Books by Arthur Sze

Sight Lines

by Arthur Sze

Winner of the 2019 National Book Award

“The sight lines in Sze’s 10th collection are just that―imagistic lines strung together by jump-cuts, creating a filmic collage that itself seems to be a portrait of simultaneity.” ―The New York Times

From the current phenomenon of drawing calligraphy with water in public parks in China to Thomas Jefferson laying out dinosaur bones on the White House floor, from the last sighting of the axolotl to a man who stops building plutonium triggers, Sight Lines moves through space and time and brings the disparate and divergent into stunning and meaningful focus. In this new work, Arthur Sze employs a wide range of voices―from lichen on a ceiling to a man behind on his rent―and his mythic imagination continually evokes how humans are endangering the planet; yet, balancing rigor with passion, he seizes the significant and luminous and transforms these moments into riveting and enduring poetry.

“These new poems are stronger yet and by confronting time head on, may best stand its tests.” ―Lit Hub

“The wonders and realities of the world as seen through travel, nature walks, and daily routine bring life to the poems in Sight Lines.” ―Library Journal

The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems

by Arthur Sze

**Winner of the 2024 National Book Foundation Science + Literature Award**

"This book is an overwhelming feast, a treasure, and more than enough proof that Sze is a major poet." —NPR
National Book Award winner Arthur Sze is a master poet, and The Glass Constellation is a triumph spanning five decades, including ten poetry collections and twenty-six new poems. Sze began his career writing compressed, lyrical poems influenced by classical Chinese poetry; he later made a leap into powerful polysemous sequences, honing a distinct stylistic signature that harnesses luminous particulars, and is sharply focused, emotionally resonant, and structurally complex. Fusing elements of Chinese, Japanese, Native American, and various Western experimental traditions—employing startling juxtapositions that are always on target, deeply informed by concern for our endangered planet and troubled species—Arthur Sze presents experience in all its multiplicities, in singular book after book. This collection is an invitation to immerse in a visionary body of work, mapping the evolution of one of our finest American poets.

The Silk Dragon II: Translations of Chinese Poetry

by Arthur Sze

National Book Award–winner Arthur Sze presents a one-of-a-kind anthology that vividly traces Chinese poetry from its centuries-old lyrical traditions up to the present day.
In The Silk Dragon II, National Book Award–winning poet Arthur Sze presents a sophisticated vision of the vitality, diversity, and power of the Chinese poetic tradition. Traveling over one and a half millennia, Sze guides readers through a luminous history of verse, from the contemplative insights of fifth century poet Tao Qian, through Tang dynasty poets such as Wang Wei and Du Fu, and into subsequent centuries in which lived such innovative artists as Li Qingzhao and Bada Shanren, among many others.
Extending the work from the original 2001 volume, The Silk Dragon II then traces classical Chinese poetry’s eruption into the free verse of the modern and contemporary eras, introducing groundbreaking poems by the Chinese Modernist master Wen Yiduo, as well as those from major living poets such as Wang Jiaxin, Zhai Yongming, and Xi Chuan. Through this remarkable journey—deepened by Sze’s personal introduction—we see that the “impossible task” of translation is yet rich with encounter, as both long-lost voices and those still speaking enter the same conversation, with the same vivacity.

Into the Hush

by Arthur Sze

With imaginative power and emotional force, Into The Hush explores the exigencies of climate change, of endangered cultures, and of our nuclear age.
Like wind on a lake, Arthur Sze’s twelfth book of poetry, Into the Hush, extends a language that ripples and stills, widens and deepens. Through an earned and profound simplicity, these poems move with imaginative power and emotional force and gather a startling array of contrasts—from wildfires to a sprig of sunrise, from gunshots to a spirit evoked by swaying candles—to address the challenges of our nuclear age. Here, poems shadow sonnets and appear as haibun and ekphrasis, pantoum and segmented zuihitsu. They borrow the voice of an eraser and the voice of a jaguar. Even the aspen leaves speak. Sze harnesses a range of innovative forms to respond to the challenges of climate change, exploring what it means to live on an endangered planet. Written at the height of his powers, Into the Hush is a landmark publication. Sze enacts a thrilling journey from silence into sound, from emptiness into the rich panoply of existence.

Chinese Writers on Writing (The Writer's World)

by Edward Hirsch, Arthur Sze

As the United States and China move toward an expansion of political and economic relations, interest in China and its culture has never been greater. Chinese Writers on Writing makes a contribution in illuminating this corner of the globe through the works of some of its finest writers. With more than half the works appearing in English for the first time, Chinese Writers on Writing features authors such as Mo Yan, whose book Red Sorghum was made into an award-winning movie by the same name; Lu Xun, known as the Chinese George Orwell; and Gao Xingjian, recipient of the 2000 Nobel Prize for Literature. Edited by award-winning poet Arthur Sze, this is the first collection that brings together material by writers reflecting on their work, their processes, and the challenges of writing under China’s political system. This is the fifth volume in the highly acclaimed Writer’s World Series.

