The Monster Loves His Labyrinth by Charles Simic

The Monster Loves His Labyrinth by Charles Simic

"Nabokovian in his caustic charm and sexy intelligence, Simic perceives the mythic in the mundane and pinpoints the perpetual suffering that infuses human life with both agony and bliss. . . . And he is the master of juxtaposition, lining up the unlikeliest of pairings and contrasts as he explores the nexuses of madness and prophecy, hell and paradise, lust and death."--Donna Seaman, Booklist

"As one reads the pithy, wise, occasionally cranky epigrams and vignettes that fill this volume, there is the definite sense that we are getting a rare glimpse into several decades worth of private journals--and, by extension are privy to the tickings of an accomplished and introspective literary mind."--Rain Taxi

Written over many years, this book is a collection of notebook entries by our current Poet Laureate.

Excerpts:

Stupidity is the secret spice historians have difficulty identifying in this soup we keep slurping.

Ars poetica: trying to make your jailers laugh.

American identity is really about having many identities simultaneously. We came to America to escape our old identities, which the multiculturalists now wish to restore to us.

Ambiguity is the world's condition. Poetry flirts with ambiguity. As a "picture of reality" it is truer than any other. This doesn't mean that you're supposed to write poems no one understands.

The twelve girls in the gospel choir sang as if dogs were biting their asses.

What an outrage! This very moment gone forever!

Charles Simic is a poet, essayist, and translator who was born in Yugoslavia in 1938 and moved to America in 1954. He has produced twenty books of poetry, a memoir, the essay collection The Life of Images, and various books of translations since 1967, for which he has won numerous literary accolades, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Griffin Prize, the MacArthur Fellowship, and the Wallace Stevens Award. Simic is a regular writer to The New York Review of Books and was named United States poet laureate in 2007. He is an emeritus professor at the University of New Hampshire and a distinguished visiting writer at New York University, where he has taught since 1973.