There's the Hand and There's the Arid Chair

Poetry. Poems born in "a time of abrupt needs," this collection catalogs those individual and imperative fancies that, in the cosmos of Tomaz Salamun, eternity aims to replace: A genealogy of dressmakers and songbirds. A biography that locates the poetic "I" as, at once, a primordial being and a tamer of beasts, a monster and a guardian angel. With uncanny and sometimes harrowing grace, Salamun plumbs every reach of the imagination in search of a space where we can delight in and mourn the disintegration of the body. The nine translators who collaborated to bring out this new book by a "major Central European poet" (The New Yorker) include Thomas Kane, Peter Richards, Phillis Levin, Joshua Beckman, Ana Jelnikar, Christopher Merrill, Matthew Rohrer, Brian Henry, and Anselm Hollo.