Books published by Persea Books Inc

For years, RandallMann has been hailed as one of contemporary American poetry's most daringformalists, expertly using craft as a way of exploring racy subjects with trenchantwit and aplomb. His new collection, Proprietary,depicts with the insights of a longtime insider the culture of corporateAmerica, in which he's worked for years, intertwined with some of histried-and-true subjects, including gay life in the wildly disparate worlds ofSan Francisco and northern Florida.

Edwin Page, a fussy middle-aged professor, no sooner bids farewell to his obstetrician wife, Cecilia, who accepted a fellowship abroad, when his new neighbors, Mrs. Botts and her sexy, twentyish daughter, Leila, arrive. Since they're locked out of their house, Edwin invites them in-and then can't get them to leave. He becomes obsessed with Leila and convinces himself that she is a perfect surrogate mother for the childless Cecilia. "Wickedly amusing . . . subversive" (New York Times Book Review), The Sugar Mother undoes the institution of marriage.

Nâzim Hikmet (1902-1963), Turkey's best-loved poet and a commanding presence in its public life, lived through a turbulent era-the end of the Ottoman Empire, the rise of Communist Russia, and the birth of the Turkish Republic. Born into the Ottoman elite, Hikmet embraced Communist ideals and joined the revolutionary ranks at nineteen. Of passionate temperament, he lived his life full-tilt, deeply romantic in his loves and uncompromising in his politics-for which he spent more than a third of his life in prisons or in exile. His stirring free verse in simple words, praising his country, his women, and the common man, was considered "subversive" and banned for decades. Today it is available in more than fifty languages, and Hikmet is recognized worldwide as a major twentieth-century poet.

This staggering volume by a leading poet of Eastern Europe, acclaimed both at home and abroad, includes the entirety of Debeljak's two most recent collections, Unended and Under the Waterline (available for the first time in English) and selections from his groundbreaking earlier work.

When Emma Hardy died in 1912, her husband, the great novelist and poet Thomas Hardy, began to write "Poems of 1912-13," a series of elegies that are among the most moving in the English language. Although the couple had been estranged for years, after her death Hardy fell under Emma's spell again and was enthralled by her as he hadn't been in decades. He transformed his hopelessly revived love into poetry, pouring out his yearning and passionate attachment to a love forever lost."Poems of 1912-13" and the other elegies about Emma included in this volume have been read and discussed by poets and scholars for almost a century but never collected in their own book. Their accessibility, emotional power, and focus on the mysterious complexities of marriage make them of interest to a broad public. Readers will cherish this beautifully produced, illustrated volume of poetical testaments to enduring love.

Written during the Second World War while Hikmet was serving a thirteen-year sentence as a political prisoner, his verse-novel uses cinematic techniques to tell the story of the emergence of secular, modern Turkey by focusing on the always-entertaining stories of sundry characters from all walks of life. As his vignettes flash before our eyes at movie-like speed, it becomes clear he is also telling the turbulent story of the twentieth century itself and the ongoing struggle between tradition, which trusts in God, and modernity, which entrusts the world to human hands.