After Modigliani

Poetry. Widely acclaimed as a translator, essayist, critic, editor, and journalist, Stephen Kessler is first of all a poet, whose work has appeared in small press publications across the U.S. since the late 1960s. AFTER MODIGLIANI is his fifteenth book and his first collection of poems to be published in twenty years. Its sixty poems generously display the author's lyric intensity, ironic wit, clarity of vision, and range of imagination. Urban and natural landscapes, social and political realities, sexual love, memory, mortality, and consciousness itself are explored here with a sharp eye, a musical ear, and a crisply contemporary voice. These soul-deep, introspective songs by Stephen Kessler wax strongly of the philosophical, the nostalgic, and an acceptance of life's complexities tingled with a quiet rag -- this book is an 'alchmical' work of passion -- Wanda Coleman.

Stephen Kessler is the author of eight previous books and chapbooks of original poetry, fourteen books of literary translation, and a collection of essays. He was a founding editor and publisher of Alcatraz, an international journal, and The Sun, a Santa Cruz newsweekly, among other periodicals and independent publishing ventures. He received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Lambda Literary Award for his translation of WRITTEN IN WATER: THE COLLECTED PROSE POEMS of Luis Cernuda, and is a four-time winner of the California Library Association's PR Excellence Award for The Redwood Coast Review, the quarterly literary newspaper he founded and has edited since 1999.