Saga/Circus by Lyn Hejinian 144 Pages (5.5” x 8.5” Paper) ISBN: 9781890650346 $15.95 Satisfaction Guaranteed or Your Money Back Within USA Free First Class or Priority Mail Shipping To order by mail: Send a check for $15.95 to: Omnidawn 1632 Elm Ave Richmond, CA 94805-1614. Please include -your mailing address -your email address, should we need to contact you to complete order.

Here is the marvel of putting learning into play, ventriloquizing it as a puppeteer might. The “characters” emerge out of the text, first as names, then as activities, then like events with personal qualities—which then become part of the social affect, the climate of the text, the whole buoyant and mournful circus. It is all so very active. Along comes Lola!
—Carla Harryman

In her Saga, “The Distance,” Hejinian writes, “I’ve tried to give emotions/The slip/By attributing them to other people/Named Felix, Sasha, Nils, Miroire, and when a new one/Rises I will call it Sam…” suggesting that her constant stream of proper names is a trick invented to enable her to write her way through a poetry of the emotions. In fact it is an excellent trick, one that is as plain and direct a method of negotiating our particular moment and the questions it raises, for example "How in a world as totalizing as the one in which we live, can we imagine “metamorphoses” if “We are all so busy…the only time we can appreciate/Existence is when we are at sea/Subject to capriciousness”? Too busy to contain ourselves on land, we must keep ourselves populated by others; it is the responsible and responsive thing to do. In Hejinian’s work, it provides a means of mediating between the need for real in a post-real, the need for some utopia in dystopia, and a small but significant way of finding “paths” into the community to come."
—Rachel Levitsky

About Saga / Circus:

Saga / Circus, by the esteemed poet Lyn Hejinian, brings us two distinctly different long poems in which the tropes of narrative and lyric—their feints and demands—stake claims amongst the actual characters presented. In this playful yet penetrating pair of poems, it is the character of Lyn Hejinian's thought meeting our character of thought that is one of the most exciting and most constant dramatic events of the book—the richly sensational & subversive crescendos register as both melodic and discordant soundtrack.

About Lyn Hejinian:

Lyn Hejinian is a poet, essayist, and translator. Her groundbreaking book of poetry, My Life, published by Sun & Moon / Green Integer, has had five re-printings from 1980-2002. Her most recent books include A Border Comedy (Granary Books, 2001), Slowly and The Beginner (both published by Tuumba Press, 2002), and The Fatalist (Omnidawn, 2003). The University of California Press published a collection of her essays entitled The Language of Inquiry in 2000. In the spring of 2007, she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. She teaches in the English Department at the University of California, Berkeley.