Alexander Vvedensky: An Invitation for Me to Think

Download Alexander Vvedensky: An Invitation for Me to Think PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : New York Review of Books
ISBN 13 : 1590176308
Total Pages : 169 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (91 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Alexander Vvedensky: An Invitation for Me to Think by : Alexander Vvedensky

Download or read book Alexander Vvedensky: An Invitation for Me to Think written by Alexander Vvedensky and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2013-04-02 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Pussy Riot are Vvedensky's disciples and his heirs. Katya, Masha, and I are in jail but I don’t consider that we’ve been defeated.... According to the official report, Alexander Vvedensky died on December 20, 1941. We don’t know the cause, whether it was dysentery in the train after his arrest or a bullet from a guard. It was somewhere on the railway line between Voronezh and Kazan. His principle of ‘bad rhythm’ is our own. He wrote: ‘It happens that two rhythms will come into your head, a good one and a bad one and I choose the bad one. It will be the right one.’ ... It is believed that the OBERIU dissidents are dead, but they live on. They are persecuted but they do not die.” — Pussy Riot [Nadezhda Tolokonnikova’s closing statement at their trial in August 2012] “I raise[d] my hand against concepts,” wrote Alexander Vvedensky, “I enacted a poetic critique of reason.” This weirdly and wonderfully philosophical poet was born in 1904, grew up in the midst of war and revolution, and reached his artistic maturity as Stalin was twisting the meaning of words in grotesque and lethal ways. Vvedensky—with Daniil Kharms the major figure in the short–lived underground avant-garde group OBERIU (a neologism for “the union for real art”)—responded with a poetry that explodes stable meaning into shimmering streams of provocation and invention. A Vvedensky poem is like a crazy party full of theater, film, magic tricks, jugglery, and feasting. Curious characters appear and disappear, euphoria keeps company with despair, outrageous assertions lead to epic shouting matches, and perhaps it all breaks off with one lonely person singing a song. A Vvedensky poem doesn’t make a statement. It is an event. Vvedensky’s poetry was unpublishable during his lifetime—he made a living as a writer for children before dying under arrest in 1942—and he remains the least known of the great twentieth-century Russian poets. This is his first book to appear in English. The translations by Eugene Ostashevsky and Matvei Yankelevich, outstanding poets in their own right, are as astonishingly alert and alive as the originals.

Alexander Vvedensky: An Invitation for Me to Think

Download Alexander Vvedensky: An Invitation for Me to Think PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : New York Review of Books
ISBN 13 : 1590176456
Total Pages : 128 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (91 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Alexander Vvedensky: An Invitation for Me to Think by : Alexander Vvedensky

Download or read book Alexander Vvedensky: An Invitation for Me to Think written by Alexander Vvedensky and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2013-04-02 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Pussy Riot are Vvedensky's disciples and his heirs. Katya, Masha, and I are in jail but I don’t consider that we’ve been defeated.... According to the official report, Alexander Vvedensky died on December 20, 1941. We don’t know the cause, whether it was dysentery in the train after his arrest or a bullet from a guard. It was somewhere on the railway line between Voronezh and Kazan. His principle of ‘bad rhythm’ is our own. He wrote: ‘It happens that two rhythms will come into your head, a good one and a bad one and I choose the bad one. It will be the right one.’ ... It is believed that the OBERIU dissidents are dead, but they live on. They are persecuted but they do not die.” — Pussy Riot [Nadezhda Tolokonnikova’s closing statement at their trial in August 2012] “I raise[d] my hand against concepts,” wrote Alexander Vvedensky, “I enacted a poetic critique of reason.” This weirdly and wonderfully philosophical poet was born in 1904, grew up in the midst of war and revolution, and reached his artistic maturity as Stalin was twisting the meaning of words in grotesque and lethal ways. Vvedensky—with Daniil Kharms the major figure in the short-lived underground avant-garde group OBERIU (a neologism for “the union for real art”)—responded with a poetry that explodes stable meaning into shimmering streams of provocation and invention. A Vvedensky poem is like a crazy party full of theater, film, magic tricks, jugglery, and feasting. Curious characters appear and disappear, euphoria keeps company with despair, outrageous assertions lead to epic shouting matches, and perhaps it all breaks off with one lonely person singing a song. A Vvedensky poem doesn’t make a statement. It is an event. Vvedensky’s poetry was unpublishable during his lifetime—he made a living as a writer for children before dying under arrest in 1942—and he remains the least known of the great twentieth-century Russian poets. This is his first book to appear in English. The translations by Eugene Ostashevsky and Matvei Yankelevich, outstanding poets in their own right, are as astonishingly alert and alive as the originals.

