A leading American poet reclaims the realm of criticism in distinctive and impassioned readings of poems and other works of art.

When I call poetry a form of partiality, writes Heather McHugh, I mean its economies operate by powers of intimation: glimmering and glints, rather than exhaustible sums. It is a broken language from the beginning, brimming with non-words: all that white welled up to keep the line from surrendering to the margin; all that quiet, to keep the musics marked. In Broken English, McHugh applies her poetic sensibility and formidable critical insight to topics ranging from the poetry of Valéry and Rilke to ancient Greek drama and Yoruba folk songs, offering intense, passionate, highly personal readings that are informed and unified by her concern for the relationships among language, culture, and poetry.

An exquisite series of poems that explore living and dying.

Shades is a book of shadow and light cast between trees and sun, between day and room, between life and death. It acknowledges endings as beginnings; it offers compassion and tenderness, searching for hope in the richness of nature; it seeks the same resources within the human being.

Heather McHugh's companion volume to To the Quick (Wesleyan 1987) continues the music and brilliance characteristic of her work but moves more deeply into the metaphysical. She writes in paradox, with serious wit and intensity, the crafted language of stitches in hand and birds in time; We part/ before we part; indeed, / we part before we meet... She studies going matched with coming. She begins with a series of elegies that bring sexuality and death into brutal juxtaposition. Living and dying are the occasions of these poems, the soul the ultimate concern. This poetry takes to heart the fundamental strangeness of being.

A renowned poet's artful collection is a striking body of work

Whether sorrowful or sassy, the poems in this new collection bear McHugh's signature: a lively love for the very language she bewares.

Available now in paperback, The Father of the Predicaments is Heather McHugh's first book since Hinge&Sign was selected as a National Book Award finalist and chosen a Best Book of the Year by the New York Times and Publishers Weekly. In this witty and deeply felt collection, McHugh takes her cue from Aristotle, who wrote that the father of the predicaments is being. For McHugh, being is intimately, though perhaps not ultimately, bound to language, and these poems cut to the quick, delivering their revelations with awesome precision

Scintillating new work from a celebrated contemporary poet.

Runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (2004)
Runner-up for the ForeWord magazine's Book of the Year Award (2003)

Heather McHugh's new book, Eyeshot, is a brooding, visionary work that takes aim at the big questions--those of love and death. The poems suggest that such immensities balance on the smallest details, and that a range of human blindness is inescapable.

The power of this new work comes from its delicate yet tenacious fidelity to the ever-unfolding senses of sense. The poems invite the reader to follow careening words and insights through passages both playful and profound. Her Fido, Jolted by Jove reveals the tension endemic to both language and living: the world itself is worried. Yet the same poem remarks the high price of any reductive fix: a brain this insecure may need another bolt be driven in it. This movement between anxiety and the human compulsion for order informs Eyeshot's darkly comic, 20/20 acuity.

Carol Muske-Dukes calls McHugh, with her comic-book moxie and her linguistic virtuosity, a kind of Superwoman of poetry. The poems focus on what is within 'eyeshot, ' or visible, but their true subject is their author's mortal acuity.--Los Angeles Times

McHugh's eighth book finds this acclaimed poet as odd and entertaining as ever, with her trademark slippery associative lines and jagged stanzas...but also subtly sobered by growing older while living through the grim political climate of the last eight years. McHugh's short, jerky lines, odd rhymes, bemused gravity and slant perspective on the world at hand bring Emily Dickinson to mind....McHugh remains one of our most important and unusual poets....--Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

Offering an idiosyncratic sense of sacredness, the book makes the earnest and the tongue-in-cheek almost indistinguishable....Writing in her signature relaxed iambic line, McHugh flips and winds the language of American common wisdom. In Upgraded to Serious...we encounter a poet who is listening assiduously. Her attention to language is visible in each poem's marked use of rhyme. The sustained outpouring of alliteration gives the sense that McHugh will never be out of breath.--ForeWord

McHugh's poems move as fluent wholes, thanks in part to her artful use of rhyme, rhythm, and portmanteaux. If much ancient poetry has become fragmentary over time, and much modern poetry begins as fragments, Heather McHugh's poetry blurs the line between fragments and wholes, crafting one from the other. She delights both in dilating linguistic fragments into astonishing new wholes and in exposing and excavating language's invisible fault-lines.--The Oxonian Review

If McHugh is serious, she's anything but grim; with all her punning, bantering, and mock scolding of herself . . . she brightens the shadowy corners of her world with verbal pyrotechnics.--The New York Times Book Review

McHugh is known as a challenging wordsmith, but, as this collection reveals, she is also a compassionate eyewitness . . . Her lines are animated but serious, and though they accelerate quickly, meaning and humor can be found in a single word.--The New Yorker

Her poems are open, resilient, invisibly twisted: part safety net, part trampoline.--The Village Voice Literary Supplement

One of Publishers Weekly's Best Books of 2009

National Book Award finalist and 2009 MacArthur Fellow Heather McHugh presents a fast-paced, verbally dexterous, and brilliantly humorous book. Utilizing medical terminology and iconography to work through loss and detachment, McHugh's startling rhymes and rhythms--along with her sarcastic self-reflection and infectious laughter--serve as antidotes to the sufferings of the world. Being upgraded to serious from critical condition is a nod to the healing powers of poetry.

Not to Be Dwelled On

Self-interest cropped up even there,
the day I hoisted three instead
of the ceremonially called-for two
spadefuls of loam
onto the coffin of my friend.

Why shovel more than anybody else?
What did I think I'd prove? More love
(mud in her eye)? More will to work?
(Her father what, a shirker?) Christ,
what wouldn't anybody give
to get that gesture back?

She cannot die again; and I
do nothing but re-live.

Heather McHugh is the author of a dozen books of poetry and translation. She teaches at the University of Washington and Warren Wilson College and lives in Seattle.