Cynthia Zarin

From acclaimed poet and New Yorker writer Cynthia Zarin comes a deeply personal meditation on two cities, Venice and Rome—each a work of art, both a monument to the past—and on how love and loss shape places and spaces. Here we encounter a writer deeply engaged with narrative in situ—a traveler moving through beloved streets, sometimes accompanied, sometimes solo. With her, we see, anew, the Venice Biennale, the Lagoon, and San Michele, the island of the dead; the Piazza di Spagna, the Tiber, the view from the Gianicolo; the pigeons at San Marco and the parrots in the Doria Pamphili. As a poet first and foremost, Zarin’s attention to the smallest details, the loveliest gesture, brings Venice and Rome vividly to life for the reader. The sixteenth book in the expanding, renowned ekphrasis series, Two Cities creates space for these two historic cities to become characters themselves, their relationship to the writer as real as any love affair.

Two Cities

An Enlarged Heart, the exquisitely written prose debut from prize-winning poet Cynthia Zarin, is a poignantly understated exploration of the author’s experiences with love, work, and the surprise of time’s passage. In these intertwined episodes from her New York world and beyond, she charts the shifting and complicated parameters of contemporary life and family in writing that feels nearly fictional in its richness of scene, dialogue, and mood. The writer herself is the marvelously rueful character at the center of these tales, at first a bewildered young woman, navigating the terrain of new jobs and borrowed apartments and the rapidly fading New York of people like Mr. Ferri, the Upper East Side tailor (“a wren of a man with pins flashing in his teeth”). By the end, whether Zarin is writing about vanished restaurants, her decades-long love affair with her collection of coats, a newlywed journey to Italy, a child’s illness, Mary McCarthy’s file cabinet, or the inner life of the New Yorker staff she knew as a young woman, this history of the heart shows us how persistent the past is in returning to us with entirely new lessons, and that there are some truths not even a tailor can alter.

A Personal History

An Enlarged Heart

A Novel

Inverno

A selection of the dazzling work of one of the finest writers of her generation and winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, a poet of elegant restraint, emotional depth, and moral vision Beginning with several dozen new poems that have appeared in The New Yorker, among other publications, this volume is a tour through Zarin’s five exquisitely made collections, beginning with The Swordfish Tooth, published in 1989. Zarin, a poet in the line of Elizabeth Bishop, allows the reader to experience human truths through a poem's shape and music, bodied forth through intimate images—the turn in the stair, a snow globe, naked birch branches, a vase of flowers—and a propulsive syntax. From the clarity of childhood memory to the maze of marriage and divorce, from her own consciousness—shaping landscapes of New York, Cape Cod, and Rome, to the shifting tides of history and the troubled conscience of a nation, her subject matter encompasses all of a woman's life, with passion—its risks, satisfactions, and shattering immediacy—her first and truest subject.

New and Selected Poems

Next Day

With Orbit, prize-winning author Cynthia Zarin confirms her place as an indispensable American poet of our time. In this, her fifth collection, Zarin turns her lyric lens on the worlds within worlds we inhabit and how we navigate our shared predicament—the tables of our lives on which the news of the day is strewn: the president speaking to parishioners in Charleston, the ricochet of violence, near and far. Whether writing about hairpin turns in the stair of childhood, about the cat’s claw of anxiety, on the impending loss of a young friend, or how “love endures, give or take,” here is the poet who, in the title poem, “bartered forty summers for black pearls” and whose work is full of such wagers, embodied in playing cards, treble notes, snow globes, and balancing acts. Zarin reminds us that the atmosphere created by our experiences shapes and defines the orbit we move through. Along the way, she is both witness and, often indirectly, subject—“I do not know how to hold the beauty and sorrow of my life,” she writes. This book is an attempt at an answer.

Poems

Orbit

These electric poems are set in a Nabokovian landscape of memory in which real places, people, and things--the exploration of the Hudson River, Edwardian London, sunflowers, Chekhov, Harlem, decks of cards, the death of Solzhenitsyn, morpho butterflies--collide with the speaker's own protean tale of desire and loss.

The Ada Poems

Columbia University. Writing Division

New Age and Other Poems

The Swordfish Tooth

Dido, Peter, Lulu, and others exercise their senses, seeing a walking stick, hearing the ice cream man, yelling, "Daddy!" and dreaming in their sleep.

