In his thirteenth collection, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Charles Simic melds folklore and black magic with everyday life. Hamlet’s ghost wandering the halls of a Vegas motel, a street corner ventriloquist using passersby as dummies, and Jesus panhandling in a weed-infested Eden are just a few of the startling conceits Simic unleashes in this collection.  “Few contemporary poets have been as influential-or inimitable-as Charles Simic." —The New York Times Book Review Arguably the most original of our great poets, Simic has been recognized with a MacArthur Fellowship and a Pulitzer Prize. The apparent simplicity of his poetic voice evokes a world at once darkly foreign yet seductively familiar. This collection, like Simic's many previous volumes, dazzles with images, insights, and narratives and disturbs with its recognition of the dark and inexplicable. Simic's familiar themes appear?scraps of an austere childhood in war-ravaged Europe, fascination with silence and anonymity, terrors and alienations of the commonplace, and conversations with philosophers and poets who feed his imagination. Interestingly, love poems rise to the top and give this book its rapture. Despite this thrust, a few dark corners remain. Still, it would be a shame not to persist; with Simic the effort is always rewarded. Highly recommended for anyone interested in contemporary poetry.?James A. Zoller, Houghton Coll., N.Y. Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. In each book, especially Hotel Insomnia (1992) and Wedding in Hell (1994), Simic--who has perfected a caffeinated brevity and has a gift for enigmatic images--establishes a fresh poetic lexicon and creates a new cast of characters that he sets in motion within taut metaphysical dramas. In his newest work (poems remarkable for the poignancy of their voices and terseness of their lines), he presents a coterie of sly cats, chattering birds, down-and-out men who talk to themselves, and silent, mysterious women. Each poem, each vignette, is like an old nickelodeon moving picture. They flicker silvery black-and-white as people twitch and lurch about, performing perfectly ordinary acts that are made surreal by their spasmodic movements and the inexplicable progression of light and shadow. Moody, fatalistic, ironic, and romantic, Simic conjures an alien yet familiar, dreamy yet gritty cinematographic world where city streets are a stage, mirrors reflect empty beds, and people brood about pleasure and pain, folly and beauty. Donna Seaman In this latest collection of poems, Charles Simic, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, brings us startling new visions of the haunted landscape that has been his oeuvre, where the surreal and the mundane, the sacred and profane, are indistinguishable, a world where "everything is teetering on the edge of everything/With a polite smile". A man waits at a bus stop for the love of his life, a woman (Lady Luck?) he's never met. The world's greatest ventriloquist who sits on a street corner uses passersby as dummies and speaks through us all. Hamlet's ghost walks the hallways of a Vegas motel. Sunlight streams through a windowpane of fire. Mary Magdalene cruises Santa Monica Boulevard. Flies from a slaughterhouse leave bloody tracks across the pages of a book. Jesus panhandles in a weed-infested Eden. 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.