From Publishers Weekly
Koch passed away this summer at 77 after a battle with leukemia, having recently produced some of the strongest work of his career: 2000's New Addresses (an NBA finalist). These two volumes-one of new work and one of poems that preceded his 1960 debut Ko, or A Season on Earth-show Koch at his various best. Sun Out catches Koch assembling the dictions (and plentiful exclamation points) he would later synthesize into his distinctive hall of linguistic mirrors, yet these '50s poems, like those of Koch's New York School brethren Ashbery and O'Hara, speak remarkably directly to our own "circumstances the Afghanistan flowers/ The feet under the hue of/ The mid-Atlantic." The long poem "When the Sun Tries to Go On" looks back to Stevens's "The Comedian as the Letter C," and forward to O'Hara's "Second Avenue." A Possible World's one-act verse plays, one-line poems, autobiographical reminiscences and long, mock-Byronic narratives display Koch's verve and light touch, but are unmistakably colored by requiem. The opening "Bel Canto" gives thanks "For love itself, and friendship its co-agent" in the ottava rima of Koch's long poem Ko, while "Variations on Home and Abroad" returns to Ko's thoughts about national origins. "To Buddhism" harks back to last year's New Addresses, and introduces the short poems about European and Asian travel that comprise much of the book. Those poems combine autobiographical nostalgia with a trademark whimsy: "The Acropolis has a uniform/ That no schoolboy can wear because it is invisible./ 'It goes to the Periclean School!' " The title poem's typographical festival pays Mallarm an homage to "Mondo universal collectivity/ Mondo aggrandizement/ Mondo nothing left to teach," while the concluding "A Memoir," finds, wryly, "Someone is singing/ On the landing below/ The arc strike of a pen on paper/ Doesn't put one in the show." Koch, as these two books amply demonstrate, most definitely remains in our collective performance. (Oct. 19) Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Given Koch's recent death at the age of 77, it is entirely fitting that his last collection, A Possible World, ends with a poem titled "A Memoir" that explores the entire concept of revisiting one's life (as poets so often do). "What shall I put in my memoir/ Kansas City/ Got off bus to get a haircut there, " muses the poet in lines that typify his style: off the cuff, vernacular, a bit tongue in cheek. That style has been evident throughout his distinguished career (he's won a host of awards, including the first Phi Beta Kappa Award for poetry, and was a National Book Award finalist in 2000 for New Addresses), and it's a pleasure to see him in good fighting form here. Though these poems were written near the end of Koch's life, they aren't terribly overcast or elegiac, and despite the final poem, he seems less interested in exploring his own life than in chronicling a whole array of "possible worlds." It is particularly instructive to read this book in conjunction with Sun Out, a collection of early poems that Koch observed "are in such a different style that they never seemed to fit into my books." Koch was hanging out with a lot of painters at the time, and these poems do have more concrete imagery and perhaps tamer lines than his other works, but Koch's classic snap, crackle, and pop are still there. These books serve as fine testimonials to an important American poet and should be considered by most libraries.Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Koch sets the scene for the exuberant poems collected for the first time in Sun Out by describing the poets and painters who goaded him on in early 1950s New York, including Larry Rivers, who died not long after Koch. Then in his twenties, Koch plays extravagantly with language, juggling words like brightly colored objects, or notes in a scale without rules or limitations. The world he describes is giddy in its animation and interconnectedness as parts of the body have their say, love and friendship work their magic and mischief, and the poet decries racism, fails to get a teaching job, and turns 29. Nearly half the book is devoted to "When the Sun Tries to Go On," a jazzy, whirlwind word-collage in which the poet circles the world and samples everything life offers. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Book Description
Mr. Koch’s poems have a natural voice, they are quick, alert, instinctive . . . He has vivacity and go, originality of perception and intoxication with life. Most important of all, he is not dull.” --Frank O’Hara, Poetry, 1955

Gathered together for the first time, the exciting, startling early work of one of our finest poets. Writing as a young man in the 1950s, Koch, a member of the now famed New York School along with John Ashbery, Larry Rivers, Frank O’Hara, and others, experimented with the delicate balance between sound and sense to offer a series of poems resembling music or abstract painting. For example, he opens the title poem with: “Bananas, piers, limericks / I am postures / Over there, I, are / The lakes of delectation / Sea, sea you!”
Also included are a selection of short plays in verse and Koch’s innovative masterpiece, “When the Sun Tries to Go On,” a poem that “produces a radical reworking of the life-poem myth predominant in American poetics since ‘Song of Myself’” (William Watkins, In the Process of Poetry).

About “When the Sun Tries to Go On,” David Lehman wrote, “Koch takes a great deal of delight in the sounds of words and his consciousness of them; he splashes them like paint on a page with enthusiastic puns, internal rhymes, titles of books, names of friends, and seems surprised as we are at the often witty outcome” (Poetry, 1968).

When the poems in Sun Out were originally published, they set a standard for the freshness and surprise of language used in extraordinary ways. For almost five decades they have delighted readers lucky enough to find them. It is our pleasure to make them once again available in this new and provocative collection.

From the Inside Flap
Mr. Koch’s poems have a natural voice, they are quick, alert, instinctive . . . He has vivacity and go, originality of perception and intoxication with life. Most important of all, he is not dull.” --Frank O’Hara, Poetry, 1955

Gathered together for the first time, the exciting, startling early work of one of our finest poets. Writing as a young man in the 1950s, Koch, a member of the now famed New York School along with John Ashbery, Larry Rivers, Frank O’Hara, and others, experimented with the delicate balance between sound and sense to offer a series of poems resembling music or abstract painting. For example, he opens the title poem with: “Bananas, piers, limericks / I am postures / Over there, I, are / The lakes of delectation / Sea, sea you!”
Also included are a selection of short plays in verse and Koch’s innovative masterpiece, “When the Sun Tries to Go On,” a poem that “produces a radical reworking of the life-poem myth predominant in American poetics since ‘Song of Myself’” (William Watkins, In the Process of Poetry).

