets explores the "shifting of the mouth" toward the other, toward translation, toward a reckoning with historical silences.In KOCHANIE, TODAY I BOUGHT BREAD, Uljana Wolf crosses borders from East Germany into Poland, from fairy tales to the tallying of land torn by fateful past, from women's voices "hibernating in documents," to Lavinia's spilling forth of red language. Hailed by critics for its "brief strokes that open up a wide historical space in which political doom is still present," this book is a testament that the cartography we inherit is equal parts limit and dare. Wolf's debut collection won the Peter Huchel Prize in 2006--she was its youngest recipient. Nearly 20 years later, this bilingual edition--featuring a new introduction by Valzhyna Mort and Greg Nissan's superbly-tuned translation--invites English-language readers into the "guest room" of poetry."Uljana Wolf's first book begins with pain, a hospital, with a daughter who rebels against the controlling word of the fathers. But it goes farther. Its mouth shifts, playfully inventive, though with a dark undertone of Polish-German history, to find bread in language. Then even a mattress becomes translatable and everything connects 'in this border trade / on my tongue.'"--Rosmarie Waldrop"Nissan's translations skillfully keep pace with Wolf's brilliant word- and worldsmithery."--Susan Bernofsky"The persistent word/sonic plays in KOCHANIE, TODAY I BOUGHT BREAD, brilliantly re-rendered by Greg Nissan, are Uljana Wolf's defiance--'my defiance is my instrument'--against Germany's fascist history. The multiplicity of 'mouths' and 'daughters' topple 'sir father herr father, ' generating linguistic displacement, hence subverting power and borders. Wolf's language of defiance is a form of 'linguistic hospitality, ' to borrow Paul Ricoeur's term. She simultaneously welcomes and deforms 'our father's embroidered word.'"--Don Mee Choi"The child works tirelessly with language. Why is this ability lost to us? Why do we avoid foreign languages except when we can abuse them as proof of achievement? Uljana Wolf's approach to languages is extremely sympathetic, liberating, and stimulating. ... When she connects words with elegant lines, crossing the boundaries between languages, an unexpected structure appears as poetry. This is comparable to constellations: Between the individual stars lies a distance of millions of light years, but because their radiation reaches our presence at the same time, we can recognize an image."--Yoko Tawada, Erlanger Prize Citation (2015)"One of Germany's most respected and original poets, Uljana Wolf is also a masterful writer of prose." --Alexander Wells, Exberliner"All in all, Wolf's poetry and Nissan's translation offer powerful commentary on the present and the past, making use not only of the words themselves, but also the spaces around and in-between them, on the page and beyond."--Anna Rumsby, AsymptotePoetry.

The elusive, distant, almost disembodied voice of Korean poet Seo Jung Hak's English-language debut examines interiorities that seem familiar, yet whose ordinariness rises to the level of the uncanny.Inspired by the commodification of arts, emotions, and ideologies, these poems--written over a span of 18 years from 1999 to 2017--parody the very act of writing amid worn-out rhetorical tropes, in a tone that is at times sinisterly witty and at others ominously blithe. "Seo Jung Hak's poetry feigns to visualize the present through an extremely low pulse rate. Then the farthermost outside intervenes--the illustrated world becomes distorted; the multiplicity of poetic composition intervenes. That's when the pulse of his poetry explodes. The gravity shatters. For what? For hot love and infinite freedom. Thus his poetry deviates from the gravity at every moment to remain a documentation of one who has left."--Kim Hyesoon"The prose poems of Seo Jung Hak, remade by Megan Sungyoon, depict the every-day existential absurdity of mid-level managerial work under South Korea's globalized capitalism. Every consumption, task, plan falls flat as a 'paper box.' (Seo's 'paper box' is not unlike Kim Hyesoon's 'pinkbox'--they both suffer from predetermined disposability.) The poems can be read as flat fables about the fate of production, growth, freedom, desire, and language. Seo's mocking tone is irresistible."--Don Mee Choi"In the absurdist, 'instant' fables of THE CHEAPEST FRANCE IN TOWN, Seo Jung Hak takes on a world of disposability, documenting the dizzying experience of having a body amidst all these textures, surfaces and ingredients. Megan Sungyoon's remarkable translation brings into English the strange, nuanced intersection of numbness, repulsion, confusion, and even joy."--Johannes GöranssonPoetry. Hybrid. Asian & Asian American Studies.

