The speaker in Irene McKinney’s poems is most often alone, sitting at the side of a stream, or standing at her own chosen gravesite in the Appalachian mountains, and the meditations spoken out of this essential solitude are powerfully clear, witty, and wide-ranging in content and tone. The ...
Kate Daniels’s central myth is that of Niobe, the mother in Greek mythology whose children were killed by the gods because of her great pride in them. She taps the lasting power of the ancient story in poems about personal loss and political insanity. Though the subjects are ...
Night Watch on the Chesapeake is Peter Meinke’s third collection of poetry. The poems traverse a wide landscape of topics from playing baseball, the death of a friend, divorce, and even poetry itself.
Winner of the 1987 American Book Award The Essential Etheridge Knight is a selection of the best work by one of the country’s most prominent and liveliest poets. It brings together poems from Knight’s previously published books and a section of new poems.
Cold Comfort is a book of poems written out of deep affection and concern for the world in a dangerous time. An urbane stylist, Anderson characteristically focuses on rural and small-town America, where the events of personal history intersect those of the larger world.
• Winner of the 1987 William Carlos Williams Award presented by the Poetry Society of America
With The Imaginary Lover, Alicia Suskin Ostriker takes her place among the most striking and original poets whose work is informed by feminist consciousness. Her characterization of the best poetry by women, in the New ...
Since the appearance of his first book in 1972, Larry Levis has been one of the most original and most highly praised of contemporary American poets. In Winter Stars, a book of love poems and elegies, Levis engages in a process of relentless self-interrogation about his life, about losses and acceptances. ...
“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 ...
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 ...
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.
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 ...
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 ...
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.
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 ...