A History of Russian Literature

Download A History of Russian Literature PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199663947
Total Pages : 976 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (996 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis A History of Russian Literature by : Andrew Kahn

Download or read book A History of Russian Literature written by Andrew Kahn and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 976 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Russia possesses one of the richest and most admired literatures of Europe, reaching back to the eleventh century. A History of Russian Literature provides a comprehensive account of Russian writing from its earliest origins in the monastic works of Kiev up to the present day, still rife with the creative experiments of post-Soviet literary life. The volume proceeds chronologically in five parts, extending from Kievan Rus' in the 11th century to the present day.The coverage strikes a balance between extensive overview and in-depth thematic focus. Parts are organized thematically in chapters, which a number of keywords that are important literary concepts that can serve as connecting motifs and 'case studies', in-depth discussions of writers, institutions, and texts that take the reader up close and. Visual material also underscores the interrelation of the word and image at a number of points, particularly significant in the medieval period and twentieth century. The History addresses major continuities and discontinuities in the history of Russian literature across all periods, and in particular bring out trans-historical features that contribute to the notion of a national literature. The volume's time-range has the merit of identifying from the early modern period a vital set of national stereotypes and popular folklore about boundaries, space, Holy Russia, and the charismatic king that offers culturally relevant material to later writers. This volume delivers a fresh view on a series of key questions about Russia's literary history, by providing new mappings of literary history and a narrative that pursues key concepts (rather more than individual authorial careers). This holistic narrative underscores the ways in which context and text are densely woven in Russian literature, and demonstrates that the most exciting way to understand the canon and the development of tradition is through a discussion of the interrelation of major and minor figures, historical events and literary politics, literary theory and literary innovation.

Dead Winter

Download Dead Winter PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781734456691
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (566 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Dead Winter by : Matvei Yankelevich

Download or read book Dead Winter written by Matvei Yankelevich and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New poetry collection by Matvei Yankelevich

Mimesis

Download Mimesis PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Verso Books
ISBN 13 : 180429490X
Total Pages : 198 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (42 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Mimesis by : Valery Podoroga

Download or read book Mimesis written by Valery Podoroga and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2024-07-02 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Russian Revolution was a literary as well as political upheaval. With a focus on the revolutionary works of Andrei Platonov and the futurist collective Oberiu, leading Russian literary thinker Valery Podoroga shows how profoundly the Soviet experiment overturned the traditional expectations of fiction and poetry. The production of this groundbreaking new work was inextricably interwoven with the political and historical debates of the time. This volume expands on Podoroga's critical exploration of the analytic anthropology of literature. Here he delves into the ways literature can be used in 'world-building', both in terms of what happens inside the narrative and how it reflects the external world. He explores the function of the work outside of its time: both as a means to project itself into the future and as a document of a former age. How are we to read the past through these works of the imagination? With an introductory essay from the author's daughter, Ioulia Podoroga.

The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi

Download The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : New York Review of Books
ISBN 13 : 1681370913
Total Pages : 144 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (813 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi by : Eugene Ostashevsky

Download or read book The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi written by Eugene Ostashevsky and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2017-03-14 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An original collection from one of the most active poets in contemporary literature. Winner of the 2019 International Poetry Prize from the City of Münster The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi is a poem-novel about the relationship between a pirate and a parrot who, after capturing a certain quantity of prizes, are shipwrecked on a deserted island, where they proceed to discuss whether they would have been able to communicate with people indigenous to the island, had there been any. Characterized by multilingual punning, humor puerile and set-theoretical, philosophical irony and narrative handicaps, Eugene Ostashevsky’s new large-scale project draws on sources as various as early modern texts about pirates and animal intelligence, old-school hip-hop, and game theory to pursue the themes of emigration, incomprehension, untranslatability, and the otherness of others.

