Proverbs of Limbo: Poems

Proverbs of Limbo: Poems - Paperback

$16.00
Sale price  $16.00 Regular price 
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Proverbs of Limbo: Poems

Proverbs of Limbo: Poems - Paperback

by Robert Pinsky
$16.00
Sale price  $16.00 Regular price 

Book Overview

A new book of poems by the three-time poet laureate Robert Pinsky, a writer "rarely equalled" (Louise Glück).

Robert Pinsky, one of our most ambitious, inventive, and finely tuned poets, takes an original approach to the fraught, central matter of borders in Proverbs of Limbo, his first new book of poetry in eight years.

In this collection, the poet mines and maps limbal regions: those spaces between differences that can be at once creative and oppressive, enlightening and dark, exciting and fatal. For Pinsky, they include the familiar borders between demographic categories, as well as limbal realities that are more personal--clashing ways of understanding, personal history and world history, health and illness, freedom and compulsion, intimacy and community, personality and culture--all the countless variations of in-between.

The title Proverbs of Limbo tips its hat, at an angle, to the great poet William Blake's Proverbs of Hell. Blake's jagged, contrary proverbs resist, from within, the binary rights and wrongs of conventional Christianity: "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom"; "The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction."

Here, Pinsky embodies a different resistance to different conventions of understanding. "The Buddha," begins the title poem, "is a liquor store / On a busy corner."
ISBN9780374609153
Author Robert Pinsky
PublisherFarrar, Straus and Giroux
GenreLiterature
FormatPaperback
PublishedJune 2025
LanguageENG- English
Pages80
Weight1.0 lb
Target AudienceAdults
Print SizeStandard Print

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About Robert Pinsky

Robert Pinsky is an award-winning American poet, essayist, and translator. He has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for poetry and the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. He served for three terms as the U.S. Poet Laureate, during which time he founded the Favorite Poem Project. His many books include On Poetry, Culture, and Democracy (Princeton), the memoir Jersey Breaks: Becoming an American Poet, and the poetry collections Proverbs of Limbo, At the Foundling Hospital, and Selected Poems. His bestselling translation of Dante's Inferno won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Among his other awards and honors are the William Carlos Williams Award, the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, the PEN/Voelcker Award, and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the PEN American Center. He is distinguished professor emeritus of English and creative writing at Boston University.

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