Available now: Two Novellas: Marble Snows & The Study by Michael Heller

 Two Novellas (Press Release) (101.79 KB)

As with Michael Heller’s memoirs and essays, Two Novellas: Marble Snows & The Study continues his project of poetry by other means.

These works, written some twenty years apart and drawing on such diverse influences as Akutagawa’s short fictions, Joyce’s Portrait and Valery’s Monsieur Teste, embody Heller’s exploration of language’s dramatic relationship to character, fate and incident. Using radically different narrative techniques, the two novellas are united by a persistent vision, both anguished and comic, of a consciousness ransomed to words and yet, in mysterious ways, seemingly redeemed by them.

From previous comment on Michael Heller’s work:

“In the subtle resources of this articulate poet’s testament, one voice again speaks for all.”
            —Robert Creeley

“He’s somewhat a latter-day Jewish Yeats, full of terror and joy, trying to make some sense of the chaotic destructiveness of the 20th century in lyric poetry. It is heroic if impossible task.”
            —The East Hampton Star

“...a questing intelligence, forever on the trail of the epistemological, the ‘flimsy beatitudes of order’”
            —The New York Times Book Review

“At once grave and uplifting, the poems in Exigent Futures are serene meditations on time, decay, and loss that recover from the ruin a repletion that is also a recognition of our necessary incompleteness before the world and language.”
            —Jacket Magazine

About Michael Heller

Michael Heller is a poet, essayist and critic. He has published six volumes of poetry, the most recent being Exigent Futures: New and Selected Poems (2003). Earth and Cave, his mixed genre journals of the 1960s when he lived in Spain, was published in 2007. A memoir, Living Root, was brought out by the State University Press of New York in 2000. His most recent critical work is Speaking the Estranged: Essays on the Work of George Oppen (2008). A selection of his essays, Uncertain Poetries, appeared in 2005. His ground-breaking book on the Objectivist poets, Conviction’s Net of Branches: Essays on the Objectivist Poets and Poetry was published in 1985 by Southern Illinois University Press and has been reissued by Spuyten-Duyvil. His poetry and criticism have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies including The Paris Review, Conjunctions, Harpers, New Letters, The Nation, American Poetry Review and The New York Times Book Review. His libretto for the opera, Constellations of Waking, was set to music by the composer Ellen Fishman Johnson and performed at the Fringe Festival in Philadelphia in 2002. He has won prizes for his poetry from The New School for Social Research, Poetry in Public Places, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the New York State CAPS Fellowship in Poetry, the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Prize of the Poetry Society of America, the New York Foundation on the Arts Fellowship and the Fund for Poetry. He lives in New York City with his wife, the poet and scholar Jane Augustine.