Author Description

The definitive collection of poems from an American original, Neeli Cherkovski. Neeli Cherkovski's SELECTED POEMS: 1959-2022 is the definitive collection from an American original. With his earliest poem in this volume beginning at age fourteen, Cherkovski reveals a youthful wisdom which grows throughout his career. For more than sixty years, Neeli has lived his life for the poem, chewing on the reality and wonder of being here, and the endless question of, what shall we do? His answer is clear: we must rejoice in the endless dilemma! In his foreword to SELECTED POEMS: 1959-2022, Charles Bernstein writes, "In Neeli Cherkovski's poetry, beat rhetoric melts into wild riffs then returns to metaphor; bunts, dodges, bows head in respect to disrespect: onward, impulse as image, becomes phrases, becomes sublime moment of stutter, stagger, implosion; till waves of loss get tossed in a walk down a lazy street, as memory of a friend, the darkening night of the soiled--soaring--souring--soul, the benediction of artfulness and refusal of refusal." "In Neeli Cherkovski's poetry, beat rhetoric melts into wild riffs then returns to metaphor; bunts, dodges, bows head in respect to disrespect: onward, impulse as image, becomes phrases, becomes sublime moment of stutter, stagger, implosion; till waves of loss get tossed in a walk down a lazy street, as memory of a friend, the darkening night of the soiled--soaring--souring--soul, the benediction of artfulness and refusal of refusal."--Charles Bernstein Poetry.