Exceptions and Melancholies

*Total season's marketing budget of $18,000; individual book budget of $3,000 *Newsletter and catalog feature mailed to entire Sarabande database and to Angel's personal contacts *2,000 postcards mailed to MFA programs, bookstores, libraries, and Angel's personal contacts *Double publicity with simultaneous publication of Angel's translation of Lorca's Poem of the Deep Song *Plans to build on publicity contacts garnered from Angel's previous publication of Twice Removed with Sarabande in 2001, including over 30 reading venues and almost a dozen reviewers that supported his last book. * Author tour: Berkeley, CA; Los Angeles, CA; Pasadena, CA; San Diego, CA; San Francisco, CA; San Jose, CA; Santa Cruz, CA; Washington, DC; Miami, FL; Chicago, IL; Iowa City, IA; Baton Rouge, LA; Amherst, MA; Boston, MA; Cambridge, MA; Provincetown, MA; Ann Arbor, MI; Detroit MI; Kalamazoo, MI; Minneapolis, MN; Oxford, MS; Las Vegas, NV; New York, NY; Wilmington, NC; Oxford, OH; Portland, OR; Philadelphia, PA; Chattanooga, TN; Austin, TX; Dallas, TX; San Antonio, TX; Salt Lake City, UT; Montpelier, VT; Charlottesville, VA; Seattle, WA

Exhilarating, dangerous new poems and a generous selection of previous work.“He brings something ancient and compelling . . . a kind of rare Sephardic wisdom, a brilliance traveling at the speed of Los Angeles light. He is one of America’s very best poets. A true visionary.”—Tomaz Salamun   “Angel’s poems are deceptively quiet, deceptively calm. Beneath their carefully constructed surfaces, they are wild, even intimidating. The power of restraint in poetry cannot be overestimated. . . . These poems burn from within.”—Carol Muske-Dukes, LA Times With the publication of his award-winning volumes, Anxious Latitudes, Neither World, and Twice Removed, Ralph Angel has won the admiration of readers of contemporary poetry for the extraordinary abstract lyricism of his poems. There is a superb grace, speculative intelligence, and a wry philosophical wisdom to Angel’s poetry. There are few poets so accomplished at creating an elegant yet innovative and provocative voice. Now, in Ralph Angel’s Exceptions and Melancholies: Poems 1986–2006, we find ourselves again in the presence of poetry that will move us even closer to a new and renewed promise of the American sublime. As Mark Doty has written, “These are the poems of a casual, down-to-earth philosopher who’s been spun around and turned inside out by loss, by the desolation of life in the late [and early] hours of the century. . . . Angel’s poems are stamped indelibly with the mark of a unique, shaping imagination, and they’re fresh with news of how it feels to live right now. He creates himself and his poems’ characters, strange people in a strangely familiar place. We recognize them, of course, as well we might since they are ourselves and the city where they live is ours. Ralph Angel is the author of three previous collections of poetry: Anxious Latitudes; Neither World, which received the 1995 James Laughlin Award of The Academy of American Poets; and Twice Removed; as well as a translation of Federico García Lorca’s Poem of the Deep Song. Angel’s poems have appeared in scores of magazines and anthologies, both here and abroad, and recent literary awards include a gift from the Elgin Cox Trust, a Pushcart Prize, the 2003 Willis Barnstone Poetry Translation Prize, a Fulbright Foundation fellowship, and the Bess Hokin Award of the...