Books

With humor and compassion, George Bilgere continues his explorations of the human predicament. The settings of these poems range from Cleveland to Berlin, from childhood to old age. Bilgere’s subject, in the largest sense, is America, in all its craziness, its haunted past, its imperiled future. But what really ...

C.D. Wright has described Roberson’s work as “lyric poetry of meticulous design and lasting emotional significance,” comparing its musical qualities to the work of saxophonist Steve Lacy, jazz pianist Thelonious Monk, and composer Johann Sebastian Bach.

Shelton says of his work: “I consider myself a regionalist and a surrealist. I have lived in the desert for ten years and hope that my work reflects that fact.” In the forty-seven poems in this collection the poet moves backward and forward through time but always in the same ...

Etai-Eken is a legend told in a series, a cycle of poems, which is to say, told in different languages. The action of the poems in the poem is their moving in and out of the legend by the changes of access to the larger legend; an access of the ...

In Shelton’s fourth collection of poems, he writes of the desert Southwest, and through it gives his unique view of the world. The poems speak of landscape, marriage, freedom, and death.

First published in 1980, the classic poetry of Sharon Olds’s Satan Says was introduced into college courses twenty years ago, and still maintains a wide usage today. Few first books have the power or vigor of design of Satan Says. Marilyn Hacker described it as “a daring and elegant first ...

Named U.S. Poet Laureate for 2004-2006, Ted Kooser is one of America's masters of the short metaphorical poem. Dana Gioia has remarked that Kooser has written more perfect poems than any poet of his generation. Long admired and praised by other poets, Kooser is also accesible to the ...

The work of Michael Burkard has a rich interior quality different from that of any other voice in American poetry. He captures a sense of the mind revising and revealing itself, altering its perceptions.

Emplumada is Lorna Dee Cervantes’s first book, a collection of poems remarkable for their surface clarity, precision of image, and emotional urgency. Rooted in her Chicana heritage, these poems illuminate the American experience of the last quarter century and, at a time when much of what is merely fashionable ...

Shelton assembles the best of his previous work together with a selection of new poems.

“Aliveness is Gary Gildner’s striking quality,” Crystal McLean writes in the magazine New Letters, and thise selection of Gary Gildner’s previously published poems, plus eighteen new poems, demonstrates the aptness of that perception. Accessible and eminently readable, the poems in Blue Like the Heavens also possess great emotional ...