Long cherished in out-of-print editions, anthologies and textbooks, and more recently celebrated on the internet, the groundbreaking Concrete and Minimalist poems of Aram Saroyan (born 1943) are gathered together here in a single, much-needed volume. Working in the 1960s among the so-called Second Generation New York School of poetry and the international Concrete poetry movement, but also informed by Conceptual art, Saroyan brought an intense focus to the sensuality of words--often single words--highlighting their material strangeness. Among the most popular of these poems are the infamous "lighght" (singled out by Senator Jesse Helms, who publicly lambasted the poem when its author received an NEA award), "eyeye," and his four-legged letter "m." "Even a five-word poem has a beginning, middle and end," Saroyan once stated; "A one-word poem doesn’t. You can see it all at once. It’s instant." Complete Minimal Poems reissues the entirety of Saroyan’s rare collections Aram Saroyan, Pages and The Rest for the first time, as well as his well-known "Electric Poems" (originally published in the 1972 All Stars anthology) and the previously unpublished sequence "Short Poems." The first edition of Complete Minimal Poems was published in 2007, receiving praise in The New York Times and winning the 2008 William Carlos Williams Award. This reprint of that edition includes a new preface by Ron Silliman.

Complete Minimal Poems, 2nd Edition

Literature & Fiction

SAROYAN, Aram

Poetry

Primary Information/Ugly Duckling Presse

“People used to tell me, if you keep on writing maybe you’ll make a name for yourself,” New York–based artist and writer Constance DeJong (born 1950) wrote in Modern Love. “They were right: My name’s Constance DeJong. My name’s Fifi Corday. My name’s Lady Mirabelle, Monsieur Le Prince, and Roderigo. Roderigo’s my favorite name. First I had my father’s name, then my husband’s, then another’s. I don’t know. I don’t want to know the cause of anything.” Modern Love, DeJong’s first book, was published in 1977 by Standard Editions, an imprint co-founded by DeJong and Dorothea Tanning. In 1978, the text was adapted into a 60-minute radio program accompanied by the “Modern Love Waltz,” a piano composition by Philip Glass. In this new edition, DeJong’s debut novel is brought back into print, her dissonant shifts of voice and inimitable staccato rhythm made available to a new generation of readers.

Modern Love

Arts & Photography

DeJong, Constance

Individual Artists

A bold, pioneering, "free-souled" and long-rare classic of concrete poetry, available for the first time in 50 years Originally published by Doubleday and Company in 1970, N.H. Pritchard's The Matrix was one of a tiny handful of books of concrete poetry published in America by a major publishing house. Sadly, the book was given little support and was not promoted, and it has long been out of print. However, it remains a cherished item for fans of poetry due to its unique composition, and difficult but rewarding poetics. Forcing the reader to straddle the line between reading and viewing, the book features visual poems that predate the experiments of the Language poets, including words that are exploded into their individual letters, and columns of text that ride the edge of the page. Praised as a "FREE souled" work by Allen Ginsberg, The Matrix feels as fresh and necessary today as when it was first published. This new facsimile edition, copublished by Primary Information and Ugly Duckling Presse, makes the book available to a new generation of readers.

The Matrix: Poems 1960–1970

Pritchard, N.H.

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