Breezeway

With more than twenty poetry collections to his name, John Ashbery is one of our most agile, philosophically complex, and visionary poets. In Breezeway, Ashbery’s powers of observation are at their most astute; his insight at its most penetrating. Filled with allusions to literature and art, as well as to the absurdities and delights of the everyday world around us, Ashbery’s poems are haunting, surprising, hilarious, and knowing all at once, the work of a master craftsman with a keen understanding of the age in which he lives and writes, an age whose fears and fragmentation he conjures and critiques with humor, pathos, and a provocative wit.
“No one writing poems in the English language is likelier than Ashbery to survive the severe judgments of time....He is joining that American sequence that includes Whitman, Dickinson, Stevens, and Hart Crane.”—Harold Bloom

As always, his poems evoke the sound of a single voice engaged in simultaneous multiple conversations. . . . Ashbery remains an engaging trickster, still able to slip the occasional shrewd commentary (”Our networks will be joining you in progress”) into the playfully distracting chaos.” — Library Journal
“One of the most anticipated poetry collections this spring, Breezeway is delightfully ambitious and imaginative - which is to say, everything we’ve come to expect from Ashbery.” — Buzzfeed
“John Ashbery is the Walt Whitman of our postwar pop age, the prolific chronicler of American consciousness...Yet his long career has proven resilient precisely because-like few other species of modern poetics-he’s been so joyously able to absorb and adapt...Breezeway...is one of his best books.” — Interview
“John Ashbery’s Breezeway is one of the most anticipated collections of the year. Readers who appreciate his mind-bending work will find the same kind of challenging richness he has offered in more than 20 collections of poetry.” — Washington Post
“Ashbery’s familiar charms are all in evidence: his playful style and his stylish play, his knack for bent idiom and his rhetorical questions.” — Boston Globe
“If you’ve ever had trouble appreciating the disjunctive, not entirely sensical work of America’s most celebrated living poet, try reading it out loud after getting high. Studies show that this method is most effective with Ashbery’s later work, so no harm starting your experiments with his excellent new collection.” — New York magazine