The Father of the Predicaments

Whether sorrowful or sassy, the poems in this new collection bear McHugh's signature: a lively love for the very language she bewares.

Available now in paperback, The Father of the Predicaments is Heather McHugh's first book since Hinge & Sign was selected as a National Book Award finalist and chosen a Best Book of the Year by the New York Times and Publishers Weekly. In this witty and deeply felt collection, McHugh takes her cue from Aristotle, who wrote that "the father of the predicaments is being." For McHugh, being is intimately, though perhaps not ultimately, bound to language, and these poems cut to the quick, delivering their revelations with awesome precision

HEATHER MCHUGH is Milliman Distinguished Writer-in-Residence and Professor of English at the University of Washingotn in Seattle. She also regularly reaches in the low-residency MFA Program at Warren Wilson college, near Ashville, N.C. She is the author of five books of poetry: Hinge & Sign: Poems, 1968-1993(Wesleyan, 1994), Shades (Wesleyan, 1988), To the Quick (Wesleyan, 1987) A World of Difference (Houghton Mifflin, 1981), and Dangers (Houghton Mifflin, 1997). She has translated three volumes of poetry: Because the Sea Is Black: Poems by Blaga Dimitrova (with co-translator Nikolai Popov, Wesleyan, 1989), D'Après Tout: Poems by Jean Fallain (Princeton, 1982), and Glottal Stop: 101 Poems by Paul Celan (with co-translator Nikolai Popov, Wesleyan, 2000). In 1993, Wesleyan published her literary essays, Broken English: Poetry and Partiality. Her version of Euripides' Cyclops (with an introduction by David Konstan) is forthcoming in a new series from Oxford University Press. Hinge & Sign: Poems, 1968-1993 was named a finalist for the national Book Award in 1994. Glottal Stop: 101 Poems by Paul Celan won the Griffin Prize in 2001. In 1999 she was elected a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.