Mary Ann Caws works on the relations between literature and art, and is the co-editor, with Hermine Riffaterre, of The Prose Poem in France.Theory and Practice (1983). Her recent publications include Pierre Reverdy (2013), the Modern Art Cookbook (2014), Surprised in Translation (2006), Surrealism (2004), and Blaise Pascal: Miracles and Reason (2017). She is a Distinguished Professor Emerita and Resident Professor of English, French, and comparative literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, the past president of the Modern Language Association and the American Comparative Literature Association, the editor of the Yale Anthology of Twentieth-Century French Poetry and the translator of André Breton, René Char, Robert Desnos, Paul Éluard, Ghérasim Luca, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Tristan Tzara. Michel Delville teaches English and American literatures, as well as comparative literature, at the University of Liège. He is the author or co-author of The American Prose Poem, J.G. Ballard, Hamlet & Co, Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, and the Secret History of Maximalism, Food, Poetry, and the Aesthetics of Consumption: Eating the Avant-Garde and Crossroads Poetics: Text, Image, Music, Film & Beyond. He has also co-edited several volumes of essays on contemporary poetics.
No longer to be understood as just another genre, the prose poem emerges here as a form of writing that unsettles our very notions of what poetry is or should be. From Novalis and Baudelaire, to such multinational writers as the Polish-Danish Grzegorz Wróblewski, from Rimbaud's Illuminations to the Japanese sanbunshi and the Surrealist prose poems of post-Saddam Iraq, these essayists give us a heady new sense of what ""postgeneric writing,"" as Steven Fredman calls it, can look like. There is something for everybody in this groundbreaking and truly global anthology.-- ""Marjorie Perloff, Stanford University""