The Avant Garde Doesn't Die and Never Surrenders

The late poet, Nina Cassian, knew the avant-garde's joyful flights and chivalrous desperation. In this collection, she brings poetry to a higher level by inventing a new language that is funny and challenging, imaginative and unique in force and grace. Framed from within by Nina's delightfully witty drawings, this book collects her most famous avant-garde poems, written over six decades. Cassian's decades of song set bodies and hearts in the enchanted state that flourishes above and below the edicts of dullness and the precincts of censure. Her glossolalic ease and ecstatic insouciance are among the finest arrows in poetry's quiver. - Andrei Codrescu Nina Cassian was a fierce and highly determined poet. Her work is so witty and clever, so mordantly funny and skillfully made, that it is impossible to underestimate her driving passions, her wild-eyed fevers, her ferocious presence. Her sense of wonder was intense. - Edward Hirsch Her previous books of poems were published by Norton.