The Glass Constellation - by Arthur Sze (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

**From the 25th U.S. Poet Laureate**

**Winner of the 2024 National Book Foundation Science + Literature Award**

An affordable paperback edition of the Collected Works of the one of the most astonishing poets writing today: U.S. Poet Laureate Arthur Sze

The Glass Constellation is a triumph spanning five decades, including ten poetry collections and twenty-six new poems, from National Book Award winner Arthur Sze. Sze began his career writing compressed, lyrical poems influenced by classical Chinese poetry; he later made a leap into powerful polysemous sequences, honing a distinct stylistic signature that harnesses luminous particulars, and is sharply focused, emotionally resonant, and structurally complex. Fusing elements of Chinese, Japanese, Native American, and various Western experimental traditions―employing startling juxtapositions that are always on target, deeply informed by concern for our endangered planet and troubled species―Sze presents experience in all its multiplicities, in singular book after book. This collection is an invitation to immerse in a visionary body of work, mapping the evolution of one of our finest American poets.

Review Quotes

"The recognition was long overdue when Sze won the 2019 National Book Award for his previous book, Sight Lines. This 500-page, career spanning retrospective is a fitting follow up, allowing readers to take in the full breadth of what Sze has achieved over ten collections published since the early 1970s. . . . This book is an overwhelming feast, a treasure, and more than enough proof that Sze is a major poet."-NPR, "Glimmers of Hope: A 2021 Poetry Preview"

"A new cornerstone of the Asian American poetic canon, Arthur Sze's career-spanning book collects early adaptations of classical Chinese poetry, his signature terrain-traversing sequences, and new work written in lines like microscope slides, long and translucent, each one isolating a single clarified perception: 'adjusting your breath to the seasonal rhythm of grasses-- // gazing into a lake on a salt flat and drinking, in reflection, the Milky Way--.'"--The Boston Globe

"A monumental collection from a poet whose lasting importance should now be recognized; essential for dedicated readers of contemporary American poetry."--Library Journal, starred review

"There is an immense silence, or the clearest crystal-toned ringing, that emanates from the nearly three hundred poems that comprise Arthur Sze's The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems. This incandescent collection by one of our time's most masterful poets is an invitation for us all to see ourselves, our lives, this earth, and one another in clear, attuned radiance."--The Georgia Review

"Ten other collections of poetry live here titivated by 26 new poems, all of them marked by the manners that have always permeated Sze's work: Zen-like wonder at the tiniest of moments that invariably take strong left-turns into new worlds"--New York Journal of Books

"Sze is simultaneously the microscope and telescope of the poetry world. And more. To truly attend to these poems is to begin to feel like you have been opened to a kaleidoscopic experience of the cosmos, a multisensual one whose kinetic foci gather moments across time and space, word and world. . . . The Glass Constellation is a sublime and masterful embodiment of a kind of cosmic consciousness."--Terrain.org

"In the case of poet Arthur Sze, 'master' is no misnomer. . . . Sze as poet has been continually searching for new ways of making poetry alive, to make way for the breathing infrastructure of the poem in all its fragility and rigor. As a result of his dynamic poetic efforts, the map of human consciousness will have grown more detailed." --Kyoto Journal Review

"The pages bear meaning of the poetry so moving that they take on a life of their own, flowing through, or rather 'collapsing' into, other images, obliging the writing process even. In turn, this urges the reader to connect, to feel along with this very process, to finally 'expand' the threads of meaning through discovery."--Tinderbox

"Sze's achievement is considerable. . . . [His] images are sharply in focus, like computational photography, his sensibility presents us with a vision that is surreally hyper-aware. The Glass Constellation is edifying in its freshness, confident in its approach, and winningly modest in its adjustment of the sublime." --The Cortland Review

"Sze writes gracefully about both the cosmos and the natural world, mining vivid imagery that performs exactly what Ezra Pound wrote an image should embody, namely, 'an emotional and

About the Author

Arthur Sze (he/him) is an award-winning poet, translator, and editor who has published eleven books of original poetry. His works have been translated into fourteen languages, and include The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems (2021); Sight Lines (2019), which won the National Book Award for Poetry; and, Compass Rose (2014), a Pulitzer Prize finalist. His book of translations, The Silk Dragon: Translations from the Chinese (2001), was selected for the Western States Book Award. A recipient of the 2022 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for Lifetime Achievement from the Poetry Foundation, Sze has also been awarded support from the Guggenheim Foundation, Lannan Foundation, Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry, and National Endowment of the Arts. A Chancellor Emeritus at the Academy of American Poets, he is a professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts and was the first poet laureate of Santa Fe, New Mexico.