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Arthur Sze has published ten books of poetry, including Sight Lines (2019), which won the National Book Award. His other books include Compass Rose (2014), which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. His poems have been translated into a dozen languages, including Chinese, Dutch, German, Korean, and Spanish. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he is a professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts and was the first poet laureate of Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he lives.
The recognition was long overdue when Sze won the 2019 National Book Award for his previous book, Sight Lines. This 500-page, career spanning retrospective is a fitting follow up, allowing readers to take in the full breadth of what Sze has achieved over ten collections published since the early 1970s... This book is an overwhelming feast, a treasure, and more than enough proof that Sze is a major poet. --NPR, Glimmers of Hope: A 2021 Poetry Preview In the case of poet Arthur Sze, 'master' is no misnomer... Sze as poet has been continually searching for new ways of making poetry alive, to make way for the breathing infrastructure of the poem in all its fragility and rigor. As a result of his dynamic poetic efforts, the map of human consciousness will have grown more detailed. --Kyoto Journal Review Arthur Sze writes with a quiet mastery which generates beautiful, sensuous, inventive, and emotionally rich poems. Sight Lines unfurls like ink in water, circulating through meditations on the natural world; the pleasure and associational depth of eating food; and the profound constitutions of self through memory, human relationships, and experience of the actual world. A keen awareness arises of structural, environmental, and social threats in the midst of this expansive beauty. --National Book Award, judges' citation, 2019 This is a poetry of assemblage, where violence and beauty combine and hang on Sze's particular gift for the leaping non sequitur... Inside these poems of billowing consciousness, we too are alive to a spectrum of wonders. -- The New York Times A collection in which the poet uses capacious intelligence and lyrical power to offer a dazzling picture of our interconnected world. --Pulitzer Prize, finalist announcement, 2015 Everything can happen in the teeming space of a stanza by Arthur Sze; almost everything does... Sze is hyper-awake to a chance that a petal may tip the balance of life; to the fact that 'we cannot act if we are asleep.' --Jackson Poetry Prize, judges' citation, 2013
