Hotel Insomnia: Poems – Luminous American Poetry of East European Memory and the Haunted Wee Hours - Softcover

Simic, Charles

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0156421828 ISBN 13: 9780156421829

Publisher: Ecco, 1992

Synopsis

In this volume, Simic fills the wee hours of his poetry with angels and pigs, riddles and cemeteries. His is a rich, haunted world of East European memory and american present-a world of his own creation, one always full of luminous surprise. “Simic writes so simply that his words fall like drops of water, but they ripple outward to evoke an ominous and numinous world” (Washington Post Book World).

What happens when the waking world dissolves into dream, and memory becomes a haunting ground?

• Surrealism and the Everyday: Witness the mundane crack open to reveal the mythic, where a trip to the funeral home or a glance at a red pencil becomes a descent into the uncanny.
• Eastern European Memory: Journey through a rich, haunted landscape where Old World folktales and sorrows bleed into the American present.
• The Poetry of Insomnia: Spend the wee hours in the titular Hotel Insomnia, a world populated by angels and pigs, where sleep never comes but luminous surprises do.
• Haunting & Lyrical Verse: Experience the simple, masterful lines that earned Charles Simic the Pulitzer Prize, where each word falls like a drop of water into a deep, ominous well.

About this title

About the Author

Charles Simic was a poet, essayist, and translator who was born in Yugoslavia in 1938 and immigrated to the United States in 1954. He published more than twenty books of poetry, in addition to a memoir and numerous books of translations for which he received many honors, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Award, the Griffin Poetry Prize, a MacArthur Fellowship, and the Wallace Stevens Award. In 2007, he served as poet laureate of the United States. He was a distinguished visiting writer at New York University and professor emeritus at the University of New Hampshire, where he taught since 1973. He died in January 2023 at the age of eighty-four.

From the Back Cover

In this new volume, Pulitzer Prize-winning Charles Simic fills the wee hours of his poetry with angels and pigs, riddles and cemeteries. With empty offices and dolls that smile. With the sound of bare feet upstairs and a single kiss before the shadows converge.

Edition details

• Publisher: Ecco
• Publication date: 1992
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0156421828
• ISBN 13: 9780156421829
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 79