num_pages: 110
description: “Balaban’s emotional range is impressively wide and deeply human—by turns compassionate and angry, somber and humorous, earnest and ironic. His voice is strong; his poems are important.”— Harvard Review Guided by an acute moral urgency, Path, Crooked Path opens on Highway 61 and keeps moving across America and throughout the world. Juxtaposing his experiences in eastern Europe and southeast Asia against contemporary life in the United States, Balaban illuminates the humor and hypocrisy that often percolates when individuals are thrust into the mix of cultures. Whether driving past Bush’s Texas ranch, sitting at a café in Vietnam, or trading swigs of vodka with a Bulgarian exile, his poems look beyond the personal to help make sense of an often chaotic world. From “The Great Fugue” ...I am playing The Grosse Fugue, hearingthe faded voices of those good peoplewho did not want to see me falter, but took me in,schooling me in an intertwining of spiritsthat like music can fill a room, that is a great fugueweaving through us and joining generationsin charged, exquisite music that we long to hear. John Balaban is the author of a dozen books of poetry, prose, and Vietnamese translations whose accolades include two National Book Award nominations, the Lamont Award, and the William Carlos Williams Award. His translation Spring The Poetry of Ho Xuan Huong was featured on NPR’s Fresh Air . Balaban teaches at North Carolina State University and lives in Raleigh.
language: English
title: Path, Crooked Path
titlecomplete: Path, Crooked Path
genres: Poetry
ratings_count: 21
publisher: Copper Canyon Press