The Redshifting Web

Arthur Sze

A comprehensive selection of great poems by one of the most intensely musical and visionary poets writing today. This collection spans more than a quarter century of published work, including selections from five previous award-winning books, and makes available for the first time the full range of Sze’s remarkable poetry. Through the startling juxtaposition of images, Sze reveals the interconnectedness and the interdependency of things and ideas, always with an ear attuned to pitch and cadence.

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ISBN: 9781556590887

Format: Paperback

The Network

In 1861, George Hew sailed in a rowboat
from the Pearl River, China, across
the Pacific ocean to San Francisco.
He sailed alone. The photograph of him
in a museum disappeared. But, in the mind,
he is intense, vivid, alive. What is
this fact but another fact in a world
of facts, another truth in a vast network
of truths? It is a red maple leaf
flaming out at the end of its life,
revealing an incredibly rich and complex
network of branching veins. We live
in such a network: the world is opaque,
translucent, or, suddenly, lucid,
vibrant. The air is alive and hums
then. Speech is too slow to the mind.
And the mind’s speech is so quick it breaks
the sound barrier and shatters glass.

About the Author

Arthur Sze has published eleven books of poetry, including Sight Lines (2019), which won the National Book Award, and The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems (2021). His other books include Compass Rose (2014), a Pulitzer Prize finalist; The Ginkgo Light (2009), selected for the PEN Southwest Book Award and the Mountains and Plains Independent Booksellers Association Book Award; Quipu (2005); The Redshifting Web: Poems 1970–1998, selected for the Balcones Poetry Prize and the Asian American Literary Award; and Archipelago …

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Reviews

“Sze writes very clear lines, quietly musical in the way that ordinary speech can be if it has a sense of measure.” —Robert Hass

“In his best poems, Sze strikes off psychic riffs as weirdly oscilloscopic as the shivering flashes in Hendrix’s studio improvisings. He brings together disparate realms of experience—astronomy, botany, anthropology, Taoism—and observes their correspondences with an exuberant attentiveness.” —New Yorker

“The sureness of Sze’s language and the clarity of his eye present a compelling picture of the world.” —Publishers Weekly

“Sze’s recent poems seem dazzled and haunted by patterns.” —Washington Post Book World