New to the Archive

Let's get right to it:

Outside it's hot as hell
Read some poems by Frederick Seidel

In addition to the four poems linked above, we also added "February 30th," which, coincidentally, would be the day after the last time we brought you a fresh look at some of the poems added to our online archive (if it were really a day). Those poems are all from his newest book, Widening Income Inequality, published by our friends at Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Also from FSG, we added three new poems by Karen Solie, the seasonly appropriate "Blueberries" by James Lasdun, and three poems by James McMichael. We "Heard Said" there was "Hidden" "Wisdom" in his work.

In other James news, we're thrilled to have five poems by the great James Baldwin live on the site for your reading pleasure, including the incredible "Staggerlee wonders," as well as "Le sporting-club de Monte Carlo (for Lena Horne)," "Munich, Winter 1973 (for Y.S.)," and "The giver (for Berdis)." Another major addition to the archive is a selection of poems by Frank Lima. These poems, which include poems from his early, nearly impossible to find collections as well as poems written from 1998-2002, serve as a great introduction to a major but relatively unknown poet's work. Of course, if you want an actual introduction to Frank Lima, we have you covered there, too.

If you've had "Read poems from Peter Balakian's Pulitzer Prize-winning book Ozone Journal" on your summer to-do list, get ready to check it off: "Baseball Days, '61," "Warhol/Mao '72," and a few others are here. Also from just down the lake at the University of Chicago Press, new poems from Maggie Dietz's That Kind of Happy and Gail Mazur's Forbidden City. 

We also added five poems from Timothy Yu's 100 Chinese Silences, a project which seeks to rewrite various appropriations of Asianness. For example, "Chinese Silence No. 92" is a take on this translation by Ezra Pound. We also have numbers 14, 22, 30, and 36.

Very different, but also very great, numbered poems come from Lyn Hejinian's The Unfollowing. Poems number 7, 20, 26, and 49 are now in the archive. We love them all, but we'll leave you with possibly picnic-related line from #26:

Puddings don’t have lungs, melons don’t have riders