FSG Celebrates 75 Years of Poetry: Frank Bidart & Yusef Komunyakaa

Yusef Komunyakaa’s work includes The Emperor of Water Clocks: Poems, Warhorses: Poems, and Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize. Everyday Mojo Songs of Earth: New and Selected Poems, 2001-2021 (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux) brings together new and selected poems from his lauded canon. His masterful, concise verse conjures arresting images of peace and war, the natural power of the earth and love, his childhood in the American South and his service in Vietnam, the ugly violence of racism in America, and the meaning of power and morality. The new poems in this collection add a refrain to the jazz-inflected rhythms of one of our most important poets. Komunyakaa writes of a young man fashioning a slingshot, workers who “honor the Earth by opening shine / inside the soil,” and the sounds of a saxophone filling a dim lounge in New Jersey. Praising the book in a starred review, Publishers Weekly observed that “this dazzling collection makes a definitive case for Pulitzer Prize winning Komunyakaa as a monumental and singular American voice.”

Jonathan Galassi is the president and publisher of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He is also a translator of poetry – including the works of the Italian poets Giacomo Leopardi and Eugenio Montale – and a poet himself. His own work has been published in literary journals and magazines including Threepenny Review, The New Yorker, The Nation, and the Poetry Foundation website. Past roles include serving as the poetry editor for The Paris Review for 10 years, and being an honorary chairman of the Academy of American Poets. In The FSG Poetry Anthology (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Galassi examines the work of many of the 125 poets whom FSG has published in its 75-year history, including Seamus Heaney, Ishion Hutchinson, Pablo Neruda, Derek Walcott, and Adam Zagajewski.

For more than 50 years, Frank Bidart has given voice to the inner self, to the depths of his psyche and the unforgettable characters that populate his poems. He is the author of several poetry collections, including Metaphysical Dog: Poems, Watching the Spring Festival: Poems, Star Dust: Poems, Desire: Poems, and In the Western Night: Collected Poems 1965-90. Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2016 won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize and the 2017 National Book Award. In Against Silence: Poems (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux), Bidart’s 11th poetry collection, he urges others to join the chorus. He writes of the cycles we cannot escape and the feelings we cannot forget. Our history is not a tabula rasa but a repeating, refining story of love and hate, spoken words and cruelties enacted. Moving among the dead and the living, the figures of his life and his past, Bidart calls forth. With nothing settled and nothing forgotten, we must speak. LitHub.com called Bidart “a gift,” and celebrated that he “continues his lifelong navigation of the uncertain spaces between haunting and love, and the fertile gap between words and the world.”