03 Confessions of a Poet Laureate is available as an e-book only.

A NEW YORK REVIEW E-BOOK ORIGINAL

As former US poet laureate Charles Simic has said, the secret to our identities lies not in grand events, but in the parentheses between events—and in these brief essays, we get a taste of this great poet’s parenthetical observations and recollections. He takes us from the his rattling house on a stormy New Hampshire night, to a park bench in Washington Square where two old men sit discussing the women they’ve known, to a business convention in Topeka where he reads a poem, to the vanished subterranean jazz clubs of old New York, and beyond. Part autobiographical fragment, part waking dream, these pieces are marked by Simic’s characteristic wit, audacity, and awe before life’s strangeness.

Contents include:

• Introduction
• Strangers on a Train
• I Like My Plato Dog-Eared
• Confessions of a Poet Laureate
• The Blustering Blast
• The Buster Keaton Cure
• On Losing
• Reminiscing about the Night Before

Confessions of a Poet Laureate is available as an e-book only. There is no print edition of this title.

Retail: $3.99

• Format: e-book
• Published: December 28, 2010
• Pages: 48
• ISBN: 9781590174784
• Series: NYRB Collections
• Categories:

Charles Simic is a poet, essayist, and translator. He has published twenty collections of his own poetry, five books of essays, a memoir, and numerous books of translations. He has received many literary awards for his poems and his translations, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Griffin Prize, and the MacArthur Fellowship. Voice at 3 A.M., his selected later and new poems, was published in 2003 and a new book of poems, My Noiseless Entourage, came out in the spring of 2005. His new e-book is titled Confessions of a Poet Laureate.