The Syndicate of Water & Light: A Divine Comedy - Softcover

Marc Vincenz is co-editor of the journal Fulcrum, international editor of Plume, publisher and editor of MadHat Press and Plume Editions. He is the author of eleven books of poetry, including Becoming the Sound of Bees (Ampersand Books, 2015), Sibylline (Ampersand Books, 2016) and the forthcoming Leaning into the Infinite (Dos Madres Press, 2018). His novella set in ancient China, Three Taos of T’ao, or How to Catch a White Elephant, is to be released by Spuyten Duyvil in 2018. He has also been widely published elsewhere, including in The Nation, Ploughshares, The Common, Solstice, Raritan, Notre Dame Review, World Literature Today, Los Angeles Review of Books, New World Writing, et al. Vincenz, who was born in Hong Kong and holds dual British and Swiss nationalities, is a multi-lingual translator of many contemporary German, French and Romanian authors. His latest work of translation, Unexpected Development (White Pine Press, 2018), by prize-winning Swiss novelist, poet and playwright Klaus Merz, was a finalist for the 2105 Cliff Becker Book Prize in Translation. Vincenz has received fellowships and grants from the Swiss Arts Council, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry and the Literary Colloquium Berlin. He lives in Massachusetts.

The Syndicate of Water and Light opens with a sense that we can grow in knowledge and that we can change―if not, perhaps, the world, then at least ourselves ... [A]fter a long night of the soul, in which formal religion yields to love and imagination, we emerge to a healing space that is both inner and outer, physical and spiritual. [There is a] sense of a pattern behind the particulars of history and cultures may be the real treasure Vincenz takes home from his journey and lays at our feet in the form of a book.