"Measured but warm, this work draws you in; it is another success among her many titles."--Library Journal In her fifteenth collection, Maxine Kumin meditates on the social consequences of such events as the bicentennial of the Civil War, and looks to poets writing from circumstances vastly different from her own. With death the central theme, poems of the body and praise songs for beloved animals explore how memory consoles and haunts.
Forty years sober when he neared the end of his life, Jack McCarthy gives the world something special in his final collection of poetry and true stories. This is his legacy to the people who saved his life. Jack McCarthy's poem "Drunks” has gone around the world on recovery websites and is one of the most popular poems on the harsh climb out of alcoholism to date.
Beloved and bestselling poet Jack Prelutsky and New York Times Best Illustrated artist Carin Berger team up to create a new collection of silly, strange, and sensational animal poems! Told through couplets and visually arresting shadow boxes, dioramas, and cut-paper collage, Stardines Swim High Across the Sky evokes both natural history museums and wild and silly fantasy. "The zoology may be suspect, but the laughs are guaranteed."—Publishers Weekly Sixteen extraordinary imagined creatures inhabit the pages of this unique, inspired, humorous picture book ideal for sharing together, and for reading again and again. Jack Prelutsky reinvents many familiar and beloved animals by combining inanimate objects with them (so, for example, a pair of pants and an anteater become a panteater). Carin Berger's illustrations are showstoppers. Her shadow boxes and dioramas utilize vintage type, ephemera, and such elements as ribbon, cards, buttons, and wood and bring the animals to life. Read it aloud, read it together: this is a catalog of effervescent silliness and will undoubtedly inspire young poets and artists alike. "The total effect is both whimsical and fascinating, with rich language in the poems and unexpected objects in the pictures to return to over and over again.'—The Horn Book Supports the Common Core State Standards
In these 37 prose-poems, ranging in density from short lists to treatises on poetics and philosophy, Anderson begins with a deceptively simple voice that breaks into dark hilarity: "No, you shall not be hurt. You may depart at once. All that is required is that you wear this placard reading, I am an ugly thing because I am superfluous."
An essential collection of a highly original American poet Winner of the Northern California Independent Booksellers Award for Poetry (2009) Winner of the American Book Award (2009) In 1965, when the poet Jack Spicer died at the age of forty, he left behind a trunkful of papers and manuscripts and a few copies of the seven small books he had seen to press. A West Coast poet, his influence spanned the national literary scene of the 1950s and '60s, though in many ways Spicer's innovative writing ran counter to that of his contemporaries in the New York School and the West Coast Beat movement. Now, more than forty years later, Spicer's voice is more compelling, insistent, and timely than ever. During his short but prolific life, Spicer troubled the concepts of translation, voice, and the act of poetic composition itself. My Vocabulary Did This to Me is a landmark publication of this essential poet's life work, and includes poems that have become increasingly hard to find and many published here for the first time.
Gathered in this volume readers will find more than fifty years of poems by the incomparable Jack Gilbert, from his Yale Younger Poets prize-winning volume to glorious late poems, including a section of previously uncollected work. There is no one quite like Jack Gilbert in postwar American poetry. After garnering early acclaim with Views of Jeopardy (1962), he escaped to Europe and lived apart from the literary establishment, honing his uniquely fierce, declarative style, with its surprising abundance of feeling. He reappeared in our midst with Monolithos (1982) and then went underground again until The Great Fires (1994), which was eventually followed by Refusing Heaven (2005), a prizewinning volume of surpassing joy and sorrow, and the elegiac The Dance Most of All (2009). Whether his subject is his boyhood in working-class Pittsburgh, the women he has loved throughout his life, or the bittersweet losses we all face, Gilbert is by turns subtle and majestic: he steals up on the odd moment of grace; he rises to crescendos of emotion. At every turn, he illuminates the basic joys of everyday experience. Now, for the first time, we have all of Jack Gilbert’s work in one essential volume: testament to a stunning career and to his place at the forefront of poetic achievement in our time.
