New from Salt Publishing:
SPEAKING THE ESTRANGED: ESSAYS ON THE WORK OF GEORGE OPPEN
by Michael Heller
Speaking the Estranged brings together the work
by Michael Heller on the distinguished American
Objectivist poet George Oppen
(1908-1984). Written over the past twenty years
since Heller's first book on the Objectivists,
Conviction's Net of Branches, these essays cover
the range of Oppen's poetry and the ways it has
been read at all stages of his career: from his
overtly Objectivist roots through his abandonment
of poetry for political activism in the thirties
to his renewed poetic output after the
1950s. Heller's sustained and astute attention
to Oppen, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
in 1968, illuminates what many consider to be one
of the most remarkable, complex and original
bodies of work in twentieth-century literature.
Michael Heller’s engagementpersonally,
critically, and poeticallywith George Oppen is
without parallel. Extending from his early
correspondence with Oppen to his groundbreaking
book on the Objectivists, Conviction’s Net of
Branches, to the acute ethical probing of his own
poetry, Heller has attempted to take the measure
of Oppen’s achievement from every conceivable
angle. This new book, published in the year of
Oppen’s centennial, displays the full fruits of
one major poet’s encounter with another.
--Stephen Fredman, author of A
Menorah for Athena: Charles Reznikoff and the
Jewish Dilemma of American Poetry and The
Grounding of American Poetry: Charles Olson and the Emersonian Tradition
Not just a great book of literary criticism,
Michael Heller’s Speaking the Estranged is an
exhilarating examination of those 20th century
literary, political, and philosophical currents
that have carried us into our tumultuous
present. As luminous a critic as he is a poet,
Heller renews our engagement with “the mind
operating in a marvel which contains the mind,”
as George Oppen once put it. Through Oppen,
Heller locates us and brings us home. When you
finish this book, you won’t want to put it away.
--Forrest Gander, poet and
author of Eye Against Eye and A Faithful Existence
MICHAEL HELLER is a poet, essayist and
critic. Recent books include Exigent Futures:
New and Selected Poems, Uncertain Poetries, a
collection of his essays, and Earth and Cave, a
memoir of Spain in the 60s. Among his many
awards are the Di Castagnola Prize of the Poetry
Society of America and grants from the National
Endowment, NYFA and The Fund for Poetry.
Publisher: Salt Publishing (March 15, 2008)
· Paperback: 152 pages
· ISBN-10: 1844714403
· ISBN-13: 978-1844714407
· List Price: $21:95
· Available at
<http://www.saltpublishing.com/>www.saltpublishing.com,
www.amazon.com or at your bookstore.
·
Uncertain Poetries: Essays on Poets, Poetry and
Poetics (2005) and Exigent Futures: New and
Selected Poems (2003) available at
www.saltpublishing.com, amazon.com and good
bookstores. Survey of work at
http://www.thing.net/~grist/ld/heller.htm
Collaborations with the composer Ellen Fishman
Johnson at http://www.efjcomposer.com/EFJ/Collaborations.html
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