You Kiss by th' Book: New Poems from Shakespeare's Line (Gary Soto Poems, Poems for Shakespeare Fans) - Softcover

Soto, Gary

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1452148295 ISBN 13: 9781452148298

Publisher: Chronicle Books, 2016

Synopsis

In his engaging new collection, National Book Award finalist Gary Soto creates poems that each begin with a line from Shakespeare and then continue in Soto's fresh and accessible verse. Drawing on moments from the sonnets, Hamlet, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Romeo and Juliet, and others, Soto illuminates aspects of the source material while taking his poems in directions of their own, strategically employing the color of "thee" and "thine," kings, thieves, and lovers. The results are inspired, by turns meditative, playful, and moving, and consistently fascinating for the conversation they create between the Bard's time and language and our own here and now.

About this title

About the Author:

Gary Soto is the author of 11 poetry collections for adults, including New and Selected Poems, a finalist for the National Book Award. His poems have appeared in many literary magazines and publications. He lives in Berkeley, California.

Review:

"Gary Soto is a consummate storyteller . . . intelligent, funny, and bitingly honest. He is also a craftsman, a master of metaphor and simile, his language capable of dazzling somersaults."
-Martin Espada

"Shakespeare's words are never more alive than when they are being seized upon, twisted, remade and made anew. Gary Soto, a brilliant recycler, has laden his ship with old gold. Himself a brilliant recycler, Shakespeare might well have been pleased."
-Stephen Greenblatt
General Editor, The Norton Shakespeare

"If we needed any evidence that Shakespeare is still (in that horrible word) "relevant," and if we needed any that Gary Soto is an authentic voice of what poetry can be-must be-at this moment, You Kiss By th' Book provides it. Soto uses a line of Shakespeare as the first line of each of his new, wonderful poems, making something completely and recognizably his own. These are poems that are playful, smart, surprising, and affecting-poems that are easy to read and difficult to forget."
-David Scott Kastan
Yale University

"I read Gary Soto's poems with delight. There's no one I know, certainly in this language, who writes like him."
-Gerald Stern

"Soto insists on the possibility of a redemptive power, and he celebrates the heroic, quixotic capacity for survival in human beings and the natural world."
-Publishers Weekly

About this edition

• Publisher: Chronicle Books
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1452148295
• ISBN 13: 9781452148298
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 108