Featuring a selection of new poems alongside five previous collections, this volume showcases the work of a distinguished poet celebrated for her emotional depth and moral insight. Drawing on personal experiences and vivid imagery, the poems explore themes of memory, relationships, and the complexities of womanhood. With influences reminiscent of Elizabeth Bishop, the writing captures the essence of life through intimate details and a compelling rhythm, reflecting on the joys and challenges of existence against the backdrop of various landscapes and historical contexts.
A daring, heartbreaking novel, Inverno is the book that J. D. Salinger’s Franny Glass might have written a few decades into her adulthood.Caroline waited for fifteen minutes in the snow. After a little time had passed, she was simply waiting to see what would happen. It was entirely possible he would not come. If he did not come, she would be in a different story than the one she had imagined, but it was possible, she knew, to imagine anything.Inverno is a love story that stretches across decades. Inverno is also the story of Caroline, waiting in Central Park in a snowstorm for her phone to ring, yards from where, thirty years ago, Alastair, as a boy, hid in the trees. Will he call? Won’t he? The story moves the way the mind years flash by in an instant—now we are in the perilous world of fairy tale, now stranded anew in childhood, with its sorrows and harsh words. Ever present are the complicated negotiations of the heart. This brilliantly original novel by Cynthia Zarin, author of An Enlarged Heart, is a kaleidoscope in which the past and the present shatter. Elliptical and inventive in the mode of Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights, Inverno is miraculous and startling. It asks, How does love make and unmake a life?
From acclaimed poet and New Yorker writer Cynthia Zarin comes a deeply personal meditation on four Italian spaces.Here we encounter a writer deeply engaged with narrative in situ – a traveller moving through beloved streets, sometimes accompanied, sometimes solo. With her we see anew the Venice Biennale, the Lagoon and San Michele, the island of the dead; the Piazza di Spagna, the Tiber, the view from the Gianicolo; the pigeons at San Marco and the parrots in the Doria Pamphili.Zarin's attention to the smallest details, the loveliest gesture, brings Venice, Rome, Assisi and Santa Maria Maggiore vividly to life for the reader.
From acclaimed poet and New Yorker writer Cynthia Zarin comes a deeply personal meditation on two cities, Venice and Rome—each a work of art, both a monument to the past—and on how love and loss shape places and spaces.Here we encounter a writer deeply engaged with narrative in situ—a traveler moving through beloved streets, sometimes accompanied, sometimes solo. With her, we see, anew, the Venice Biennale, the Lagoon, and San Michele, the island of the dead; the Piazza di Spagna, the Tiber, the view from the Gianicolo; the pigeons at San Marco and the parrots in the Doria Pamphili. As a poet first and foremost, Zarin’s attention to the smallest details, the loveliest gesture, brings Venice and Rome vividly to life for the reader.The sixteenth book in the expanding, renowned ekphrasis series, Two Cities creates space for these two historic cities to become characters themselves, their relationship to the writer as real as any love affair.
