Böcker av Jonas Zdanys

This latest book by Jonas Zdanys continues his multi-volume exploration of some potentials of the lyrical-narrative voice in poetry. This volume probes the epiphanic moments revealed by the lyrical voice and the human stories celebrated by the narrative impulse, both within and surrounding moments of immediate insight. The poems in this collection reflect those dual patterns, often taking the reader beyond set expectations and moving to more chaotic frameworks made possible by surrealist and magical realist perspectives. In doing so, Zdanys continues to present the world as an unbound frame where all things can be imagined and where human experience is not limited merely to the familiar. That has been an organizing thematic principle of several of his earlier books. It finds particular reaffirmation in this volume, which speaks through vivid imagery and textured language to present the contours of the immediate world lit by the poetic imagination and what it may mean to be human in it. "Zdanys is as close to consistently revealing luminosity as anyone." World Literature Today

This latest book by Jonas Zdanys presents lyrical narrative poems that speak through vivid multi-sensual imagery and the textured language of a master poet to present a resonant interplay of poetry and painting. Written in the galleries of the New Britain Museum of American Art, the poems in this volume are not just commentaries on the framed works in those galleries. They are, most essentially, expressions of the poet's commitment to hear and to extend the stories those paintings tell, and to do so by creating parallel texts in these pages -- paintings in words that absorb and expand the paintings in pigments. This book is a masterful example of ekphrasis at its best -- a mature aesthetic vision, a chronicle of what the poet has seen and imagined at the Museum, presented through varied perspectives and voices.

A classic of Holocaust literature from “one of the great masters of the short novel.”—The New YorkerIn the Vilna Ghetto during World War II, Nazi Commandant Schoger demands that all children be sent to the death camp. When Abraham Lipman pleads with him to spare their lives, Schoger reconsiders, and tells Lipman there will be a chess match between himself and Lipman’s only surviving son, Isaac, a chess prodigy. If Isaac wins, the children will live, but Isaac will die. If Isaac loses, the children will die, but Isaac will live. Only a draw will save the ghetto from this terrible predicament.The chess game begins: a nightmarish contest played over the course of several evenings, witnessed by an audience impotent to act, staking the lives of their children on a stalemate. This is a moving story of a father and a son who shame their cruel perpetrator with their dignity, spirit, and extraordinary courage. Stalemate speaks to the power of humor even under the direst circumstances. As a parable that gives voice to the unspeakable, Stalemate is an antidote to despair.“Gripping . . . a truly memorable work.”—Booklist