Books

“Weaver's life studies and lyrics are imbued with a vivid sense of language, a vivid sense of the world, a vivid sense of their inseparability. And his tonal range—from unabashed passion to the subtlest velleity—is impressive indeed. This is a singular talent.”—Henry Louis ...

City of Salt, Gregory Orr’s sixth book of poems, is largely autobiographical and presents moments of intense emotion which are anchored in clearly dramatized events. These are poems of elegy and celebration, and of occasions where the two modes fuse in acts of redemptive imagination.

Although Kathleen Norris’s best-selling Dakota: A Spiritual Geography has brought her to the attention of many thousands of readers, she is first and last a poet. Like Robert Frost, another poet identified with a particular landscape, she can reveal the miraculous in the ordinary, and she writes with ...

Over the past decade, Billy Collins has emerged as the most beloved American poet since Robert Frost, garnering critical acclaim and broad popular appeal. Gerald Stern describes his poetry as “heartbreakingly beautiful.” John Updike proclaims his poems “consistently startling, more serious than they seem, they describe all the worlds that ...

Winner of the 1994 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize Winner of the 2000 Creative Achievement Award from the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust “In every poem, she keeps her fury contained, but omnipresent, so that it resembles a cornered dog’s warning growl, yet she hints of happier possibilities.”—Booklist

The locales of these poems range from the mountains of western Pennsylvania to the Andes, the subjects from memories of Kilwein Guevara’s native Colombia to a New York street scene. What characterizes all of them is precise and surprising language, a brilliance of effect, that establishes him as ...

Angel, Interupted is Reginald Shepherd’s second poetry collection. The poems are lyrical, streetwise and contemporary, yet timeless, classically referential, and introspective.

Jim Daniels’ Blessing the House visits the sites of domestic faith – Catholic schools, sex and marriage, childbirth – in an attempt to witness a world worth believing in. In their search for hope, grace, and decency in the small dramas of an individual life, these poems become larger, more overtly ...

The Falling Hour is the fifth collection of poetry by David Wojahn, one of the most highly regarded poets of his generation. It is a fiercly elegiac and even apocalyptic book, culminating in a series of blistering elegies written after the sudden death of Wojahn’s wife, the poet ...

Toi Derricotte’s fourth collection of poetry. Tender probes sexuality, spirituality, emotion, child abuse, mother hatred, and the physical and psychological ravages of violence. These poems are raw and upsetting in subject matter, yet extremely readable.

A few days before his death in 1996, Larry Levis mentioned to his friend and former instructor Philip Levine that he had “an all-but-completed manuscript” of poems. Levine had years earlier recognized Levis as “the most gifted and determined young poet I have ever had the good fortune to have in ...

Winner of the 1999 Paterson Poetry Prize Over the past decade, Billy Collins has emerged as the most beloved American poet since Robert Frost, garnering critical acclaim and broad popular appeal. Annie Proulx admits, “I have never before felt possessive about a poet, but I am fiercely glad that Billy Collins ...

As its title proclaims, Eve’s Striptease delivers a female voice that seeks to “find out for (her)self/ all the desires a body can hold.” Through artful acts of revelation and concealment, these poems test experience against the notions of love and loss that tradition and religion have taught ...

Winner of the 1999 Oklahoma Book Award for poetry given by the Oklahoma Center for the Book. Winner of the Midland Society of Authors Award for Poetry 1999 In this latest, long-awaited collection, Mark Cox delivers a powerful exploration of the vagaries, ironies, and responsibilities of familial and romantic relationships. With humor, ...

Named one of Library Journal’s Top 20 Poetry Books of 1998Winner of the 1997 Agnes Lynch Starrett PrizeRunner up for the Great Lakes Colleges Association 1999 New Writers Award City of a Hundred Fires presents us with a journey through the cultural coming of age experiences of the hyphenated Cuban-American. This distinct ...