Description: "Benjamin Fondane was that rarest of poets: an experimental formalist with a powerfully lyric poetic style; a near-surrealist who embraced and produced his own version of existential philosophy; a Romanian poet who wrote in French; a self-consciously Jewish poet of diaspora and loss, whose last manuscripts made it out of Drancy just before his deportation to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1945, where he was murdered, yet whose poetry speaks of a plenitude, an overflowing. After Fondane's death, the poetry might have been forgotten had not writers like E. M. Cioran kept the memory of the work alive, and in France today, Fondane's poetry is again widely available. This first American collection of Fondane's poetry includes his surrealist "Cine-poems," philosophical meditations, and poems that, in their secular/mystical Judaism, confront the calamity--and imaginative triumph--of European Jewry. Poems included in this collection are translated by Mitch Abidor, Marianne Bailey, E.M. Cioran, Joseph Donahue, Eric Freedman, Henry King, Andrew Rubens, Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody, and Leonard Schwartz"--
Review Quotes: "Of all his contemporaries, not one, not even those who were in the Resistance, wrote in revolt, mingling the flavor of life with death, like Fondane." --Henri Meschonnic
"Benjamin Fondane, Romanian Jewish immigrant writing in his second language, brought a narrative vigor and a lyrical, global, tragicomic imagination to French poetry that it has rarely seen since." --Marilyn Hacker "Cinepoems and Others...arrives with the force of a major literary event...throughout the collection, there is a genuine sense of commitment and love to the work of Fondane. It's a fitting testament to the work of a complex and enduring poetic voice." --Joseph Houlihan, Entropy Magazine "Fondane ... deserves to be celebrated outside France ... as his far-ranging gifts and accomplishments are at the heart of 20th-century Jewish artistic and philosophical modernism." --Benjamin Ivry, The Jewish Daily Forward "Fondane's polemical approach confronts the reader with some explosive turns of thought which may lead us to reconsider everything we took for granted about life and art." --Andrew Rubens, Glasgow Review of Books"I am proud to have known Fondane, learnt the elements of philosophy from particularly Chestov's and his own, special kind of existential philosophy, and to have been, at a crucial moment in my youth, greatly influenced by him." --David Gascoyne "I was seized by the force of his images anchored in carnality, and I had the feeling of listening to a voice that was both unique and powerful, the voice of a man who, unworried by literary effect, shouted out his human condition." --Michel Carassou