Edward Sanders

Softcover, 392 pages ISBN: 1-57423-117-0 2003, $17.95   America: A History in Verse Volume 1, 1900–1939 by Edward Sanders     Softcover, 428 pages ISBN: 1-57423-147-2 2003, $18.95   America: A History in Verse Volume 2, 1940–1961 by Edward Sanders Softcover, 428 pages ISBN: 1-57423-189-8 2003, $19.95 America: A History in Verse Volume 3, 1962–1970 by Edward Sanders Edward Sanders is America’s bard, the cheerful, chanting poet who sings our collective life and times, our “Seething Nation! Vast & Flowing! Day & Night & Dawn!” His present project, America: A History in Verse, is a free-wheeling, episodic, free-verse chronicle of the American Century, from the explosion of the Maine in Havana Harbor down to the present day. The first two volumes, chronicling the period 1900– 1961, appeared in 2000 to great acclaim. Now Sanders gives us a third, an account of 1962–1970, “the time of a randy young president with a bad back / who attracted the squint-eyed scorn / & even the hatred of the / National Security Grouch Apparatus,” of “a strange man named Johnson / & then the reappearance of an even stranger man named Nixon.” It was the time of Vietnam, civil rights, space shots, and evil—“the only word for some of it.” But it was also the time of the poet’s Fugged-up youth and Oh! what bliss to be young, alive, and high in those excruciatingly interesting times, those days “when we searched for meaning / in the sawdust floors of rebel cafés / or the stardust soars of psychedelic haze / or mind-stretching hours in front of / 4- and 8-track tape recorders / getting our brains onto friendly oxide / while we outlined our livers / like a Dan Flavin sculpture”! What a whirling hurry of years it was, what a flash of time! And what a necessary, twenty-first-century Whitman Sanders is, channeling Clio for our great nation,“where so many sing without cease / work without halt / shoulder without shudder / to bring the Feather of Justice to every / bell tower, biome & blade of grass." Long may Sanders sing us the 1960s, and long may his America “dwell in peace, freedom & equality / out on its spiraling arm / in the Milky Way.”   Hardcover,  262 pages ISBN: 1-57423-038-7 2000, $28.95 Softcover,  262 pages ISBN: 1-57423-037-9 2000, $17.95   1968: A History in Verse by Edward Sanders     Softcover,  240 pages ISBN: 0-87685-965-1 1995, $14.95 Chekhov poems by Edward Sanders Succeeds brilliantly in telling Chekhov's complex, fascinating life story. — Booklist When poet Edward Sanders, founder of New York's famous Peace Eye Book Store as well as of 60's folk-rock group The Fugs, undertook to write a drama based on the life of Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, he started with a poem. Hoping that a poem would engender dialogue and chorus refrains, Sanders' finished product was . . . a poem. Delving into the life of the classic Russian author, Sanders was so taken with his subject that he realized "a verse biography of Chekhov could extend to five or ten thousand pages" and his poem (really a series of short poems about the short life and revolutionary times of the author of "The Seagull") grew and grew. While Chekhov is slightly shorter than those five to ten thousand pages, it does contain "surprisingly detailed information about the social, political, and intellectual phenomena of Chekhov's Russia" (Booklist) and is written in verse that would do Pushkin proud. A must for any student of Chekhov, Russia or, for that matter, literature.   Softcover,  196 pages ISBN: 0-87685-899-X 1993, $14.95   Hymn to the Rebel Cafe: Poems by Edward Sanders