Spell

A new collection of provocative work from the author of Or To Begin Again, a finalist for the 2009 National Book Award in Poetry

Ann Lauterbach is one of America's most inventive poets, acclaimed for her fierce, sensuous, and intellectually charged work. In her tenth collection, Spell, Lauterbach activates the many meanings of "spell": her sense that the world is under a spell from which it must awaken, to spells of passing weather, to her desire to spell out life's difficulties and wonders, and how sin-gle words (and their etymologies) might inform and enlighten our contemporary condition. In short poems, poem sequences, and a series of "Conversations with Evening," Lauterbach calls upon all her imaginative resources to locate a new hybrid poetics of reality, with wit, urgency, and candor.

Ann Lauterbach was born and grew up in New York City. She has been since 1992 co-chair of writ-ing in the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College, where she is also Ruth and David Schwab II Professor of Languages and Literature. Among the recognitions of her work are fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation (1986) and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation (1993). She is the author of nine previous collections of poetry, as well as three collec-tions of prose, including The Night Sky: Writings on the Poetics of Experience. She lives in German-town, New York.