New Books from Action Books

We have two new books out from Action Books on sale on our web site:



Songs For His Disappeared Love
by Raúl Zurita
$12

“Raúl Zurita is, with Nicanor Parra, Chile's preeminent living poet,and his "Canto a su amor desaparecido," here in Daniel Borzutzky's superb translation,is a shattering cyclotron of compact epic. Written in wake of the poet's experiences of imprisonment, torture, and underground resistance, Zurita offers, in the poem's opening half,stuttering, heart-wrenching testimonies of political and personal loss, followed by a tour de force sequence continental in scope-- a kind of Canto General "in negative," drained of any of the consoling teleologies. It is a brave work that conjoins the major and the minor, the vatic and the humblest--and most courageous--orders of the quotidian. Giving no quarter to abstract aesthetic, it's a poem whose traumas jolt us awake and demand we remember.”

-Kent Johnson




Hank
by Abraham Smith
$12

"In an era of overpolished workshop poems and vague, bloodless experiment, Abraham Smith's Hank risks a caterwauling quagmire both epic and lyric in scope, replete with 18 kinds of loneliness. A folk paen to Hank Williams, Sr., its excess is astonishing, its unpunctuated, puncturing burble is propulsive, funny, unforgiving , and raw. Hank is an "elegy for gravel" along the lost highway we've been hunting for. It belongs only to the future of American poetry."

-Joshua Marie Wilkinson

Also: If you buy these two plus Don Mee Choi's The Morning News Is Exciting! you get them for half price off ($24).