The poems in this pocket companion to Zdanys' Collected Poems 1970-2020 were written between the summer of 1966 and the winter of 1969, when he was a high school student and a freshman in college. They mark the beginning of a number of continuing thematic commitments and explorations that have found differing voices, structures, and expressions over the past fifty years in his acclaimed literary work. They are a valuable and revealing look at the springboard of his poetic career.

Early Poems 1966-1969

Literature & Fiction

Zdanys, Jonas

Poetry

Black Spruce Press

Black Ice

Keys, Kerry Shawn

Midnight Café, by Susana Cuartas-Ordoñez, is a powerful gathering of lyrical poems in which the poet is both a participant and an observer - at the center and on the periphery - of a world shaped by love and by its sorrows and joys. These are epiphanic poems, chronicles that explore lost loves, and especially an ongoing love for the unnamed woman who broke the poet's heart. They peer through veils of the present and jolt us with memories of a painful and wistful past. These are raw and honest and intense poems, perceptions that reach out from a heart that wants to be wanted, to be welcomed and healed. Written in the cadences of slam and performance poetry, all splendidly managed, the poems of Midnight Café introduce an exciting and original new voice in contemporary American poetry.

Midnight Café

Cuartas-Ordoñez, Susana

This is the comprehensive translation into English of poems by Kornelijus Platelis, the most acclaimed contemporary Lithuanian poet and one of the most accomplished of contemporary European poets. The translations in this collection are by award-winning poet and translator Jonas Zdanys. They are the product of a thirty-five year friendship and literary collaboration that celebrates lyric moments of beauty and transcendence that can shine through two languages. Vivid and original, intense and resonant, these poems affirm for us all the insights that the literary imagination makes possible into human complexity, and they attest to the luminous role of art in shaping and defining the self as it seeks to affirm its place in an inconstant world. This is an important and essential book in world literature.

Alternating Masks: Selected Poems of Kornelijus Platelis

Platelis, Kornelijus

Alan Berecka's collection of "work" poetry moves toward an ethical, even existential conclusion - honest but not brow-beating or self-righteousness. The poems unmask the false values of our work-world. Berecka's voice is not that of a lazy, jerk-off kid, but a man, now in his sixties, who has played the game with ironic, rebellious effort, in the spirit of Camus' rebel hero, perhaps even approaching the societal-resistance of Melville's Bartleby. But Berecka writes with damn-fine humor, and his work is always graced with his self-effacing style and redeemed by his soul-affirming humanity. - Ken Hada, author of Contour Feathers

A Living is Not a Life: A Working Title

Berecka, Alan

When She Became You / Songs to Suzanne, by award-winning poet Michael Jennings, chronicles a love story, the light and the shadows, over most of a lifetime, from the passionate, surreal, goddess-like portraits of the opening "Where She Dances" section to the devastating dark dirges of the "Lost Hallways" sequence: a record of love as lived and a testament to the fact that both love and poetry exist at the intersection of the sacred and the profane. These are intimate and private lyrical exultations that affirm what is most valuable and most powerful in our shared expressions of what it means to be most fully human and deeply alive. They are the work of a magisterial poet at the pinnacle of his craft.

When She Became You / Songs to Suzanne

Jennings, Michael

United States

seasons at the Patch: for Kristijonas Donelaitis

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