Neither Wit Nor Gold (from Then)

Author: Ammiel Alcalay 

Publisher: Ugly Duckling Presse (2011)

While putting together a manuscript of work written between 1975-1990, Alcalay became dissatisfied with the notion of a "selected poems." As a response, he began to comb through photographs, correspondence, memorabilia, journal entries, and newspaper clippings from the era, and incorporated them into his book; the result is a personal investigation into the relationships of context to text, memory to nostalgia, and present attention to the multiple traces of the past.

"Ammiel Alcalay is that rare thing—a gifted prose writer and poet, an accomplished intellectual and a true, as well as inventive, comparatist."

–Edward Said