The White Orchard: Selected Interviews, Essays, and Poems

Sze, Arthur

Biographies & Memoirs

Museum of New Mexico Press

Dazzled

Literature & Fiction

Classics

Floating Island Pub

River River (Lost Roads, 31)

Poetry

Lost Roads Pub

Willow Wind: Translations from the Chinese and Poems (English and Chinese Edition)

History & Criticism

Tooth of Time Books

Two Ravens

A comprehensive collection by one of the most intensely musical and visionary poets writing today.

The Redshifting Web: New & Selected Poems

Copper Canyon Press

Poetry. "Arthur Sze composes an elegant, quietly intense, very human, beautiful poetry, one that is remarkable for its commitment to metaphor and musical language. I consider him one of the foremost poets of his generation. He is wise, intelligent, a joy to be with and read" -Quincy Troupe.

Archipelago, Poems.

“Sze brings together disparate realms of experience—-astronomy, botany, anthropology, Taoism—and observes their correspondences with an exuberant attentiveness.”—The New Yorker
“Sze’s poems seem dazzled and haunted by patterns.”—The Washington Post
Quipu was a tactile recording device for the pre-literate Inca, an assemblage of colored knots on cords. In his eighth collection of poetry, Arthur Sze utilizes quipu as a unifying metaphor, knotting and stringing luminous poems that move across cultures and time, from elegy to ode, to create a precarious splendor.
Revelation never comes as a fern uncoiling a frond in mist; it comes when I trip on a root, slap a mosquito on my arm. We go on, but stop when gnats lift into a cloud as we stumble into a bunch of rose apples rotting on the ground.
Long admired for his poetic fusions of science, history, and anthropology, in Quipu, Sze’s lines and language are taut and mesmerizing, nouns can become verbs—“where is passion that orchids the body?”—and what appears solid and -stable may actually be fluid and volatile.
A point of exhaustion can become a point of renewal: it might happen as you observe a magpie on a branch, or when you tug at a knot and discover that a grief disentangles, dissolves into air. Renewal is not possible to a calligrapher who simultaneously draws characters with a brush in each hand; it occurs when the tip of a brush slips yet swerves into flame . . .
Arthur Sze is the author of eight books of poetry and a volume of translations. He is the recipient of an Asian American Literary Award, a Lannan Literary Award, and fellowships from the Witter Bynner Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He teaches at the Institute of American Indian Arts and lives in New Mexico.

Quipu

“Classically elegant.”—The New York Times Book Review
Sze's free verse emphasizes at once how difficult, and how necessary, it is for us to imagine our world as a system whose ecologies and societies require us to care for all their interdependent parts." —Publishers Weekly
“Sze’s list-laden sequences capture the world’s manifold facts one by one, then through discursive commentary exact from them a sense not only of aesthetic order but of universal cause and effect.”—Boston Review
"Sze...here captures the energy of life in overshadowed daily events....His poems mine everything from geography, history, and biology to philosophy and nature, interweaving them to create a complex and luminous poetic texture....His poetry is an experience of awakening and pleasure that all serious students of contemporary poetry should have." —Library Journal
"Whether incorporating nature, philosophy, history, or science, Sze's poems are expansive. They unfold like the time-slowed cinematic recording of a flower's blooming...Sze has a refreshingly original sensibility and style, and he approaches writing like a collagist by joining disparate elements into a cohesive whole." —Booklist
A temple near the hypocenter of the atomic blast at Hiroshima was disintegrated, but its ginkgo tree survived to bud and bloom. Arthur Sze extends this metaphor of survival and perseverance to transform the world’s factual darkness into precarious splendor. “Each hour teems,” Sze writes, as he ingeniously integrates the world’s miraculous and mundane—a woodpecker drilling a utility pole or a 1300-year-old lotus seed—into a moving, visionary journey.
Mayans charted Venus’s motion across the sky, poured chocolate into jars and interred them with the dead. A woman dips three bowls into hair’s fur glaze, places them in a kiln, anticipates removing them, red-hot, to a shelf to cool. When samba melodies have dissipated into air, when lights wrapped around a willow have vanished, what pattern of shifting lines leads to Duration?
Arthur Sze, one of America’s leading poets, is the author of nine books of poetry and translation. He is professor emeritus of creative writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts and just completed a term as Poet Laureate of Santa Fe, New Mexico.

The Ginkgo Light

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.

Compass Rose

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