Compass Rose

by Arthur Sze

2015 Pulitzer Prize finalist

"Compass Rose [is] a collection in which the poet uses capacious intelligence and lyrical power to offer a dazzling picture of our inter-connected world."—Pulitzer Prize finalist announcement
[Sze] brings together disparate realms of experience—astronomy, botany, anthropology, Taoism—and observes their correspondences with an exuberant attentiveness."—The New Yorker
A child playing a game, tea leaves resting in a bowl, an abandoned dog, a foot sticking out from a funeral pyre, an Afghan farmer pausing as mortars fire at the enemy: in Arthur Sze's tenth book, the world spins on many points of reference, unfolding with full sensuous detail.
Arthur Sze is the author of The Ginkgo Light (2009), Quipu (2005), and The Redshifting Web (1998). He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

The Ginkgo Light

by Arthur Sze

“Classically elegant.”—The New York Times Book Review
Sze's free verse emphasizes at once how difficult, and how necessary, it is for us to imagine our world as a system whose ecologies and societies require us to care for all their interdependent parts." —Publishers Weekly
“Sze’s list-laden sequences capture the world’s manifold facts one by one, then through discursive commentary exact from them a sense not only of aesthetic order but of universal cause and effect.”—Boston Review
"Sze...here captures the energy of life in overshadowed daily events....His poems mine everything from geography, history, and biology to philosophy and nature, interweaving them to create a complex and luminous poetic texture....His poetry is an experience of awakening and pleasure that all serious students of contemporary poetry should have." —Library Journal
"Whether incorporating nature, philosophy, history, or science, Sze's poems are expansive. They unfold like the time-slowed cinematic recording of a flower's blooming...Sze has a refreshingly original sensibility and style, and he approaches writing like a collagist by joining disparate elements into a cohesive whole." —Booklist
A temple near the hypocenter of the atomic blast at Hiroshima was disintegrated, but its ginkgo tree survived to bud and bloom. Arthur Sze extends this metaphor of survival and perseverance to transform the world’s factual darkness into precarious splendor. “Each hour teems,” Sze writes, as he ingeniously integrates the world’s miraculous and mundane—a woodpecker drilling a utility pole or a 1300-year-old lotus seed—into a moving, visionary journey.
Mayans charted Venus’s motion across the sky,
poured chocolate into jars and interred them
with the dead. A woman dips three bowls into
hair’s fur glaze, places them in a kiln, anticipates
removing them, red-hot, to a shelf to cool.
When samba melodies have dissipated into air,
when lights wrapped around a willow have vanished,
what pattern of shifting lines leads to Duration?
Arthur Sze, one of America’s leading poets, is the author of nine books of poetry and translation. He is professor emeritus of creative writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts and just completed a term as Poet Laureate of Santa Fe, New Mexico.

The Glass Constellation New and Collected Poems

by Arthur Sze

**Winner of the 2024 National Book Foundation Science + Literature Award**

An affordable paperback edition of Arthur Sze's Collected Works--which includes many new poems--by one of the most astonishing poets writing today.

The Glass Constellation is a triumph spanning five decades, including ten poetry collections and twenty-six new poems, from National Book Award winner Arthur Sze. Sze began his career writing compressed, lyrical poems influenced by classical Chinese poetry; he later made a leap into powerful polysemous sequences, honing a distinct stylistic signature that harnesses luminous particulars, and is sharply focused, emotionally resonant, and structurally complex. Fusing elements of Chinese, Japanese, Native American, and various Western experimental traditions―employing startling juxtapositions that are always on target, deeply informed by concern for our endangered planet and troubled species―Sze presents experience in all its multiplicities, in singular book after book. This collection is an invitation to immerse in a visionary body of work, mapping the evolution of one of our finest American poets.

The White Orchard Selected Interviews, Essays, and Poems

by Arthur Sze

A poet's creative process comes to light in this latest book by National Book Award recipient Arthur Sze. Sze has assembled an illuminating selection of seven interviews, three essays, and poems to examine the evolution of his compositions, his decades teaching poetry, and his deep connection to the cultures and landscape of New Mexico.

A son of Chinese immigrants who was born and raised in New York City and on Long Island, Sze first studied science at MIT. His call to write poetry pulled him away from that academic pursuit, but the sciences would continue to influence his writing. In 2024, Sze received the National Book Foundation Science + Literature Award for The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems (Copper Canyon Press). Sze spent over two decades as an educator, teaching creative writing and poetry to Indigenous students from across America at Santa Fe's Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA). In this compilation, Sze is interviewed by his former IAIA student, award-winning Diné poet, editor, and visual artist Esther Belin.

Sze's fluency in his parents' native tongue, along with study at the University of California at Berkeley, allowed him to delve into Chinese poetry, both as a student and translator of classical and contemporary works. The White Orchard shows his wider connection to Asian American poetry across the United States and how he has drawn inspiration from translating Chinese poetry into English. Arthur Sze is one of our finest poets, and this collection demonstrates how literature can enrich us all.

Transient Worlds: on Translating Poetry

by Arthur Sze

Transient Worlds: On Translating Poetry is a personal guide to global poetry in translation by 25 th U.S. Poet Laureate Arthur Sze. Focusing on an accessible selection of key works, Sze takes readers through nearly two millennia of poetry from every part of the world, constructing fifteen different "zones" of literary discussion with a critical focus on the artistic dimensions of translation itself. To do this, Sze engages multiple translations of the same source poems-as well as original poems written by translators-toexplore deep connections between the acts of writing and reading. In Zone 10, for instance, Sze presents two translations of a single poem by Marina Tsevataeva, the first a well-known standard by Elaine Feinstein, and the second by Carol Moldaw, who employed a Russian-speaking friend to help translate the poem phrase by phrase. In another Zone, Sze presents a famous passage from the Iliad -translated by Robert Fagles-but rather than present another translation to contrast Fagles's, Sze instead juxtaposes the opening of Alice Oswald's book-length poem, Memorial, which uses numerous elements of the Iliad as a springboard to write through the original Greek and into her original, English-language poem.
Ultimately, Sze invites readers to consider their own acts of engaged reading as a creative pursuit, giving them tools to begin translating poems themselves as well those that will unlock foreign-language works-even from languages of very little familiarity-as inspirational sources. At its core, this unique anthology-published in association with the Library of Congress-showcases a profound goal of global literary citizenship: to open works up to all readers and to encouragepoetic creativity at the fundamental level of language itself.