Kirjahaku

Winner of the 2005 Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry, selected by Billy Collins, a tour de force, ""Funny"" is a masterpiece of poetic, as well as philosophic and comic, invention. It creates a musing world where the issues are philosophical but the focus is always on people, on our most private ways of balancing our accounts. The poems are psychological; tender and humane, and somehow ruthless. This is poetry that swarms with ideas, that revels in rhythmic intricacy and literary references, but is also clear as a bell and tells marvelous stories.

A leading public critic reminds us of the compelling reasons people throughout time have found to stay alive Worldwide, more people die by suicide than by murder, and many more are left behind to grieve. Despite distressing statistics that show suicide rates rising, the subject, long a taboo, is infrequently talked about. In this sweeping intellectual and cultural history, poet and historian Jennifer Michael Hecht channels her grief for two friends lost to suicide into a search for history’s most persuasive arguments against the irretrievable act, arguments she hopes to bring back into public consciousness. From the Stoics and the Bible to Dante, Shakespeare, Wittgenstein, and such twentieth-century writers as John Berryman, Hecht recasts the narrative of our “secular age” in new terms. She shows how religious prohibitions against self-killing were replaced by the Enlightenment’s insistence on the rights of the individual, even when those rights had troubling applications. This transition, she movingly argues, resulted in a profound cultural and moral loss: the loss of shared, secular, logical arguments against suicide. By examining how people in other times have found powerful reasons to stay alive when suicide seems a tempting choice, she makes a persuasive intellectual and moral case against suicide.

The Wonder Paradox offers a lively, practical, and transcendent roadmap to meaning and connection through poetry. Where do we find magic? Peace? Connection? We have calendars to mark time, communal spaces to bring us together, bells to signal hours of contemplation, official archives to record legacies, the wisdom of sages read aloud, weekly, to map out the right way to live--in kindness, justice, morality. These rhythms and structures of society were all once set by religion. Now, for many, religion no longer runs the show. So how then to celebrate milestones? Find rules to guide us? Figure out which texts can focus our attention but still offer space for inquiry, communion, and the chance to dwell for a dazzling instant in what can't be said? Where, really, are truth and beauty? The answer, says The Wonder Paradox, is in poetry. In twenty chapters built from years of questions and conversations with those looking for an authen-tic and meaningful life, Jennifer Michael Hecht offers ways to mine and adapt the useful aspects of tradition and to replace what no longer feels true. Through cultures and poetic wisdom from around the world--Sappho, Rumi, Shakespeare, Issa, Tagore, Frost, Szymborska, Angelou, and others--she blends literary criticism with spiritual guidance rooted in the everyday. Linking our needs to particular poems, she helps us better understand those needs, our very being, and poetry itself. Our capacity for wonder is one of the greatest joys of being human; The Wonder Paradox celebrates that instinct and that yearning.

The Next Ancient World won the Tupelo Press Judge’s Prize in 2001 and has since won the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award and the ForeWord Magazine Best Poetry Book of the Year (2001).

We have calendars to mark time, communal spaces to bring us together, bells to signal hours of contemplation, official archives to record legacies, the wisdom of sages read aloud, weekly, to map out the right way to live - in kindness, justice, morality. These rhythms and structures of society were all once set by religion. Now, for many, religion no longer runs the show. So how then to celebrate milestones? Find rules to guide us? Figure out which texts can focus our attention but still offer space for inquiry, communion, and the chance to dwell for a dazzling instant in what can’t be said? Where, really, are truth and beauty? The answer, says The Wonder Paradox, is in poetry. In twenty chapters built from years of questions and conversations with those looking for an authentic and meaningful life, Jennifer Michael Hecht offers ways to mine and adapt the useful aspects of tradition and to replace what no longer feels true. Our capacity for wonder is one of the greatest joys of being human; The Wonder Paradox celebrates that instinct and that yearning.

Jennifer Michael Hecht writes delightfully tricky poems that wildly bend the sense of our language.--Billy Collins, former US Poet LaureateHecht's rhymes are irregular, gymnastic, pointed, and fun; she's found what so many would-be populists seek, an idiom entirely conversational yet able to sustain unexpected ideas.--The BelieverWho Said is a meditation on life's profound questions told through playful engagement with iconic poems and lyrics. Jennifer Michael Hecht's book is a magic echo chamber wherein great poems come back to us, altered to fit the concerns of our moment. This wildly interpretive treatment of Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, and the rock band Nirvana is original, occasionally hilarious, and always moving.From Not Stopping By the Woods on a Snowy Evening: Promises to keep, was a lie, he had nothing. Throughthe woods. Over the river and into the pain. It is an addict'stalk of quitting as she's smacking at a vein. He was alwaysgoing into the woods. It was he who wrote, The only wayaround is through. You'd think a shrink, but no, a poet. He saw the woods and knew. The forest is the one that holdspromises. The woods are lovely, dark, and deep, they fillwith a quiet snow. Miles are traveled as we sleep. He steershis horse off the road. Among the trees now, the blizzardis a dusting. Holes in the canopy make columns of snowstorm, lit from above. His little horse thinks it is queer. They godeeper, sky gets darker. It's the darkest night of the year . . . Jennifer Michael Hecht is the author of several nonfiction titles, most recently The Happiness Myth (HarperOne). She teaches at The New School and lives in the BoCoCa neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York.