Time Is a Toy ─ The Selected Poems of Michael Benedikt

Michael Benedikt (1935–2007), who has been occasionally grouped with the New York School poets, published five books of poetry in his lifetime, and edited several anthologies, including the influential The Prose Poem (1976) and The Poetry of Surrealism (1974). This collection brings together for the first time work from all five of those long out-of-print volumes, along with work from his five unpublished manuscripts, which were nearly destroyed after his death. Finally, this once widely published and influential voice is back in print, and a fuller understanding of the development of American surrealism and the prose poem in the 1960s and 1970s is possible. A lifelong New Yorker, Benedikt was at various times an associate editor with Art News and Art International, managing editor of Locus Solus, and poetry editor of the Paris Review. Benedikt also taught at institutions such as Sarah Lawrence, Bennington, Vassar, and Boston University.

Laura Boss, a national award-winning poet, was a first prize winner in Poetry Society of America’s Gordon Barber Poetry Contest. Founder and Editor of Lips poetry magazine, she was the sole representative of the USA in 1987 at the XXVI Annual International Struga Poetry Readings in Yugoslavia. Her awards for her own poetry include an American Literary Translators Award, and Fellowships in Creative Writing (Poetry) from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts/Department of State in 1986, 1992, and 1999. Her books of poetry include Stripping (1982), the award-winning On the Edge of the Hudson (1986), and Reports From the Front (1995. Her most recent book is Arms: New and Selected Work (1999). Her poetry has appeared in the New York Times and in the anthology The Poets of New Jersey: From Colonial to Contemporary (Jersey Shore Publications). She has been a featured reader at the United Nations, Princeton University, the New York Public Library, and numerous other poetry venues and universities in this country and Europe.