Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz (1651 - 1695) was a feminist and a woman ahead of her time. She was very much a public intellectual and her contemporaries called her "the Tenth Muse" and "the Phoenix of Mexico", names that continue to resonate. This self-taught intellectual rose to the height of fame as a writer in Mexico City during the Spanish Golden Age. The volume includes Sor Juana's best-known works, including "First Dream", which showcases her prodigious...

"In the beginning, the world is spoken into existence with one word: "Earth." There are no inhabitants, and no sun--only the broad sky, silent sea, and sovereign Framer and Shaper. Then come the twin heroes Hunahpu and Xbalanque. Wielding blowguns, they begin a journey to hell and back, ready to confront the folly of false deities as well as death itself, in service to the world and to humanity. This is the story of the Mayan Popol Vuh, "the book...

A complete edition of Beckett's poetry and verse translations. "Samuel Beckett began his career by publishing poems in literary reviews in Paris during the 1930s, and--although primarily considered a playwright and novelist--he continued writing poetry throughout his life. This new, definitive volume presents Beckett's poetry in the order it was composed, from prewar to postwar, and contains previously unpublished and never-before- reprinted work....

Celan, a Bukovinian Jew who lived through the Holocaust, created work that displays both great lyric power and an uncanny ability to pinpoint totalitarian cultural and political tendencies. His quest, however, is not only reflective: there is in Celan's writing a profound need and desire to create a new, inhabitable world and a new language for it. In Memory Rose into Threshold Speech, Celan’s reader witnesses his poetry, which starts lush with...

"The complete poems of the priestess Enheduana, the world's first known author, newly translated from the original Sumerian. Enheduana was a high priestess and royal princess who lived in Ur, in what is now southern Iraq, about 2300 BCE. Not only does Enheduana have the distinction of being the first author whose name we know, but the poems attributed to her are hymns of great power. They are a rare flash of the female voice in the often male-dominated...

I gaze into the mirror of my heart, / And though it's me who looks, it's you I see. So speaks one of the many distinctive voices in this new anthology of verse by women poets writing in Persian, most of whom have never been translated into English before; this is especially true of the pre-modern poets, such as the unnamed author of the lines above, known simply as the "daughter of Salar" or "the woman from Esfahan." One of the very first Persian...

"English-only edition of poems written from exile, prison, and on the run by the Salvadoran revolutionary whose life and word urged love as well as change. Selected from 10 of his collections including two posthumous manuscripts, but none are from Poemas clandestinos (1980). The vital force of the intimate, conversational Spanish challenges the translators. Introductory essays by Ernesto Cardenal, Claribel Alegría, and Hardie St. Martin recommend...