Michael Palmer's new book-a collection in two parts, "The Laughter of the Sphinx" and "Still (a cantata-or nada-for Sister Satan)"-contains 52 poems.

The title poem begins "The laughter of the Sphinx / caused my eyes to bleed" and haunts us with the ruin we are making of our world, even as Palmer revels in its incredible beauty. Such central tensions in The Laughter of the Sphinx-between beauty and loss, love and death, motion and rest, knowledge and ignorance-glow in Palmer's lyrical play of light and entirely hypnotize the reader. The stakes, as always with Palmer, are very high, essentially life and death: "Please favor us with a reply / regarding our one-time offer / which will soon expire."

About the Author
Michael Palmer was born into an Italian-American family in Manhattan in 1943 and has lived in San Francisco since 1969. He has taught at numerous universities in the United States, Europe and Asia, and has published translations from a variety of languages, in particular French, Brazilian Portuguese and Russian. He has been involved in joint projects with many visual artists and composers in the United States and elsewhere and has also served as an artistic collaborator with the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company for close to fifty years. Palmer's honors include two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writer's Award, a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, the Shelley Memorial Prize from the Poetry Society of America, and he was awarded the 2006 Wallace Stevens Award. In 1999, he was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

Reviews
"Palmer manages to cut deep into the unknowable appeal of the best poetry, some of which Palmer can claim to have written." -- Jonathon Sturgeon - Flavorwire
"Depending on the poem, the laughter here is by turns bitter, wistful even playful, but typically inflected by a sense of enigma. Returning again and again to songs and singing, to voices and voicelessness, Palmer continues to push the boundaries of poetry with dream songs that explore the place of poetry in a surreal world 'where headless horseman sing/fevered songs/of self and war.' Palmer writes with uncanny precision about this world, a world that this book finds to be as beautiful as it is violated, and his poetry often achieves an ecstatic pitch, but one in which pain is rarely absent." -- Jon Thompson - Free Verse
"Palmer's poems can suggest multiverses, silent but spectrally there." -- James Gibbons - Hyperallergic
"The music in these verses never exhausts itself [...] Palmer recomposes the measures of poetic song for our time." -- Benjamin Hollander - New York Times Book Review
"Magnificent ... an astringent blend of surrealism and symbolism." -- The New York Times Book Review
"Exemplarily radical." -- John Ashbery
"The most influential avant-gardist working, and perhaps the greatest poet of his generation. His genius is for making the world strange again." -- Village Voice
"Palmer is among America's most elegant-and abstract-heirs to modernist poetry." -- The Believer



Book Information
ISBN 9780811225540
Author Michael Palmer
Format Paperback
Page Count 96
Imprint New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publisher New Directions Publishing Corporation
Weight(grams) 145g
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm * 10mm