Scribbled in the Dark (Charles Simic)

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning former poet laureate, a collection of elegiac, irreverent new poems-an American master at the height of his talent

The latest volume of poetry from Charles Simic hums with the liveliness of the writer's pen. Scribbled in the Dark brings the poet's signature sardonic sense of humor, piercing social insight, and haunting lyricism to diverse and richly imagined landscapes. Peopled by policemen, presidents, kids in Halloween masks, a fortune-teller, a fly on the wall of the poet's kitchen; set on crowded New York streets, on park benches, and under darkened skies; the pages within toy with the end of the world and its infinity. Simic continues to be an imitable voice in modern American poetry and one of its finest chroniclers of the human condition.

What happens when one of America's greatest poets turns his eye to the absurdities of modern life?

• Surreal Poetry: Find the profound in the mundane, from a fly on a kitchen wall to a shadow in a pitch-dark fishbowl.
• Urban Poetry: Walk the crowded, dimly-lit streets of New York City and other richly imagined American landscapes where anything can happen.
• Philosophical Poetry: Grapple with mortality, infinity, and the human condition in poems that are both hauntingly lyrical and deeply insightful.
• Literary Poetry: Experience the peerless craft of a Pulitzer Prize-winning former poet laureate at the height of his powers.

Charles Simic was a poet, essayist, and translator who was born in Yugoslavia in 1938 and immigrated to the United States in 1954. He published more than twenty books of poetry, in addition to a memoir and numerous books of translations for which he received many honors, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Award, the Griffin Poetry Prize, a MacArthur Fellowship, and the Wallace Stevens Award. In 2007, he served as poet laureate of the United States. He was a distinguished visiting writer at New York University and professor emeritus at the University of New Hampshire, where he taught since 1973. He died in January 2023 at the age of eighty-four.