Product Description: Inspired by the miraculously mercurial potential of words, Stephen Yenser takes readers on a heady trip through a world full of promise yet compromised by human weakness. Set in sunny southern California and Greece, the poems of Blue Guide cast the shadow of mortality, and the tones are elegiac...read more

A series of mystical poems explores the author's experiences communicating through a Ouija board with a spirit named Ephraim who guides the poet through a series of conversations with W. H. Auden, W. B. Yeats, Plato, and others.

A definitive compilation of prose works by the distinguished author and poet features essays, interviews, and intimate reminiscences, covering such topics as fellow authors Truman Capote, M. F. K. Fisher, Dante, and Cavafy, as well as reflections on the people and places of Greece, his coming of age as a gay man, his travels in Europe, and his family legacy.

Fifty years of the author's acclaimed poetry--with works ranging from his earliest anthology, The Black Swan and Other Poems, to the posthumous volume A Scattering of Salts--are collected into a single volume for the first time, celebrating a lifetime of verse by one of the twentieth century's literary masters. Reprint.

A companion volume to the acclaimed Collected Poems celebrates the literary quality of Merrill the novelist and playwright in an anthology that contains such novels as The Seraglio and The (Diblos) Notebook, as well as dramatic works including The Bait and the previously unpublished The Birthday. Reprint.

Fifty years of the author's acclaimed poetry--with works ranging from his earliest anthology, The Black Swan and Other Poems, to the posthumous volume A Scattering of Salts--are collected into a single volume for the first time, celebrating a lifetime of verse by one of the twentieth century's literary masters. 10,000 first printing.

Selected by Richard Howard from almost one thousand entries, Stephen Yenser’s The Fire in All Things is the most recent recipient of the Walt Whitman Award, given annually by The Academy of American Poets to honor an outstanding collection of verse by an American poet who has not previously published a book-length collection. The poems in The Fire in All Things are as intricate as vines that intertwine and twist around the trunk of a tree; yet high though the poems climb, each has its roots in the natural world, and in the heart. Ruins, architectural and emotional, fill these poems even as the language restores itself in puns, internal rhymes, and slant rhymes. The long poem “Bertumnal” begins with these lines:Close call, close call, close call: this early in the morning The raucous crows’ raw caws are ricochets off rock. Afloat on wire from a dead tree’s branch a piece of charred limb Repeats a finch that perched on it in its last life.Here under the pergola, loaded with green wisteria, Misty air wistful with a few late lavender clusters,Light falling in petal-sized spots across the notebook page (Falling just now for instance on the phrase Light falling) . . .The Fire in All Things reveals a poet of mature talent―shrewdly observant of the world around him, possessed of a keen wit and a formidable command of the language.