The Glass Constellation

"Sze writes gracefully about both the cosmos and the natural world, mining vivid imagery that performs exactly what Ezra Pound wrote an image should embody, namely, 'an emotional and intellectual complex in an instance of time.' One poem segues into the next, moving from book to book with leaping, lyrical reportage that erases the speaker's ego but not his presence. Each of his poems is a proverbial drop containing the whole of the ocean of his poetry."-Harvard Review

"A new cornerstone of the Asian American poetic canon, Arthur Sze's career-spanning book collects early adaptations of classical Chinese poetry, his signature terrain-traversing sequences, and new work written in lines like microscope slides, long and translucent, each one isolating a single clarified perception: 'adjusting your breath to the seasonal rhythm of grasses- // gazing into a lake on a salt flat and drinking, in reflection, the Milky Way-.'"-The Boston Globe

"Sze is a distinguished translator of Chinese poetry, and Asian poetic and philosophical traditions. Image-based juxtaposition, openness to chance, ego-shattering and interrogative thought, remain central to this practice. The empirical and theoretical knowledge of the physical world, of which Sze has a remarkable range, enriches rather than competes with our emotional engagement... [W]ith full humility and wonder, the sense of the sublime does often arise, with its perplexing interplay of the minute and the vast, and its mixture of pleasure and terror, order and rupture." -PN Review

"There is an immense silence, or the clearest crystal-toned ringing, that emanates from the nearly three hundred poems that comprise Arthur Sze's The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems. This incandescent collection by one of our time's most masterful poets is an invitation for us all to see ourselves, our lives, this earth, and one another in clear, attuned radiance" -The Georgia Review

"Arthur Sze offers a stellar collection of lyrical poems that captivate the reader's heart ... This is a volume I feel very fortunate to have encountered. I am living with it. You will want to as well." -World Literature Today