Circling the Canon, Volume II

Download Circling the Canon, Volume II PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : University of New Mexico Press
ISBN 13 : 082636053X
Total Pages : 311 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (263 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Circling the Canon, Volume II by : Marjorie Perloff

Download or read book Circling the Canon, Volume II written by Marjorie Perloff and published by University of New Mexico Press. This book was released on 2019-11-15 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of our most important contemporary critics, Marjorie Perloff has been a widely published and influential reviewer, especially of poetry and poetics, for over fifty years. Circling the Canon, Volume II focuses on the second half of her prolific career, showcasing reviews from 1995 through her 2017 reconsiderations of Jonathan Culler’s theory of the lyric and William Empson’s classic Seven Types of Ambiguity. In this volume Perloff provides insight into the twenty-first-century literary landscape, from revaluations of its leading poets and translations of European poetry from Goethe to the Brazilian Noigandres group and interart studies and performance art. Key issues of the past few decades, such as the controversy over the role and function of poetry anthologies, receive extended treatment, and Perloff frequently voices a minority view, as in the case of the acclaimed British poet Philip Larkin.

OBERIU

Download OBERIU PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Northwestern University Press
ISBN 13 : 0810122936
Total Pages : 292 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (11 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis OBERIU by : Eugene Ostashevsky

Download or read book OBERIU written by Eugene Ostashevsky and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It was a movement so artfully anarchic, and so quickly suppressed, that readers only began to discover its strange and singular brilliance three decades after it was extinguished-and then only in samizdat and emigre publications.

The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry

Download The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Penguin UK
ISBN 13 : 0141972262
Total Pages : 448 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (419 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry by : Robert Chandler

Download or read book The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry written by Robert Chandler and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2015-02-26 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An enchanting collection of the very best of Russian poetry, edited by acclaimed translator Robert Chandler together with poets Boris Dralyuk and Irina Mashinski. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, poetry's pre-eminence in Russia was unchallenged, with Pushkin and his contemporaries ushering in the 'Golden Age' of Russian literature. Prose briefly gained the high ground in the second half of the nineteenth century, but poetry again became dominant in the 'Silver Age' (the early twentieth century), when belief in reason and progress yielded once more to a more magical view of the world. During the Soviet era, poetry became a dangerous, subversive activity; nevertheless, poets such as Osip Mandelstam and Anna Akhmatova continued to defy the censors. This anthology traces Russian poetry from its Golden Age to the modern era, including work by several great poets - Georgy Ivanov and Varlam Shalamov among them - in captivating modern translations by Robert Chandler and others. The volume also includes a general introduction, chronology and individual introductions to each poet. Robert Chandler is an acclaimed poet and translator. His many translations from Russian include works by Aleksandr Pushkin, Nikolay Leskov, Vasily Grossman and Andrey Platonov, while his anthologies of Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida and Russian Magic Tales are both published in Penguin Classics. Irina Mashinski is a bilingual poet and co-founder of the StoSvet literary project. Her most recent collection is 2013's Ophelia i masterok [Ophelia and the Trowel]. Boris Dralyuk is a Lecturer in Russian at the University of St Andrews and translator of many books from Russian, including, most recently, Isaac Babel's Red Cavalry (2014).

The Best American Poetry 2023

Download The Best American Poetry 2023 PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 1982186755
Total Pages : 224 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (821 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Best American Poetry 2023 by : David Lehman

Download or read book The Best American Poetry 2023 written by David Lehman and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2023-09-05 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Award-winning poet Elaine Equi selects the poems for the 2023 edition of The Best American Poetry, “a ‘best’ anthology that really lives up to its title” (Chicago Tribune). Since its debut in 1988, The Best American Poetry series has been “one of the mainstays of the poetry publication world” (Academy of American Poets). Each volume presents some of the year’s most striking and innovative poems, with comments from the poets themselves offering insight into their work. For The Best American Poetry 2023 guest editor Elaine Equi, whose own work is “deft, delicate [and] subversive” (August Kleinzahler), has made astute choices representing contemporary poetry at its most dynamic. The result is an exceptionally coherent vision of American poetry today. Including valuable introductory essays contributed by the series and guest editors, the 2023 volume is sure to capture the attention of both Best American Poetry loyalists and newcomers to the series.

