Books published by Oberlin College Press

Imagine a book of hours condensed into a book of minutes: that is the project of the compact lyrical prose poems found in Gemma Gorga's Book of Minutes, the first English-language translation of this emerging poet, widely known and loved in her native Catalonia yet little known outside it. The poems in Book of Minutes move seamlessly from philosophical speculation to aphorism, condensed narrative, brief love letter, and prayer, finding the metaphysical in even the most mundane. In the space of one or two paragraphs, they ponder God, love, language, existence, and beginnings and endings both large and small. In her openness to explore these and many other subjects, Gorga's leitmotif might well be "light." Carrying with them echoes of Wallace Stevens, Rainer Maria Rilke, Hans Christian Andersen, Francis Ponge, George Herbert, and Emily Dickinson, the poems in Book of Minutes are nonetheless firmly in the twenty-first century, moving in a single breath from the soul to diopters or benzodiazepine. In deft, idiomatic translation from Sharon Dolin, Book of Minutes also retains the original Catalan texts on facing pages.

Readers who have followed Jonah Winter's work in the pages of Field and other magazines, and who know his delightful first collection, MAINE, will welcome this lively and inventive volume. Winter's admirers, who include poets like Charles Simic, Charles Wright, and David Lehman (who selected MAINE for Slope Editions and wrote the introduction), emphasize his assimilation of the Surrealist tradition to an American landscape and a contemporary culture that become dreamlike, surprising, poignant, and hilarious in his capable hands. Objects and events we might never have thought capable of poetic treatment acquire grace, beauty, and even a certain immortality in this book. It becomes a stay against amnesia that constitutes an enterprise both comic and heroic. Selected from over 500 manuscript entries, this is the seventh winner of our annual contest. The next prize entrants are invited to submit in May 2004, and the prize winner will be announced by August.

Carol Moldaw explores new territory in poems that are thematically far-reaching and technically superb. The book includes three long sequences based on art and artifact in various stages of completeness: preliminary pen-and-ink studies, Turkish ruins, and, at the center, the site-specific art installation that gives the book its title and impetus

"Angie Estes takes very alert art and wakes it up all over again. Out of wonderful sliding sound relationships and torqued-up rhythms, out of histories as vivid as they are diverse, she creates a present moment in which we realize that Giotto and Le Corbusier are, and have always been, contemporaries--our contemporaries--for great art always happens in the present, and Estes' work is no exception. It's now."

In this deeply innovative and beautifully human book, Ralph Burns explores the vivid relation between American jazz and American poetry. In the long title poem he plays wide open, without a mute, as Red Allen advises. The result is inclusive and exhilarating, a structure that keeps on opening and opening.

"Among the works by which the times we live in will be remembered and known."

Poems of striking grace and subtlety map an intricate, shifting landscape

The first English collection of this irresistible French poet's work

Timothy O'Keefe was awarded the 2010 FIELD Poetry Prize for THE GOODBYE TOWN, described by Editor David Walker as a complex and multilayered collection, deeply intelligent and humane, beautifully balanced in its sly wit and elegant lyricism.... He has a fresh and distinctive voice. This is O'Keefe's first book.

These poems, by privileging the lyric in their intention, open up a new direction in the American prose poem

"Marilyn Hacker is truly one of this country's greatest translators...Her translation of Emmanuel Moses' He and I introduces a vital, ambitious new poet to American readers. By turns violent and witty, melancholy and thoughtful, He and I deserves a wide readership and high praise."--Kevin Prufer

Winner of the 2007 FIELD Poetry prize, poems on recovery from injury, materialism, aging, love, and death

Winner of the 2006 FIELD Poetry Prize, Red Studio is a collection of startling lyricism, vivid sensuality, and keen precision. Cornish's poems tell about life and art and their interdependence. They are fierce, funny, and filled with a love of the world that acknowledges candidly how precarious it is--or rather, how brief our time in it must be.

Herman de Coninck, Belgium's leading poet for many decades, appears in English in a single volume for the first time. Witty, tender, trenchant, wise, de Coninck's poems range from playful, terse love lyrics to darkly ironic, somberly truthful observations about human experience.

Jean Gallagher's first book of poems, This Minute, received the Poets Out Loud Prize and was published by Fordham University Press. Her second book, Stubborn, was selected from over 450 entries as the ninth winner of the annual FIELD Poetry Prize. David Young, one of the judges, had this to say about it: "In Stubborn Jean Gallagher teaches us new ways of seeing--medieval paintings, for instance--and new ways of thinking: about the infinite, about holiness and terror and vision and loss. She does this with a kind of casual precision, a musical and imaginative daring that is both breathtaking and yet somehow matter-of-fact. As if taking the tops of our heads off or throwing open sudden doorways to timelessness were the most natural activity in the world. Her command of her art is remarkable, and readers will not want to put down this book once they have started to encounter it. It shines with power and crackles with excitement."

Already one of America's most admired poets, Beckian Fritz Goldberg joins the FIELD Poetry Series as the winner of our annual poetry prize with her brilliant new collection.

Winner of the 2016 FIELD Poetry Prize Chance Divine explores the broadest territory possible, from the origins of the universe to the speculative, precarious future. Bookended by the dazzling prose poem sequences called "Genesis" and "Revelation," Jeffrey Skinner's new collection is equally grounded in the contemporary science of photons, black holes, and climate change and the uncanny mythology of celestial talk shows, shifting identities, angels, and politicians. Visionary, wildly unpredictable, and often unsettlingly funny, this is a book that matters.

Rueful, tender visions of the Apocalypse as seen from the Midwest