"A selection from the legendary French poet Paul Verlaine's first four books-Saturnine Poems (1866), Wild Parties (1869), The Good Song (1870), and Wordless Romances (1874)--translated with irreverence and musicality by Keith Waldrop and K.A. Hays"--

"One of the most influential, if rarely seen, visual poetry books of the post-war avant-garde, Pomerand's Lettrist masterwork elaborates a psychogeographic story of the bohemian Parisian neighborhood of Saint-Germain-des-Prâes through punning prose-poems and dazzling, rebus-like 'metagraphics' on facing pages"--Back cover.

The first English-language collection of Greek Modernist George Sarantaris, described by Nobel Laureate Odysseus Elytis as "the greatest poet of the Generation of '30," whose laconic lyric poetry oscillates between the philosophical and the erotic.Sarantaris' lucid poems, with their epigrammatic simplicity, recall the ancient Greek poetic tradition while drawing on the French and Italian influences of his time. Louka's translation conveys the freshness of Sarantaris's aphoristic style, metaphorical wit, and philosophical musings. In their condensed precision and attention to landscape, Sarantaris's poems may remind English-language readers of his American contemporary Lorine Niedecker and others in the Objectivist circle."In his brief lifetime, Sarantaris produced poems of exceptional force and beauty. These are verses that ache, that unsettle, that thrum with vitality and precision. Pria Louka, in her graceful, finely-wrought translations, has reproduced the essential purity and interiority of Sarantaris' poems, the same ambiguity and lightness of touch. I will treasure this bilingual volume, and I will urge it upon lovers of poetry everywhere."-- Jhumpa Lahiri"Although the poems in ABYSS AND SONG seem evanescent, almost wispy in their brevity, these fleeting lyrics convey a powerful and universal longing. In this way, Sarantaris's poems function as fragments of a larger, still unfinished poetry project that it is up to each reader to savor and to complete."-- Rachel Hadas"A Sarantaris poem--a product of the subtlest kind of subtraction--is often both epigram and epitaph, aspiring to song while inscribing its own reticence ... Pria Louka's fine translations find ways to convey the oracular qualities of this mysterious poet while retaining the urgency of his acts of abbreviation."-- Christopher Bakken"Through this elegant and comprehensive selection of the poems of George Sarantaris, Pria Louka helps introduce a major twentieth-century Greek poet to readers of English. So poised and exquisite are these translations that they could easily appear on their own, without the Greek original."-- Michael Moore"In the best of these poems, the philosopher and the lyricist work together in a creative symbiosis that produces poetry that concerns itself with the concrete, experiential ramifications of a universal condition. Louka's translations convey both sides of Sarantaris' writing elegantly; her translations read like good poetry in their own right."-- Daniel Barbiero, Arteidolia"The title of this selection, ABYSS AND SONG, taken from the first line of the poem "Anxiety," is a tribute to the dual nature of the philosopher-poet, who oscillated between the "abyss" of contemplation and the "song" of poetry."-- Pria Louka, Caesura"Sarantaris's poems possess an emotional timelessness, a linguistic legacy, and a philosophical sensuality."-- Nicole Yurcaba, Tupelo Quarterly "In the best of these poems, the philosopher and the lyricist work together in a creative symbiosis that produces poetry that concerns itself with the concrete, experiential ramifications of a universal condition."--Daniel BarbieroPoetry. Nature.