Explodity

Download Explodity PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Getty Publications
ISBN 13 : 1606065084
Total Pages : 210 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (6 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Explodity by : Nancy Perloff

Download or read book Explodity written by Nancy Perloff and published by Getty Publications. This book was released on 2017-01-21 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The artists’ books made in Russia between 1910 and 1915 are like no others. Unique in their fusion of the verbal, visual, and sonic, these books are meant to be read, looked at, and listened to. Painters and poets—including Natalia Goncharova, Velimir Khlebnikov, Mikhail Larionov, Kazimir Malevich, and Vladimir Mayakovsky— collaborated to fabricate hand-lithographed books, for which they invented a new language called zaum (a neologism meaning “beyond the mind”), which was distinctive in its emphasis on “sound as such” and its rejection of definite logical meaning. At the heart of this volume are close analyses of two of the most significant and experimental futurist books: Mirskontsa (Worldbackwards) and Vzorval’ (Explodity). In addition, Nancy Perloff examines the profound differences between the Russian avant-garde and Western art movements, including futurism, and she uncovers a wide-ranging legacy in the midcentury global movement of sound and concrete poetry (the Brazilian Noigandres group, Ian Hamilton Finlay, and Henri Chopin), contemporary Western conceptual art, and the artist’s book. Sound recordings of zaum poems featured in the book are available at www.getty.edu.

The Fire Horse: Children's Poems by Vladimir Mayakovsky, Osip Mandelstam and Daniil Kharms

Download The Fire Horse: Children's Poems by Vladimir Mayakovsky, Osip Mandelstam and Daniil Kharms PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : New York Review of Books
ISBN 13 : 168137093X
Total Pages : 48 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (813 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Fire Horse: Children's Poems by Vladimir Mayakovsky, Osip Mandelstam and Daniil Kharms by : Eugene Ostashevsky

Download or read book The Fire Horse: Children's Poems by Vladimir Mayakovsky, Osip Mandelstam and Daniil Kharms written by Eugene Ostashevsky and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2017-03-14 with total page 48 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whimsical and revolutionary poems and art by some of Russia's foremost avant-garde writers and illustrators A boy wants a toy horse big enough to ride, but where can his father find it? Not in the stores, which means it’s got to be built from scratch. How? With the help of expert workers, from the carpenter to the painter, working together as one. And now the bold boy is ready to ride off in defense of the future! Two trams, Click and Zam, are cousins. Click goes out for a day on the tracks and before long he’s so tired he doesn’t know where he is or how to get back. All he knows is he’s got to find Zam. Click is looking for Zam and Zam is looking for Click, and though for a while it seems like nobody knows where to find Click, good and faithful Zam is not to be deterred. Peter’s a car, Vasco’s a steamboat, and Mikey’s a plane. They’re all running like mad and going great guns until, whoops, there’s a big old cow, just a plain old cow, standing in the road. What then? The early years of the Soviet Union were a golden age for children’s literature. The Fire Horse brings together three classics from the era in which some of Russia’s most celebrated poets, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Osip Mandelstam, and Daniil Kharms, teamed up with some of its finest artists, Lidia Popova, Boris Ender, and Vladimir Konashevich. Brilliantly translated by the poet Eugene Ostashevsky, this is poetry that is as whimsical and wonderful as it is revolutionary.

Endarkenment

Download Endarkenment PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Wesleyan University Press
ISBN 13 : 0819573930
Total Pages : 178 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (195 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Endarkenment by : Arkadii Dragomoshchenko

Download or read book Endarkenment written by Arkadii Dragomoshchenko and published by Wesleyan University Press. This book was released on 2014-01-03 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The poet Arkadii Dragomoshchenko made his debut in underground magazines in the late Soviet period, and developed an elliptic, figural style with affinities to Moscow metarealism, although he lived in what was then Leningrad. Endarkenment brings together revisions of selected translations by Lyn Hejinian and Elena Balashova from his previous American titles, long out of print, with translations of new work carried out by Genya Turovskaya, Bela Shayevich, Jacob Edmond, and Eugene Ostashevsky. This chronological arrangement of Dragomoshchenko’s writing represents the heights of his imaginative poetry and fragmentary lyricism from perestroika to the time of his death. His language—although “perpetually incomplete” and shifting in meaning—remains fresh and transformative, exhibiting its roots in Russian Modernism and its openness to the poet’s Language School contemporaries in the United States. The collection is a crucial English introduction to Dragomoshchenko’s work. It is also bilingual, with Russian texts that are otherwise hard to obtain. It also includes a foreword by Lyn Hejinian, an essay on how the poetry reads in Russian, a biography, and a list of publications. Check for the online reader’s companion at endarkenment.site.wesleyan.edu.

