Euripides

David Konstan

Heather McHugh

Brimming with lusty comedy and horror, this new version of Euripides's only extant satyr play has been refreshed with all the salty humor, vigorous music, and dramatic shapeliness in modern American English.

Cyclops

Paul Celan

Nikolai Popov

Rich new translations of one of the most important poets of our time.

101 Poems

Glottal Stop

Heather McHugh’s thirteenth book, Upgraded to Serious, is a fast-paced, funny, verbally dexterous collection that’s “boiling up and boiling over” as it accesses varieties of loss. Her unexpected rhymes and rhythms encourage infectious laughter as both palliative and prophylactic, in the face of human sufferings and of ignorance. Alert to changes in physiological and technological life, McHugh records the patient’s pulse: Being “upgraded to serious” from a critical condition is a diagnosis. McHugh’s ironies rest on the knowledge that even poems cannot “save the world / without exception.”

Upgraded to Serious

From an aging body's slow disintegration to the deconstruction of the alphabet, McHugh's expansive collection challenges our roles within society.

Muddy Matterhorn

Words and forms challenge each other in a collection of new poems and selections from the author's five previous books

Poems, 1968–1993

Hinge & Sign

Poems featuring wit and word play discuss the themes of life, death, aging, cruelty, and religion, but also such contemporary topics as Webcams and the Internet.

Ellen Bryant Voigt

Hammer and Blaze provides a true cross-section of the best contemporary poets writing in North America today. Editors Ellen Bryant Voigt and Heather McHugh have brought together the work of sixty poets who have taught at the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, one of the most respected and influential writing programs of its kind. The stellar group of contributors includes MacArthur fellows Campbell McGrath, Anne Carson, Edward Hirsch, Eleanor Wilner, Susan Stewart, and Lucia Perillo. Also represented here are works by Pulitzer Prize winners Stephen Dunn and Louise Glück; Ruth Lilly Prize winner Carl Dennis; and Robert Wrigley, Thomas Lux, and B. H. Fairchild, winners of the Kingsley Tufts Award. From the couplets of Pablo Medina to the neoclassical lyricisms of Carl Phillips, this anthology appropriately reflects the cross-cultural nature of contemporary North American poetry with its most diverse and prestigious voices. A number of the poems are previously unpublished, including work by Joan Aleshire, Stuart Dischell, Stephen Dobyns, Stephen Dunn, Roland Flint, Carol Frost, Barbara Greenberg, Edward Hirsch, Pablo Medina, Steve Orlen, Gregory Orr, Kathleen Peirce, Kenneth Rosen, Daniel Tobin, Alan Williamson, and Eleanor Wilner. Hammer and Blaze, a gathering of our best poets, should garner attention from the literary world at large as well as from students of contemporary poetry and creative writing.

A Gathering of Contemporary American Poets

Hammer and Blaze

Heather McHugh’s first book in a decade, Muddy Matterhorn, reclaims the mix of high and low that is her sensibility’s signature, in matters practical and philosophical, semantic and stylistic, mortal and transitory, amorous and political, hilarious and heartbreaking. With fierce attacks on technology and social structures, McHugh finds a way to enjoy and empathize with humanity on her own terms. Ever the outsider, McHugh combines a strong sense of self with a determination to love people and the worlds they build without losing her biting criticism or witty rejection of societal norms and expectations. She is both pragmatic and theorizing, esoteric and identifiable. The joy and anger in these poems join to form an empowered and impassioned declaration of self in a chaotic time.

Scintillating new work from a celebrated contemporary poet. Runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (2004) Runner-up for the ForeWord magazine's Book of the Year Award (2003) Heather McHugh's new book, Eyeshot, is a brooding, visionary work that takes aim at the big questions—those of love and death. The poems suggest that such immensities balance on the smallest details, and that a range of human blindness is inescapable. The power of this new work comes from its delicate yet tenacious fidelity to the ever-unfolding senses of sense. The poems invite the reader to follow careening words and insights through passages both playful and profound. Her "Fido, Jolted by Jove" reveals the tension endemic to both language and living: "the world itself is worried." Yet the same poem remarks the high price of any reductive fix: "a brain this insecure may need another bolt be driven in it." This movement between anxiety and the human compulsion for order informs Eyeshot's darkly comic, 20/20 acuity.

Eyeshot

David Lehman

The twentieth edition of The Best American poetry series celebrates the rich and fertile landscape of American poetry. Renowned poet Heather McHugh loves words and the unexpected places they take you; her own poetry elevates wordplay to a species of metaphysical wit. For this year's anthology McHugh has culled a spectacular group of poems reflecting her passion for language, her acumen, and her vivacious humor. From the thousands of poems published or posted in one year, McHugh has chosen seventy-five that fully engage the reader while illustrating the formal and tonal diversity of American poetry. With new work by established poets such as Louise Glück, Robert Hass, and Richard Wilbur, The Best American Poetry 2007 also features such younger talents as Ben Lerner, Meghan O'Rourke, Brian Turner, and Matthea Harvey. Graced with McHugh's fascinating introduction, the anthology includes the ever-popular notes and comments section in which the contributors write about their work. Series editor David Lehman's engaging foreword limns the necessity of poetry. The Best American Poetry 2007 is an exciting addition to a series committed to covering the American poetry scene and delivering great poems to a broad audience.

Series Editor David Lehman

The Best American Poetry 2007

An anthology of contemporary poets presents works that reflect the diversity in American poetry

Heather McHugh

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