<div>&ldquo;This 20th collection from the former U.S. poet laureate departs only by degrees from his poems of earlier decades&mdash;but it could just be his best book.&rdquo; &mdash;Publishers Weekly (starred review) In his first volume of poetry since his tenure as poet laureate, Charles Simic shows he is at the height of his poetic powers. These new poems mine the rich strain of inscrutability in ordinary life, until it is hard to know what is innocent and what ominous. There is something about his work that continues to be crystal clear and yet deeply weighted with violence and mystery. Reading it is like going undercover. The face of a girl carrying a white dress from the cleaners with her eyes half-closed. The Adam &amp; Evie Tanning Salon at night. A sparrow on crutches. A rubber duck in a shooting gallery on a Sunday morning. And someone in a tree swing, too old to be swinging and to be wearing no clothes at all, blowing a toy trumpet at the sky. &ldquo;Simic&rsquo;s compact poems carry concealed weapons amid unnerving juxtapositions . . . Simic&rsquo;s edgy, brooding poems are like saxophone solos played under a bridge in the deep, dark hours of the spinning world&rsquo;s bruising insomnia.&rdquo; &mdash;Booklist &ldquo;In retrospect, the man who&rsquo;s referred to himself as a &lsquo;cheerful pessimist&rsquo; succeeds again in demonstrating his ability to condense meaning without obscuring it, to empower his poems with paradox, and to mesh seamlessly the real and imagined. And though many of the poems in Master of Disguises continue a style trend, they are also verbal tightropes off which a reader rarely falls, tightropes that demand&mdash;and deserve&mdash;a reader&rsquo;s complete attention.&rdquo; &mdash;Rattle</div>

Master of Disguises

<div>The Pulitzer Prize–winning poet “illuminates the shadow side of life in poems as perfectly formed and directed as the beam of a flashlight” (Booklist). The poems in Charles Simic’s new collection evoke a variety of settings and images, from New York City to small New England towns; from crowds spilling onto the sidewalk on a hot summer night to an abandoned wooden church and a car graveyard overgrown with weeds. His subjects range from a bakery early in the morning to the fingerprints on a stranger’s front door; from waiters in an empty restaurant to the decorations in a window of a funeral home; from a dog tied to a chain to a homeless man sleeping at the foot of a skyscraper; and other moments of solitude and clear vision. “What is beautiful,’ he writes in one poem, “is found accidentally and not sought after. What is beautiful is easily lost.” Simic is the metaphysician of the ordinary, a poet who reminds us of the mysteries of our daily lives. “This first book of poems since 1999’s Jackstraws continues Simic’s familiar, unsettling methods and extends them into the terrain of older age . . . Simic remains a powerful, and funny, chronicler of an individual world one where pastry, omelets and queen-size beds offer their ambiguous pleasures, and where, inseparably, ‘the butchery of the innocent/ Never stops.’ It is a world that should be familiar.” —Publishers Weekly “Nabokovian in his caustic charm and sexy intelligence, Simic perceives the mythic in the mundane and pinpoints the perpetual suffering that infuses human life with both agony and bliss.” —Booklist</div>

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Night Picnic

<div>A &ldquo;beautifully crafted&rdquo; visual celebration with 150 photos and essays by Barbara Kingsolver, Bill Moyers, Ann Patchett, Anne Lamott, Amy Tan, and more (Publishers Weekly). Many of us have vivid recollections of childhood visits to a public library: the unmistakable musty scent, the excitement of checking out a stack of newly discovered books. Today, the more than 17,000 libraries in America also function as de facto community centers offering free access to the internet, job-hunting assistance, or a warm place to take shelter. And yet, across the country, cities large and small are closing public libraries or curtailing their hours of operation. Over eighteen years, photographer Robert Dawson crisscrossed the country documenting hundreds of these endangered institutions. The Public Library presents a wide selection of his photographs&mdash;from the majestic reading room at the New York Public Library to Allensworth, California&rsquo;s one-room Tulare County Free Library, built by former slaves. Accompanying them are essays, letters, and poetry by some of America&rsquo;s most celebrated writers. &ldquo;For book lovers, library denizens, and fans of architecture or Americana, The Public Library is a delight.&rdquo; &mdash;The Christian Science Monitor &ldquo;If you think all public libraries look pretty much the same, well, you need to take a look at this book. Oh, sure, there are plenty of grand ones, such as Philadelphia&rsquo;s own Central Library on the Parkway. But we also have the Fishtown Community Branch, featured in this volume, which used to be a firehouse and, before that, a stable. There&rsquo;s also the log cabin library in Cable, Wis. And many, many more, both grand and humble.&rdquo; &mdash;Philadelphia Inquirer &ldquo;An irrefutable argument for the preservation of public libraries . . . profound and heartbreakingly beautiful.&rdquo; &mdash;Toni Morrison</div>

Charles Simic
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Books By Charles Simic (2 Books)

Master of Disguises

Night Picnic

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Charles SimicFollow this author

Books By Charles Simic (2 Books)

Master of Disguises

Night Picnic

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Charles Simic
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