Excerpts from this book, sometimes in different versions, have appeared in American Poets, A Public Space, Harper’s, jubilat, Little Star, Poetry, The American Scholar, Working Document, and a chapbook, titled Readings in World Literature, published by Omnidawn Books in 2012. Thank you to the editors.
I am grateful, too, to the National Endowment for the Arts, the Creative Capital Foundation, the Franke Institute for the Humanities, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation for their generous support.
To my coworkers and to my students at the University of Chicago, thank you. The Writing Department and the Department of Pacific and Asian Studies at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, provided space and community as well, during a critical time in the book’s completion.
I owe my acquaintance with the Mayan, Egyptian, and Chinese realms of the dead to modern English translations of the Popol Vuh by Michael Bazzett, Allen Christenson, and Dennis Tedlock; Erik Hornung’s The Egyptian Amdaut: The Book of the Hidden Chamber, the Bollingen Series edition of Alexandre Piankoff’s The Tomb of Ramesses IV, and Toby Wilkinson’s The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt; John Minford’s English translation of Pu Songling’s Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, Léon Wieger’s French-language collection Folk-lore Chinois Moderne, and Anthony C. Yu’s English translation of The Journey to the West.
Though I’m indebted to too many friends to list in a book already overfull with names, Daniel Beachy-Quick, Joshua Beckman, Heidi Broadhead, Ben Doller, Sandra Doller, Joshua Edwards, Frances Ferguson, Langdon Hammer, Lyn Hejinian, Oren Izenberg, Mark Levine, Ben Lerner, Anthony Madrid, Jena Osman, Mark Payne, Gus Rose, Daniel Tiffany, Nick Twemlow, Robyn Schiff, Cole Swensen, John Wilkinson, Lynn Xu, and Matthew Zapruder are a few of those I owe particular thanks. Thank you to my family, especially my daughter Mira, whose art appears throughout these pages. Under every word, my world, Suzanne.