What Do You See when You Shut Your Eyes?

Small for his age, Wallace always wears a fireman's hat so he won't be lost in a crowd, but when his legs start growing out of proportion to his body, his mother is told by old Nanny Heppleweather that the hat must come off.

Wallace Hoskins, the Boy who Grew Down

Rose is frightened by the noises coming from the apartment upstairs, but then she and her mother pay a visit to the boy who lives there.

Rose and Sebastian

'Zarin's marvelous gift for linguistic play, her gentle humor and her sheer delight in imaginative stanza form and rhyme punctuate this collection and provide a relief that serves to sharpen the reflective edge of the serious poetry.' --Robert Hosmer, 'The Southern Review'

Fire Lyric

"A selection of the dazzling work of one of the finest writers of her generation and winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, a poet of elegant restraint, emotional depth, and moral vision. Beginning with several dozen new poems that have appeared in The New Yorker, among others, this volume is a tour through Zarin's five exquisitely made collections, beginning with The Swordfish Tooth, published in 1988. Zarin, a poet in the line of Elizabeth Bishop, allows the reader to experience human truths through a poem's shape and music, bodied forth through intimate images-the turn in the stair, a snow globe, naked birch branches, a vase of flowers-and a propulsive syntax. From the clarity of childhood memory to the maze of marriage and divorce, from her own consciousness-shaping landscapes of New York, Cape Cod, and Rome, to the shifting tides of history and the troubled conscience of a nation, her subject matter encompasses all of a woman's life, with passion-its risks, satisfactions, and shattering immediacy-her first and truest subject"--

New & Selected Poems

Always Albert hopes for rain. On rainy days Mrs. Crabtree takes him with her for taxi rides. So much better than walks. One day -- brilliantly sunny, for a surprise -- Albert hops a taxi alone. More than one taxi, actually. You will never guess where he goes!

Albert, the Dog Who Liked to Ride in Taxis

A collection of the stories about the lives of Christian saints.

Saints Among the Animals

In her third book, her first in eight years, Zarin turns her consummate art to fresh purposes. Taking up the subject of divorce and the splintering and re-forming of family that follows it, she makes her way through a time of guilt and sorrow in an oblique yet precise tone that is unique in contemporary poetry. Whether escorting a brood of children to the swimming pool in the ninth month of pregnancy or contemplating a parrot or a bruise on her knee, Zarin reveals beauty in the working-out of subtle statements of feeling -- as in these lines about figure skating in Harlem on Christmas Day: Folly tells the truth by what it's not -- one X equals a fall I'd not forgo. Are ice and fire the integers we've got?Skating backwards tells another story -- the risky star above the freezing town, a way to walk on water and not drown.Always attentive to the rash life of the heart, Zarin offers us a gorgeous, mature, and profoundly moving collection.

The Watercourse

A New York City writer shares episodes from her life that reflect the cyclical nature of the past and her relationships with a range of people and places, from an energetic tailor and a twice-married mom to literary co-workers and the patrons of vanishedrestaurants.

A dazzling story of obsessive love emerges in Cynthia Zarin’s luminous new book inspired and inhabited by the title character of Nabokov’s novel Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle, who was the lifelong love of her half brother, Van. These electric poems are set in a Nabokovian landscape of memory in which real places, people, and things—the exploration of the Hudson River, Edwardian London, sunflowers, Chekhov, Harlem, decks of cards, the death of Solzhenitsyn, morpho butterflies—collide with the speaker’s own protean tale of desire and loss. With a string of brilliant contemporary sonnets as its spine, the book is a headlong display of mastery and sorrow: in the opening poem, “Birch,” the poet writes “Abide with me, arrive / at its skinned branches, its arms pulled / from the sapling . . . the birch all elbows, taking us in.” But Zarin does not “Destroy and forget” as Nabokov’s witty, tender Ada would have her do; rather, as she writes in “Fugue: Pilgrim Valley,” “The past’s / clear colors make the future dim, Lethe’s / swale lined with willow twigs.” Like all enduring love poetry, these poems are a gorgeous refusal to forget. A riveting, high-stakes performance by one of our major poets, The Ada Poems extends the reach of American poetry.

Cynthia Zarin

Books

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