Imagining Paradise

A world of poems as populous and diverse as it is ephemeral and evanescent, born of the world and of books and art in equal measure, yielding granite truths and feather truths of people's roller-coaster lives. The poet looks back, facing life and death and everything in between with equanimity, holding a steady hand to the quivering breast wherever there is breath.

Published in The New Yorker, La Nouvelle Revue Française, and in nearly a hundred magazines and poetry journals from Los Angeles to Tokyo, from Lawrence, Kansas to Rome, Madrid, Paris, London, Beijing, and Bucharest, poems by Barry Gifford have been describing and changing our world for nearly half a century. Here in one volume for the first time is the poet's own choices from his nine previous collections, as well as a rich selection of new poems. Imagining Paradise sums up the tremendous achievement of an underground poet who lasted.“Barry Gifford's pure lyrical self shines in these poems.” –Andrei Codrescu

“At his best, Gifford recalls William Carlos Williams: particular, lyrical but laconic, compassionate but unsentimental.” –Publishers Weekly

“These poems are like zen dominoes: no matter how shuffled, they always seem to come out right.” –Booklist

The author of more than forty works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, which have been translated into over twenty-five languages, BARRY GIFFORD writes distinctly American stories for readers around the globe. From screenplays and librettos to his acclaimed Sailor and Lula novels, Gifford’s writing is as distinctive as it is difficult to classify. Born in the Seneca Hotel on Chicago’s Near North Side, he relocated in his adolescence to New Orleans. The move proved significant: throughout his career, Gifford’s fiction—part-noir, part-picaresque, always entertaining—is born of the clash between what he has referred to as his “Northern Side” and “Southern Side.” Gifford has been recipient of awards from PEN, the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Library Association, the Writers Guild of America and the Christopher Isherwood Foundation. His novel Wild at Heart was adapted into the 1990 Palme d’Or-winning film of the same name. Gifford lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.