Breccia: Selected Poems 1972-1986

Pierre Joris

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Breccia is an inspired grouping of poems from celebrated poet, translator, anthologist and essayist, Pierre Joris. After a limited initial publication by Station Hill/Guernica, this wonderful collection is finally available once again.

“[Breccia] is a showcase for poems from roughly twenty, sometimes rather fugitive, volumes, written and published during a time when Joris was living as a kind of postmodern nomad. One of the virtues of this in-gathering of work is that it makes clear the extent to which a sense of ‘nomadism’ — of being intensely in a place because one knows one has already left it — marks Joris’ poetry.... The sense of immediacy in his work is striking. But the images of weather and shifting light and shade that give so many poems their climate of feeling, always play against a complex flow of conceptual activity and the possibility, but only the possibility, of archetypal permanence…” — Don Byrd

“…This is honest, radical work, close to the beginning of a poetic disenchanted with its own airs and graces...Pierre Joris is a wonderful poet of remarkable breadth of concern and lyric occasion.” — Robert Kelly

“…The scope of the work is large, the thrust is synthesizing, the idiom particular and rich…” — Jerome Rothenberg

Born in 1946 in Strasbourg, France, and raised in Luxembourg, Pierre Joris has moved between the US, Europe & North Africa for 50 years, publishing close to 50 books of poetry & essays, translations & anthologies. In 1992 he returned to the Mid-Hudson valley where he taught poetry and poetics at the State University of New York, Albany until his retirement in 2013. He has lived with his wife, the performance artist and singer Nicole Peyrafitte, in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn since 2008.

  • ISBN: 978-1-908011-88-6
  • 214 pages
  • cover painting by Allen Fisher
  • perfect-bound paperback: 229mm x 152mm
  • black and white text
  • published 30th November 2014