For more information, visit McSweeneys.net From Rae Armantrout to Adam Zagajewski, In the Shape of a Human Body I Am Visiting the Earth is a chorus of voices from around the globe and across generations. A compendium of some of our beloved poems from our favorite poets, this slim anthology is the perfect companion for cafés, road trips, bathtubs, shuttle expeditions, and any other situation in need of the genuinely human. Included are freshly translated masterpieces-originally published in Poetry International-from poets such as Pablo Neruda, Rainer Maria Rilke, Federico García Lorca, and Charles Baudelaire, along with new work from contemporary practitioners such as Kay Ryan, Jane Hirshfield, Derek Walcott, Kwame Dawes, Valzhyna Mort, and James Tate. Ilya Kaminsky was born in Odessa, Ukraine, and currently lives in San Diego. He's the author of Dancing In Odessa, and the co-editor of The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry. With Jean Valentine, he has co-translated Dark Elderberry Branch: Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva. Dominic Luxford was raised on a sheep farm in the Appalachian Mountains of Virginia, and currently lives in San Francisco. He edited The McSweeney's Book of Poets Picking Poets, has been the Believer magazine's poetry editor since 2007, and co-founded the McSweeney's Poetry Series. Jesse Nathan was born in Berkeley, grew up on a farm in Kansas, and lives now in San Francisco. He's the author of several chapbooks, including Cloud 9, and is a co-founding editor of the McSweeney's Poetry Series. He's completing a PhD in poetry and poetics at Stanford. In the Shape of a Human Body I Am Visiting the Earth: Poems from Far and Wide features a completely subjective, but, we hope, valuable swath of poetry from near and far. Our aim was to curate a small but sharp collection―an assortment of poems with teeth, in the hope that every poem cuts deep (as they have, with gratitude, for us). English has always been a particularly absorbent and ravenous language, informed by the cadences and grammars of other tongues since its inception. Latin, Nordic, Saxon, French, Irish, Welsh, and Italian poetries seeded the ground upon which English verse has grown. These influences became prominent again when modernist sensibilities swept poetry in English in the early twentieth century, a movement sometimes driven by direct (if often quite loose) translations of poetry from other languages. Despite that internationalist turn, readers in the United States today remain all too unaware of the contemporary and historical writings of their peers from other language-cultures. In this country, many readers learn about foreign-language poets after they turn eighty-five and win the Nobel Prize. But the most valuable, potent conversation between literatures happens more naturally―continuously and organically―and not from a museum-like retrospective. Our thought was to provide a smattering of both the known and less-well-known, the contemporary and the historical, in a cocktail of topics, tones, and aesthetic orientations, a cocktail we hope may produce pleasing and surprising new experiences for you, reader. The challenges of creating any poetry anthology are, of course, many, and those challenges become exponential when one may include any poem written by any poet at any point in history. We chose, if not exactly to ignore these challenges, then to take them with a Parnassus-sized grain of salt. Perfection or anything resembling ―flawlessness―in art―much less in a multi-author selection of poetry from around the world, over centuries―is as inherently impossible as flawlessness in translation. Our goal instead became something like the opposite of comprehensiveness. In order to make what you hold in your hands as readable as possible (as opposed to yet another guilt-inducing door-stopper), we gradually honed the available material until we arrived at a collection that we felt was wide in its reach, but still elegant; unpredictable, yet cohesive. In short, we aspired to create the book that we ourselves most wanted to read. We hope these pages provide you with some of the pleasures and edifications that we experienced while putting it together. ―Ilya Kaminsky, Dominic Luxford, and Jesse Nathan San Diego and San Francisco, 2017