Zone

Download Zone PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : New York Review of Books
ISBN 13 : 1590179242
Total Pages : 289 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (91 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Zone by : Guillaume Apollinaire

Download or read book Zone written by Guillaume Apollinaire and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2015-11-24 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Zone is the fruit of poet-translator Ron Padgett’s fifty-year engagement with the work of France’s greatest modern poet. This bilingual edition of Apollinaire’s poetry represents the full range of his achievement from traditional lyric verse to the pathbreaking visual poems he called calligrams, from often-anthologized classics to hitherto-untranslated gems, from poems of cosmic breadth to a poem about his shoes. Including an introduction by the distinguished scholar Peter Read, helpful endnotes, a preface, and an annotated bibliography by Padgett, this new edition of Apollinaire stands out not only for its compact and judicious selection of the essential poems but also as the work of an important American poet. The Washington Post has said, “No praise can be too high for Ron Padgett’s translations.”

Silvina Ocampo

Download Silvina Ocampo PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : New York Review of Books
ISBN 13 : 159017805X
Total Pages : 177 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (91 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Silvina Ocampo by : Silvina Ocampo

Download or read book Silvina Ocampo written by Silvina Ocampo and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2015-01-27 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Silvina Ocampo possessed her own special enchantment as a poet, and only now is her extraordinary poetic achievement becoming more widely recognized beyond Latin America. Remarkably, this is the first collection of Ocampo’s poetry to appear in English. From her early sonnets on the native Argentine landscape, to her meditations on love’s travails, to her explorations of the kinship between plant and animal realms, to her clairvoyant inquiries into history and myth and memory, readers will find the full range of Ocampo’s “metaphysical lyricism” (The Independent) represented in this groundbreaking edition.

Say Something Back & Time Lived, Without Its Flow

Download Say Something Back & Time Lived, Without Its Flow PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : New York Review of Books
ISBN 13 : 1681373998
Total Pages : 161 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (813 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Say Something Back & Time Lived, Without Its Flow by : Denise Riley

Download or read book Say Something Back & Time Lived, Without Its Flow written by Denise Riley and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2020-02-11 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A moving meditation on grief and motherhood by one of Britain's most celebrated poets. The British poet Denise Riley is one of the finest and most individual writers at work in English today. With her striking musical gifts, she is as happy in traditional forms as experimental, and though her poetry has a kinship to that of the New York School, at heart she is unaligned with any tribe. A distinguished philosopher and feminist theorist as well as a poet, Riley has produced a body of work that is both intellectually uncompromising and emotionally open. This book, her first collection of poems to appear with an American press, includes Riley’s widely acclaimed recent volume Say Something Back, a lyric meditation on bereavement composed, as she has written, “in imagined solidarity with the endless others whose adult children have died, often in far worse circumstances.” Riley’s new prose work, Time Lived, Without Its Flow, returns to the subject of grief, just as grief returns in memory to be continually relived.

Medusa Beach

Download Medusa Beach PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : New York Review of Books
ISBN 13 : 1681374587
Total Pages : 201 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (813 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Medusa Beach by : Melissa Monroe

Download or read book Medusa Beach written by Melissa Monroe and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2020-09-08 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new collection from one of the most exciting voices in American poetry. For many years, Melissa Monroe has been assembling one of the most distinctive bodies of work in contemporary American poetry, drawing on all different kinds of writing, from technical manuals to books of spells to dictionaries of slang, to explore the many ways—poetry is, after all, one of them—in which we human beings seek to know and control the elusive realities of the world around and within us. Her subject is both the strangeness of things and the strangeness of the things we think, and she has an unsurpassed eye for the wilderness between them that we inhabit. The poems collected in Medusa Beach include “Planetogenesis,” recording the life of an imaginary planet; “Whiz Mob,” a sequence of haikus composed in the criminal argot of 1940s America; “Frequently Asked Questions About Spirit Photography”; and the title poem, which interweaves an account of the life and thought of the great German philosopher and marine biologist Ernst Haeckel with a meditation on the many historical and natural historical avatars of the figure of Medusa. As formally adventurous as they are rigorous, disconcertingly comic, and deeply strange, the poems in Medusa Beach are the work of a true American original.