Under the Sign (Penguin Poets)

A new collection from the author of Or To Begin Again, a finalist for the 2009 National Book Award in Poetry

Ann Lauterbach is one of America’s most innovative and provocative poets, acclaimed for her fierce, sensuous and intellectually charged poems.  In this, her ninth book of poems, Lauterbach pursues longstanding inquiries into how language forms and informs our understanding of the relation between empirical observation and subjective response; worldly attachment and inwardness; the given and the chosen. The poems set out not so much to find cogent resolutions to these fluid dyads as to open them to the fact of unknowing that is at the core of all human curiosity and desire. A central prose section tracks along a meditative edge, engaging the risky task of opening the mind to the limits of apprehension; the final section evokes, in the figure of the instructor, the essential contemporary question of how information becomes knowledge.

Ann Lauterbach is the author of eight collections of poems, most recently Or To Begin Again, and a book of essays, The Night Sky: Writings on the Poetics of Experience. She has been, since 1991, Co-Chair of Writing in the Milton Avery School of the Arts at Bard College, where she is Ruth and David Schwab II Professor of Languages and Literatures.  Named the Sherry Distinguished Poet at the University of Chicago for 2012, she is also the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship.  She lives in Germantown, New York.