Jackstraws

by Charles Simic

Overview

In this new collection of sixty-two poems Charles Simic paints exquisite and shattering word pictures that lend meaning to a chaotic world populated by insects, bridal veils, pallbearers, TV sets, parrots, and a finely detailed dragonfly. Suffused with hope yet unafraid to mock his own credulity, Simic's searing metaphors unite the solemn with the absurd. His raindrops listen to each other fall and collect memories; his wildflowers are drunk with kissing the red-hot breezes; and his God is a Mr. Know-it-all, a wheeler-dealer, a wire-puller. In this latest lyrical gathering, Simic continues to startle his fans with the powerful and surprising images that are his trademark-slangy images of the ethereal, fantastic visions of the everyday, foreign scenes of the all-American-and moments full of humor and full of heartache.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780156010986
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	04/01/2000
Series:	Harvest Book
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	96
Product dimensions:	5.31(w) x 8.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Charles Simic was a poet, essayist, and translator who was born in Yugoslavia in 1938 and immigrated to the United States in 1954. He published more than twenty books of poetry, in addition to a memoir and numerous books of translations for which he received many honors, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Award, the Griffin Poetry Prize, a MacArthur Fellowship, and the Wallace Stevens Award. In 2007, he served as poet laureate of the United States. He was a distinguished visiting writer at New York University and professor emeritus at the University of New Hampshire, where he taught since 1973. He died in January 2023 at the age of eighty-four.

Editorial Reviews

"A master of the surreal, Simic packs his poems full of horror movies, bleak jokes, savage ironies and the things an insomniac notices on the ceiling. . . . A gem."-People
"Charles Simic is a contemporary master of the short lyric [who] makes an art out of clarity of vision."-The American Poet, Spring 1999
"These poems are like self-developing Polaroids, in which a scene, gradually assembling itself out of unexplained images, suddenly clicks into a recognizable whole."-The New York Review of Books
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From the Publisher

These poems are like self-developing Polaroids, in which a scene, gradually assembling itself out of unexplained images, suddenly clicks into a recognizable whole.

New York Review of Books

Irreverent and heartstopping poems.

Vanity Fair

A master of the surreal, Simic packs his poems full of horror movies, bleak jokes, savage ironies and the things an insomniac notices on the ceiling....A gem.

People Magazine