Return To The City Of White Donkeys: Poems by James Tate

Return To The City Of White Donkeys: Poems by James Tate

In his fourteenth collection of poetry, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner James Tate continues exploring his own peculiar brand of poetry, transforming our everyday world, a world where women give birth to wolves, wild babies are found in gardens, and Saint Nick visits on a hot July day. Tate's signature style draws on a marvelous variety of voices and characters, all of which sound vaguely familiar, but are each fantastically unique, brilliant, and eccentric.

Yet, as Charles Simic observed in the New York Review of Books, "With all his reliance on chance, Tate has a serious purpose. He's searching for a new way to write a lyric poem." He continues, "To write a poem out of nothing at all is Tate's genius. For him, the poem is something one did not know was there until it was written down. . . . Just about anything can happen next in this kind of poetry and that is its attraction. . . . Tate is not worried about leaving us a little dazed. . . . He succeeds in ways for which there are a few precedents. He makes me think that anti-poetry is the best friend poetry ever had."

James Tate is the author of 14 collections of poetry, the most recent of which is Return to the City of White Donkeys, published in 2004. He has received numerous prizes, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundations, as well as the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. His first collection of stories is Dreams of the Robot Dancing Bee. He is an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.