About “When the Sun Tries to Go On,” David Lehman wrote, “Koch takes a great deal of delight in the sounds of words and his consciousness of them; he splashes them like paint on a page with enthusiastic puns, internal rhymes, titles of books, names of friends, and seems surprised as we are at the often witty outcome” (Poetry, 1968).

When the poems in Sun Out were originally published, they set a standard for the freshness and surprise of language used in extraordinary ways. For almost five decades they have delighted readers lucky enough to find them. It is our pleasure to make them once again available in this new and provocative collection.

About the Author
Kenneth Koch has published many volumes of poetry, including New Addresses, Straits and One Train. He was awarded the Bollingen Prize for Poetry in 1995, in 1996 he received the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry awarded by the Library of Congress, and he received the first Phi Beta Kappa Poetry award in November of 2001. His short plays, many of them produced off- and off-off-Broadway, are collected in The Gold Standard: A Book of Plays. He has also written several books about poetry, including Wishes, Lies, and Dreams; Rose, Where Did You Get That Red?; and, most recently, Making Your Own Days: The Pleasures of Reading and Writing Poetry. He taught undergraduates at Columbia University for many years. He passed away in 2002.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Mr. Koch’s poems have a natural voice, they are quick, alert, instinctive . . . He has vivacity and go, originality of perception and intoxication with life. Most important of all, he is not dull.” --Frank O’Hara, Poetry, 1955
Gathered together for the first time, the exciting, startling early work of one of our finest poets. Writing as a young man in the 1950s, Koch, a member of the now famed New York School along with John Ashbery, Larry Rivers, Frank O’Hara, and others, experimented with the delicate balance between sound and sense to offer a series of poems resembling music or abstract painting. For example, he opens the title poem with: “Bananas, piers, limericks / I am postures / Over there, I, are / The lakes of delectation / Sea, sea you!”
Also included are a selection of short plays in verse and Koch’s innovative masterpiece, “When the Sun Tries to Go On,” a poem that “produces a radical reworking of the life-poem myth predominant in American poetics since ‘Song of Myself’” (William Watkins, In the Process of Poetry).
About “When the Sun Tries to Go On,” David Lehman wrote, “Koch takes a great deal of delight in the sounds of words and his consciousness of them; he splashes them like paint on a page with enthusiastic puns, internal rhymes, titles of books, names of friends, and seems surprised as we are at the often witty outcome” (Poetry, 1968).
When the poems in Sun Out were originally published, they set a standard for the freshness and surprise of language used in extraordinary ways. For almost five decades they have delighted readers luckyenough to find them. It is our pleasure to make them once again available in this new and provocative collection.

Author Biography: Kenneth Koch has published many volumes of poetry, including New Addresses, Straits and One Train. He was awarded the Bollingen Prize for Poetry in 1995, in 1996 he received the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry awarded by the Library of Congress, and he received the first Phi Beta Kappa Poetry award in November of 2001. His short plays, many of them produced off- and off-off-Broadway, are collected in The Gold Standard: A Book of Plays. He has also written several books about poetry, including Wishes, Lies, and Dreams; Rose, Where Did You Get That Red?; and, most recently, Making Your Own Days: The Pleasures of Reading and Writing Poetry. He taught undergraduates at Columbia University for many years. He passed away in 2002.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Koch passed away this summer at 77 after a battle with leukemia, having recently produced some of the strongest work of his career: 2000's New Addresses (an NBA finalist). These two volumes-one of new work and one of poems that preceded his 1960 debut Ko, or A Season on Earth-show Koch at his various best. Sun Out catches Koch assembling the dictions (and plentiful exclamation points) he would later synthesize into his distinctive hall of linguistic mirrors, yet these '50s poems, like those of Koch's New York School brethren Ashbery and O'Hara, speak remarkably directly to our own "circumstances the Afghanistan flowers/ The feet under the hue of/ The mid-Atlantic." The long poem "When the Sun Tries to Go On" looks back to Stevens's "The Comedian as the Letter C," and forward to O'Hara's "Second Avenue." A Possible World's one-act verse plays, one-line poems, autobiographical reminiscences and long, mock-Byronic narratives display Koch's verve and light touch, but are unmistakably colored by requiem. The opening "Bel Canto" gives thanks "For love itself, and friendship its co-agent" in the ottava rima of Koch's long poem Ko, while "Variations on Home and Abroad" returns to Ko's thoughts about national origins. "To Buddhism" harks back to last year's New Addresses, and introduces the short poems about European and Asian travel that comprise much of the book. Those poems combine autobiographical nostalgia with a trademark whimsy: "The Acropolis has a uniform/ That no schoolboy can wear because it is invisible./ `It goes to the Periclean School!' " The title poem's typographical festival pays Mallarm an homage to "Mondo universal collectivity/ Mondo aggrandizement/ Mondo nothing left to teach," while the concluding "A Memoir," finds, wryly, "Someone is singing/ On the landing below/ The arc strike of a pen on paper/ Doesn't put one in the show." Koch, as these two books amply demonstrate, most definitely remains in our collective performance. (Oct. 19) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal