Lunatic

Charles Simic, poet, essayist, and translator, was born in Yugoslavia in 1938 and immigrated to the United States in 1954. Since 1967, he has published twenty books of his own poetry, in addition to a memoir; the essay collection The Life of Images; and numerous books of translations for which he has received many literary awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Griffin Prize, the MacArthur Fellowship, and the Wallace Stevens Award. Simic is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and in 2007 was chosen as poet laureate of the United States. He is emeritus professor at the University of New Hampshire, where he has taught since 1973, and is distinguished visiting writer at New York University.

"Charles Simic's The Lunatic is a series of short, vivid poems. Each magnifies a moment or scene to highlight its complexity, humor or strangeness... Every page has its own vibrant life, sometimes troubling or poignant." -- Washington Post "70 grimly playful poems that confirm his position among the literary elite...Unvarnished yet profound, these poems show a boundless sensitivity underneath their impish presentation...Simic's new collection is an outlandish and masterly mixture of morbidity and heartfelt yearning." -- Publishers Weekly "Driven by his signature melancholy and sardonic humor...Spiked with clues to larger mysteries, Simic's unnerving puzzle poems are works of insomniac witnessing and tempered love for our precious, haunted, rapturous, and dangerous world..." -- Booklist (starred review) "Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Simic brings a nuanced, cosmopolitan perspective to his essays, which explore art, intellect, his childhood memories, and the immigrant experience in America." -- O, the Oprah Magazine "The Lunatic, his newest poetry collection, is his thirty-sixth. Simultaneously, Ecco, his publisher, has brought out The Life of Images: Selected Prose ,... the cream of his six previous prose collections... one of our finest poets,... a singularly engaging, eminently sane American essayist." -- New York Review of Books