The Lunatic: Poems

From Pulitzer Prize winner and former Poet Laureate Charles Simic comes a dazzling collection of poems as original, meditative, and humorous as the legendary poet himself.

This latest volume of poetry from Charles Simic, one of America’s most celebrated poets, demonstrates his revered signature style—a mix of understated brilliance, wry melancholy, and sardonic wit. These seventy luminous poems range in subject from mortality to personal ads, from the simple wonders of nature to his childhood in war-torn Yugoslavia.

For over fifty years, Simic has delighted readers with his innovative form, quiet humor, and his rare ability to limn our interior life and concisely capture the depth of human emotion. These stunning, succinct poems—most no longer than a page, some no longer than a paragraph—validate and reinforce Simic’s importance and relevance in modern poetry.

Inside, Simic’s masterful eye for the uncanny and the profound reveals:

• Meditative Poetry: A single snowflake falls and rises, a mirror understands everything, and a lost button tells the story of a forgotten touch.
• Sardonic Wit: Meet the uncrowned king of the insomniacs, a rat writing a personal ad for a soul mate, and God playing a game of solitaire while Satan cheats.
• Everyday Surrealism: Discover a world where Death needs a button sewn on his coat and a horse stands quietly over your bed in the middle of the night.
• Poems about Mortality: From a ghost ship weighed down with coffins to the simple poignancy of a dead fly in a window, Simic confronts the end with a clear and steady gaze.

Winner of the pulitzer prize

Former poet laureate of the united states

This latest volume of poetry from Charles Simic, one of America’s most celebrated poets, demonstrates his signature mix of wry melancholy and sardonic wit—a dazzling collection as original, meditative, and humorous as the poet himself. 

For more than fifty years, Simic has delighted readers with his innovative form, quiet humor, and his rare ability to limn our interior life and concisely capture the depth of human emotion. These stunning, succinct poems validate and reinforce Simic’s importance and relevance in modern poetry.

“ ‘When our souls are happy,’ Charles Simic has written, ‘they talk about food.’ When my soul is happy, often enough, I want to talk about Mr. Simic.”—Dwight Garner, New York Times Book Review

“‘When our souls are happy,’ Charles Simic has written, ‘they talk about food.’ When my soul is happy, often enough, I want to talk about Mr. Simic. A great deal has been written about his poetry, which is comic and elegiac in equal measure. . . . The Life of Images has many things you’d expect from a poet’s nonfiction miscellany. There are book reviews, meditations on form, pieces on politics and moral themes. There is also a good deal of writing about photography and art, about which Mr. Simic is passionate and learned. Yet what’s really special about this book is that it demonstrates what a melancholy baby this poet is, in all the best ways. Again and again, Mr. Simic returns to his favorite topics: old records, garlicky sausages, late nights, Buster Keaton movies, candles stuck into Chianti bottles, laughter, swearing, his lover’s pink toes. His enthusiasms warm you up like a wood stove.” - Dwight Garner, New York Times

“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

“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)