5-3/8 x 8. 200 pgs. 22 photographs. (2000) Paper 978-0-472-08909-3 $17.95T  Available Add to Cart Search this Book's Content About the Book Praise Series Poets on Poetry Subjects Biography / European Studies--Eastern European Studies / Literary Studies--American Literature / Literary Studies--Poetry and Poetry Criticism

A Fly in the Soup
Memoirs

Charles Simic

Named 2007 U.S. Poet Laureate

The coming-of-age of one of America's best-loved poets, from his childhood in war-torn Yugoslavia to his bohemian years in New York City

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Praise for the Book

"The story, from the first sighting of Manhattan to the establishment of Simic's family in Chicago, is a classic tale of the discovery of America, made new and different here by the quirky and questing personalities involved. It is clear from the beginning this will not be the story of an academic poet, but a poet who will revel in the textures of American life, jazz, all-night bars, food, freedom. . . . In the brilliant twenty-third chapter, poetry is viewed largely as 'retrieval' of experience otherwise lost. Poems must be written as if only God can hear them. Simic tells the story of an Amazon tribe that places, as a religious ritual, a flute player at the bottom of a pit and then abandons him. After fasting, the flute player begins to play, for God. T hat is what the poet must do from his private pit. . . . A Fly in the Soup is an important and fascinating book."
---David Rogers, Seton Hall University, World Literature Today, Spring 2002

"The author takes us through his lonely renegade youth in Belgrade, his learning to play truant and to lie and steal to survive; he reveals his love of American movies, food, and jazz, and his lasting devotion to writing. All of this is told with an existential and absurdist disregard for plot developements and a deep imagist's love of detail. He refuses the distortion of narrative, and so his life moves along seemingly without purpose yet full of precious joy in detail. . . . This book helps to open us to the poet's stance in the world and reveals the dynamics of his mythopoetics and his original poetry."
---Larry Smith, American Book Review, November/December 2001

"What this poet is particularly gifted at revealing is the derivation of joys and pleasures from the most unlikely, and even forbidding, sources. . . It has about it a pungency of pain, fear, sex and death blinded into an extraordinary brew of life that is far from commonplace experience. . . . This lively and heartening book of memoirs. . . reads like a child's box of jumbled treasures, made the more wonderful by the oddness of their assortment."
---Anthony Hecht, The New York Review of Books, Volume XLVIII, No. 16

". . . more than a writer's account of his own formation; it is also the story of a man shaped by extremes of history, a story of displacement, war and exile--a central story of the last century and one that Simic, who never let horror deprive him of aesthetic and sensual pleasure, tells vividly. . . . Simic is a natural storyteller with an innate distaste for pallid truths, and his memoir is one of those books in which a life is so well-evoked that we recognize ourselves in experiences we've never had."
---Meghan O'Rourke , Los Angeles Times, April 1, 2001