The World Doesn't End

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry

“One of the truly imaginative writers of our time.” —Los Angles Times Book Review

You never know what Charles Simic is up to until you reach the end of the line or the bottom of the paragraph. Waiting for you might be a kiss. Or a bludgeon. A smile at the absurdities of society, or a wistful, grim memory of World War II.

He puns, pulls pranks. He can be jazzy and streetwise. Or cloak himself in antiquity.

Charles Simic has new eyes, and in these wonderful poems and poems-in-prose he lets us see through them. 

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.