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The Glass Constellation
  • Published: 28 January 2027
  • ISBN: 9781837312238
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 560
Categories:

The Glass Constellation

New and Collected Poems

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A career-defining collection from the 25th Poet Laureate of the United States

For the past five decades, Arthur Sze has been a major force in American letters. Deeply influenced by Classical Chinese poetry, as well as the interplay between philosophy and science, Sze’s luminous verse is attuned to the minutiae of our natural world and our place within it.

This volume brings together ten collections across Sze’s career, including Compass Rose (shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize) and Sight Lines (winner of the National Book Award), as well as twenty-six new poems. Moving from the quark to the jaguar, the sunflower to the Molotov cocktail, Sze’s vertiginous poems transform our atomized world through a restless, cinematic eye into an exploded network of surprising connections. These works harness the simple building blocks of language to construct rich poems that dazzle, like jewels in a chandelier, with a profound resonance and an irrepressible light.

The Glass Constellation is a singular invitation for readers to immerse themselves in a visionary body of work, mapping the evolution of one of our finest and most inimitable American poets.
  • Published: 28 January 2027
  • ISBN: 9781837312238
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 560
Categories:

About the author

Arthur Sze

Arthur Sze is a poet, translator, editor and the current US Poet Laureate. His poetry has received several awards including the 2025 Bollingen Prize for American Poetry for Lifetime Achievement, the 2019 National Book Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, Lannan Literary Award and was a 2015 Pulitzer Prize finalist. Sze is a Chancellor Emeritus of the Academy of American Poets and was the first Poet Laureate of Santa Fe, where he lives with his wife, the poet Carol Moldaw.
AS

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Praise for The Glass Constellation

Praise for Arthur Sze

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Arthur Sze is a treasure and a beacon of a poet, whose indispensable body of work offers no less than ‘a way to navigate this world’. These poems lead us through the intermeshing worlds of matter and spirit, science and instinct, to touch the beating heart of things

Sarah Howe, author of <i> Foretokens </i>

One of our best poets

Charles Simic

Inside these poems of billowing consciousness, we too are alive to a spectrum of wonders

New York Times

[A] bold vision of the world’s fragility: one of unceasing iridescence and glimmer, even in the face of ecological destruction and dilapidation

Oluwaseun Olayiwola, Guardian

This book is an overwhelming feast, a treasure, and more than enough proof that Sze is a major poet

Craig Morgan Teicher, NPR

Moving through human and non-human perspectives, Sze considers nature, time, and interconnectedness, in elegant and utterly arresting language

Megan Robson, Poetry Book Society

The sureness of Sze’s language and the clarity of his eye present a compelling picture of the world

Publishers Weekly

[Sze] brings together disparate realms of experience - astronomy, botany, anthropology, Taoism-and observes their correspondences with an exuberant attentiveness

New Yorker

Sze is a deeply philosophical word scientist; every increment of livingness has weight: history, experience, and sound. The lines move between the microscopic and the cosmic. The poem is a universe of unexpected juxtapositions—a droplet, a lichen, a bird, to create a fresh world

Bollingen Prize Judges 2025

[Arthur Sze] uses capacious intelligence and lyrical power to offer a dazzling picture of our interconnected world

Pulitzer Prize Judges 2015