Hotel Insomnia by Charles Simic

Hotel Insomnia by Charles Simic

In this volume, Simic fills the wee hours of his poetry with angels and pigs, riddles and cemeteries. His is a rich, haunted world of East European memory and american present-a world of his own creation, one always full of luminous surprise. "Simic writes so simply that his words fall like drops of water, but they ripple outward to evoke an ominous and numinous world" (Washington Post Book World).

What happens when the waking world dissolves into dream, and memory becomes a haunting ground?

• Surrealism and the Everyday: Witness the mundane crack open to reveal the mythic, where a trip to the funeral home or a glance at a red pencil becomes a descent into the uncanny.
• Eastern European Memory: Journey through a rich, haunted landscape where Old World folktales and sorrows bleed into the American present.
• The Poetry of Insomnia: Spend the wee hours in the titular Hotel Insomnia, a world populated by angels and pigs, where sleep never comes but luminous surprises do.
• Haunting & Lyrical Verse: Experience the simple, masterful lines that earned Charles Simic the Pulitzer Prize, where each word falls like a drop of water into a deep, ominous well.

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.