A Day in the Life

A collection of essays by poet Ralph Angel, a second-generation American of Sephardic Jewish descent, that reflects on his upbringing, his relationship to language, and the poetry and art that have been his greatest influences. “I speak the word I because I am not anyone or anything else. I am my strangeness, my presence. And by acknowledging it thus, by naming it, I am intending, hoping, I am going elsewhere, toward what I am not.”Drawn from his reflections on being a distinguished translator of Federico García Lorca as well as the lectures he delivered while a longstanding member of the faculty of the Vermont College of Fine Arts, these essays smash conventional truths about writing by showing us that fragmentation has a symmetry of its own and demonstrating that the distinction between poetry and prose is, to say the least, superfluous. Including a foreword by David St. John, these are essays that reveal that Angel was as close and as engaged an observer of artworks of all kinds as he was the world that formed his poems.