The Library of Seven Readings
Leonard Schwartz
April 2008
The sublimating and uplifting rhythms of his poems are pierced with veins of divinity.
Forrest Gander
A long poem, hand-bound and encased in letterpressed and rubber-stamped covers.
About the Author
Leonard Schwartz is the author of The Library of Seven Readings (UDP). Other books of poetry include Heavy Sublimation (Talisman House); Salamander: A Bestiary (Chax Press), with painter Simon Carr; and If (Talisman House). Schwartz is also the author of the multi-genre books of poetics The New Babel: Toward a Poetics of the Mid-East Crises (University of Arkansas Press), Language as Responsibility (Tinfish Editions), and A Flicker at the Edge of Things: Essays Towards a Poetics (Spuyten Duyvil). He edited and co-translated Benjamin Fondane’s Cine-Poems and Others (NYRB Poets), and hosts the radio program Cross Cultural Poetics, archived online at the University of Pennsylvania’s PennSound.
Praise
Leonard Schwartz's poems introduce philosophical meditation to emotional sensibility in a way that has become unusual in contemporary poetry. In his work, one feels the risk, even the vertigo, of the mind orienting itself to otherness, to world, and to language. The sublimating and uplifting rhythms of his poems are pierced with veins of divinity. One might say in fact that the body of his work unwinds a long Gnostic inquiry that begins to articulate the contradictions and complexities of a significant and richly felt thought.
Forrest Gander
In the News
Links
Review of Ear and Ethos on Jacket
Schwartz readings on PennSound
Review of The New Babel: Toward a Poetics of the Middle East Crisis on Entropy
Leonard Schwartz and Kathleen Eamon discuss Schwartz’s The New Babel
Review of Salamander: A Bestiary on Hyperallergic
Special Section on Leonard Schwartz in Talisman #48
Actualities by Leonard Schwartz
Publication Details
Chapbook
Hand-bound. 40 pp, 7 x 7 in
Publication Date: April 01 2008