In the Shape of a Human Body I Am Visiting the Earth: Poems from Far and Wide by Ilya Kaminsky #sdsupress

In the Shape of a Human Body I Am Visiting the Earth: Poems from Far and Wide

 "In short, we aspired to create the book that we ourselves most wanted to read. We hope these pages provide you with some of the pleasures and edifications that we experienced while putting it together."

―Ilya Kaminsky, Dominic Luxford, and Jesse Nathan

San Diego and San Francisco, 2017

Book Description: From Rae Armantrout to Adam Zagajewski, In the Shape of a Human Body I Am Visiting the Earth is a chorus of voices from around the globe and across generations. A compendium of some of our beloved poems from our favorite poets, this slim anthology is the perfect companion for cafés, road trips, bathtubs, shuttle expeditions, and any other situation in need of the genuinely human

Challenges and Goals

The challenges of creating any poetry anthology are, of course, many, and those challenges become exponential when one may include any poem written by any poet at any point in history. We chose, if not exactly to ignore these challenges, then to take them with a Parnassus-sized grain of salt. Perfection or anything resembling ―flawlessness―in art―much less in a multi-author selection of poetry from around the world, over centuries―is as inherently impossible as flawlessness in translation. Our goal instead became something like the opposite of comprehensiveness. In order to make what you hold in your hands as readable as possible (as opposed to yet another guilt-inducing door-stopper), we gradually honed the available material until we arrived at a collection that we felt was wide in its reach, but still elegant; unpredictable, yet cohesive.

Editor - Ilya Kasminsky 

Ilya Kasminsky

Ilya Kaminsky was born in Odessa, Ukraine, and currently lives in San Diego. He's the author of Dancing In Odessa, and the co-editor of The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry. With Jean Valentine, he has co-translated Dark Elderberry Branch: Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva.

Editor - Dominic Luxford

Dominic Luxford

Dominic Luxford was raised on a sheep farm in the Appalachian Mountains of Virginia, and currently lives in San Francisco. He edited The McSweeney's Book of Poets Picking Poets, has been the Believer magazine's poetry editor since 2007, and co-founded the McSweeney's Poetry Series. 

Editor - Jesse Nathan 

Jesse Nathan

Jesse Nathan was born in Berkeley, grew up on a farm in Kansas, and lives now in San Francisco. He's the author of several chapbooks, including Cloud 9, and is a co-founding editor of the McSweeney's Poetry Series. He's completing a PhD in poetry and poetics at Stanford.