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Angel Rain
poetry by Art Beck
foreword by Paul Vangelisti

Angel Rain is a selection of the author's poems written between 1977 and 2020. Versions of many of these were originally published in magazines, journals, anthologies, and limited chapbook editions. The current presentation is arranged thematically rather than chronologically. It incorporates a wide range of lyric and narrative verse and notably includes a long Odyssey-themed sequence, titled “Homage to Ithaca.” Paul Vangelisti, who published many of these poems in his guise as editor of various journals over the years, wrote the Foreword for this volume.

POETRY / General

ISBN: 978-1-951651-76-3 (print; softcover; perfect bound)

LCCN: 2022941823

Released July 2022; Copyright 2022

128 pages

Biography

Art Beck is a poet, essayist, and translator whose work has appeared in books and magazines since the early 1970s. Translations of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poems were published in Etudes: A Rilke Recital (Shanti Arts, 2020), which was a finalist for the 2021 Northern California Book Awards. His Opera Omnia Or, a Duet for Sitar and Trombone, versions of the sixth-century CE North African Roman poet Luxorius (Otis Books/Seismicity Editions, 2013) won the 2013 Northern California Book Award for translated poetry. Mea Roma (Shearsman Books, 2018), a 140-poem “meditative sampling” of Martial’s epigram was awarded Honorable Mention in the American Literary Translators Association 2018 Cliff Becker Prize. In 2019, his poetic sequence The Insistent Island was published by Magra Books in its annual chapbook series. From 2009 through 2012, Beck was a regular contributor to Rattle, with essays on translating poetry under the rubric “The Impertinent Duet.” His articles on the translator’s art have appeared in Jacket2, Your Impossible Voice, The Journal of Poetics Research, PN Review, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. He makes his home in San Francisco.

Paul Vangelisti is the author of more than thirty books of poetry as well as being a noted translator from Italian. Recently, his sonnet sequence Imperfect Music was published in a limited, bilingual edition by Galleria Mazzoli Editore in Modena. In 2015 he edited for Grove Press, Amiri Baraka’s posthumous collected poems, S.O.S.: Poems, 1961–2014. In 2006 Lucia Re’s and his translation of Amelia Rosselli’s War Variations won both the Premio Flaiano in Italy and the PEN-USA Award for Translation. In 2010 his translation of Adriano Spatola’s The Position of Things: Collected Poems, 1961–1992 won an Academy of American Poets Prize. He lives in Pasadena (California) and Bagnone (Italy).

Articles and Reviews