Return to the City of White Donkeys

<p>In his fourteenth collection of poetry Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner James Tate continues exploring his own peculiar brand of poetry transforming our everyday world a world where women give birth to wolves wild babies are found in gardens and Saint Nick visits on a hot July day. Tate's signature style draws on a marvelous variety of voices and characters all of which sound vaguely familiar but are each fantastically unique brilliant and eccentric.</p><p>Yet as Charles Simic observed in the New York Review of Books With all his reliance on chance Tate has a serious purpose. He's searching for a new way to write a lyric poem. He continues To write a poem out of nothing at all is Tate's genius. For him the poem is something one did not know was there until it was written down. . . . Just about anything can happen next in this kind of poetry and that is its attraction. . . . Tate is not worried about leaving us a little dazed. . . . He succeeds in ways for which there are a few precedents. He makes me think that anti-poetry is the best friend poetry ever had.</p>