A spiritual pilgrim is led by Virgil through the nine circles of Hell, in a translation of the classic epic poem about the three realms of the Christian afterlife.

The Inferno of Dante: A New Verse Translation by Robert Pinsky (FSG Audio)

Literature & Fiction

HEANEY, SEAMUS

Glück, Louise

BIDART, Frank

PINSKY, Robert

DANTE, ALIGHIERI

Poetry

Penguin Audio

The Book of the Body

United States

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

WINNER OF THE 2018 PULITZER PRIZE IN POETRY WINNER OF THE 2017 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY The collected works of one of contemporary poetry’s most original voices
Gathered together, the poems of Frank Bidart perform one of the most remarkable transmutations of the body into language in contemporary literature. His pages represent the human voice in all its extreme registers, whether it’s that of the child-murderer Herbert White, the obsessive anorexic Ellen West, the tormented genius Vaslav Nijinsky, or the poet’s own. And in that embodiment is a transgressive empathy, one that recognizes our wild appetites, the monsters, the misfits, the misunderstood among us and inside us. Few writers have so willingly ventured to the dark places of the human psyche and allowed themselves to be stripped bare on the page with such candor and vulnerability. Over the past half century, Bidart has done nothing less than invent a poetics commensurate with the chaos and appetites of our experience.
Half-light encompasses all of Bidart’s previous books, and also includes a new collection, Thirst, in which the poet austerely surveys his life, laying it plain for us before venturing into something new and unknown. Here Bidart finds himself a “Creature coterminous with thirst,” still longing, still searching in himself, one of the “queers of the universe.” 
Visionary and revelatory, intimate and unguarded, Bidart’s Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2017 are a radical confrontation with human nature, a conflict eternally renewed and reframed, restless line by restless line.

Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2016

Poems contemplate the art of writing, Eros, the desolations of history, and the illusion of will

Desire

Farrar. Straus & Giroux

Metaphysical Dog: Poems

National Book Critics Circle Award Winner A National Book Award Finalist
 A vital, searching new collection from one of finest American poets at work today
In "Those Nights," Frank Bidart writes: "We who could get / somewhere through / words through / sex could not." Words and sex, art and flesh: In Metaphysical Dog, Bidart explores their nexus. The result stands among this deeply adventurous poet's most powerful and achieved work, an emotionally naked, fearlessly candid journey through many of the central axes, the central conflicts, of his life, and ours. Near the end of the book, Bidart writes: In adolescence, you thought your work ancient work: to decipher at last human beings' relation to God. Decipher love. To make what was once whole whole again: or to see why it never should have been thought whole. This "ancient work" reflects what the poet sees as fundamental in human feeling, what psychologists and mystics have called the "hunger for the Absolute"―a hunger as fundamental as any physical hunger. This hunger must confront the elusiveness of the Absolute, our self-deluding, failed glimpses of it. The third section of the book is titled "History is a series of failed revelations." The result is one of the most fascinating and ambitious books of poetry in many years. 
One of Publishers Weekly's Best Poetry Books of 2013 A New York Times Notable Book of 2013 An NPR Best Book of 2013

History & Criticism

In the Western Night: Collected Poems, 1965-1990

In the Western Night brings together in one volume all of the poems to date, including many previously unpublished poems, of one of the most exciting and gifted poets writing today.

Star Dust: Poems

In 2002, Frank Bidart published a sequence of poems, Music Like Dirt, the first chapbook ever to be a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. From the beginning, he had conceived this sequence as the opening movement in a larger structure--now, with Star Dust, finally complete. Throughout his work, Bidart has been uniquely alert to the dramatic possibilities of violence; in this, and in his sense of theater, he resembles the great Jacobean dramatists. It is no accident that Webster's plays echo in "The Third Hour of the Night," the brilliant long poem that dominates the second half of Star Dust. Bidart locates in Benvenuto Cellini the speaker truest to his own vision. Who better to speak of the drive to create, not as reverie or pleasure or afterthought, but as task and burden, thwarted by the world? In its scale, sonorities, extraordinary leaps, and juxtapositions, "The Third Hour of the Night" makes an astonishing counterbalance to the intense, spare lyrics that precede it. In this profound and unforgettable new book, the dream beyond desire (which now seems to represent human destiny) is rooted in the drive to create, a drive tormented at every stage by failure, as the temporal being fights for its survival by making an eternal life. Bidart is a poet of passionate originality, and Star Dust shows that the forms of this originality continue to deepen and change as he constantly renews his contract with the idea of truth. Star Dust is a 2005 National Book Award Finalist for Poetry.

Watching the Spring Festival: Poems

This is Frank Bidart’s first book of lyrics—his first book not dominated by long poems. Narrative elaboration becomes speed and song. Less embattled than earlier work, less actively violent, these new poems have, by conceding time’s finalities and triumphs, acquired a dark radiance unlike anything seen before in Bidart’s long career. Mortality—imminent, not theoretical—forces the self to question the relation between the actual life lived and what was once the promise of transformation. This plays out against a broad landscape. The book opens with Marilyn Monroe, followed by the glamour of the eighth-century Chinese imperial court (seen through the eyes of one of China’s greatest poets, Tu Fu). At the center of the book is an ambitious meditation on the Russian ballerina Ulanova, Giselle, and the nature of tragedy. All this gives new dimension and poignance to Bidart’s recurring preoccupation with the human need to leave behind some record or emblem, a made thing that stands, in the face of death, for the possibilities of art. Bidart, winner of the 2007 Bollingen Prize in American Poetry, is widely acknowledged as one of the significant poets of his time. This is perhaps his most accessible, mysterious, and austerely beautiful book.

Superb copy, clean and bright inside and out. Back cover has one-half inch cut in spine area

Politics & Social Sciences

WILSON, EDMUND

Philosophy

In the Western Night brings together in one volume all of the poems to date, including many previously unpublished poems, of one of the most exciting and gifted poets writing today.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by BIDART, Frank. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by BIDART, Frank

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by BIDART, Frank. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Inferno of Dante: A New Verse Translation by Robert Pinsky (FSG Audio)

The Book of the Body

Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2016

Desire

Metaphysical Dog: Poems

In the Western Night: Collected Poems, 1965-1990

Star Dust: Poems

Watching the Spring Festival: Poems

The Book of the Body

In the Western Night: Collected Poems, 1965-1990