Vincent Katz

Stopping time on the page to discover the poetic moment where past and present are one, Vincent Katz (called a poet of "vibrant cinematic hunger" by Eileen Myles) opens himself to the fleeting beauty of both culture and nature in this stunning gathering of new work. With his painterly eye and disarming concision on the page, Katz opens this book with a powerful image of "all time sequestered in the fold of a daffodil," setting the stage for an encounter with the immediacy we must embrace to see the world around us with clarity. At the center of this collection are his captivating poems about animals--"The hope in fear / In thrill to run" of the rabbit, the snapping turtle "nestled // Next to brother rock"--as the poems continually engage with the heady passage of days and years, and the promise to honor a life in the here and now, to walk the street with the sense that, "It's not about buying / But rather about feeling the air.""Whether in nature, or on a crowded or empty city street, was all a dream?" Katz writes, considering Daffodil. "Surely, there was and is still someone close, and that continues, as animals, despite war, despite incursions, continue. New York is a place of return, where we're aware of faces and other things; there, or in a field of flowers, in places in the distant past and present, love has some inexorable way of continuing." These poems evoke the exact scenes that command our daily thoughts, that usher in grace and beauty, with their quietly urgent moral qualities, which, Katz suggests, can shape our days if we allow them to.

I love the vibrant cinematic hunger of this book, its urbanity, yours and mine too." --Eileen Myles Friendship, love, and the potential energy of change animate these poems of walking through New York City--now in paperback. Broadway, the famous artery, both off the grid and definitive of Manhattan as it cuts its way downtown, is a metaphor for Katz's path through these poems. From Lincoln Plaza on the Upper West Side to the African Burial Ground and the courthouses downtown, Katz mines his native city for the deep humanity that undergirds its streets. His title, with its implication that one could give something as large and undefinable as Broadway to a single person, courts an impossibility that generates the possibility of friendship, as well as the largesse Katz wants to find in our civic discourse. In poems such as Ivanka Skirting and This Beautiful Bubble we encounter his reckoning with a divisive culture that can, he suggests, be healed through our daily acts--through a kind of alert graciousness that also defines his poetry. In this moving collection, we enter Katz's world, both public and private, and experience poetry as a way of seeing that can change hearts and minds.

Alex Katz has found his audience. It s not the first time. Over seven decades, the artist has developed his vision with determination as the tides of avant-garde and academic fashion ebbed and flowed. His first audience was other painters (including de Kooning and Philip Guston), and today, still, he is perhaps best understood by other artists: those who appreciate how difficult it is to make something so simple, so well. Working in a representational style while his classmates celebrated Abstract Expressionism, eschewing slick surfaces for a pared-down view while his peers went glossy with Pop, Katz cleaved to one vision, a few locations, and subjects. Katz s endurance and commitment to developing an original American style is explored in depth, from his boyhood influences to an artistic circle that included John Ashbery, Ted Berrigan, Lois Dodd, Kenneth Koch, Frank O Hara, Fairfield Porter, Yvonne Rainer, Larry Rivers, and Paul Taylor. Sketches, works on paper, and archival material selected by the artist s son, the poet Vincent Katz, give a fuller picture of the painter and his world. The more than 250 paintings reproduced at an unprecedented scale will be the most comprehensive collection available in a single publication.

Friendship, love, and the potential energy of change animate these poems of walking through New York City. Broadway, the famous artery, both off the grid and definitive of Manhattan as it cuts its way downtown, is a metaphor for Katz's path through these poems: from Lincoln Plaza on the Upper West Side to the African Burial Ground and the courthouses downtown, Katz mines his native city for the deep humanity that undergirds its streets. His title, with its implication that one could give something as large and undefinable as Broadway to a single person, courts an impossibility that generates the possibility of friendship, as well as the largesse Katz wants to find in our civic discourse. In poems such as "Ivanka Skirting" and "This Beautiful Bubble" we encounter his reckoning with a divisive culture that can, he suggests, be healed through our daily acts--through a kind of alert graciousness that also defines his poetry. In this moving collection, we enter Katz's world, both public and private, and experience poetry as a way of seeing that can change hearts and minds.

Vincent Katz's new collection, his first in a decade, presents an aesthetically and emotionally diverse series of poems that attempt to tune in to particular details of the poet's life, from friends and family to larger geopolitical issues.