Winner of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry“Kooser documents the dignities, habits and small griefs of daily life, our hunger for connection, our struggle to find balance.”—Poetry"[Kooser] brushes poems over ordinary objects, revealing metaphysical themes that way an investigator dusts for fingerprints. His language is so controlled and convincing that one can't help but feel significant truths behind his lines." —The Philadelphia Inquirer"Del...

Ted Kooser describes with exquisite detail and humor the place he calls home in the rolling hills of southeastern Nebraska, an area known as the Bohemian Alps. Nothing is too big or too small for his attention, including memories of his grandmother’s cooking. Kooser also reminds us that the closing of local schools, thoughtless county weed control, and irresponsible housing development destroy more than just the view.What makes life meaningful for Kooser are the ways in which his n...

From Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Ted Kooser and award-winning illustrator, Jon Klassen, comes a poignant tale of loss, change, and nature's quiet triumph.When the house was new, not a single tree remained on its perfect lawn to give shade from the sun. The children in the house trailed the scent of wild trees to neighboring lots, where thick bushes offered up secret places to play. When the children grew up and moved away, their father, alone in the house, continued his battle agai...

The publication of Ted Kooser's Sure Signs: New and Selected Poems is a literary event of major importance. Long admired and praised by other poets, Kooser is also accessible to the reader not familiar with contemporary poetry.

Ted Kooser lives and writes on 62 acres of wooded hills and pasture in rural Nebraska with his wife, Kathleen Rutledge, a retired editor of the Lincoln Journal Star. None of their property is farmed and is instead left to an abundance of wildlife. For many years Kooser worked at a desk in the life insurance business, retired at 60, and for fifteen years taught poetry writing in the graduate program of the University of Nebraska.He is the author of fifteen books of poetry, five volu...

"Kooser’s picturesque poetry vividly shapes his living sky metaphors. . . A lofty concept and radiant illustrations will leave readers on cloud nine." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)The skies are hanging their freshly washed—and sweepingly illustrated—clouds out to dry in Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Ted Kooser’s celestial ode to an approaching rainstorm.One sky unpins damp sheets of cirrus. Another wads cirrocumulus into a basket ...

Finalist for the 2023 Midwest Book AwardFinalist for the 2023 Heartland Booksellers Award“Poems dipped out of the air” describes the manner in which Ted Kooser composed the poems in Cotton Candy, the result of his daily routine of getting up long before dawn, sitting with coffee, pen, and notebook, and writing whatever drifts into his mind. Whether those words and images are serious or just plain silly, Kooser tries not to censor himself. His object...

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.In Flying at Night: Poems 1965-1985, Kooser has selected poems from two of his earlier works, Sure Signs (1980) and One World at a Time (1985). Taken together or read one at a time, these poems clearly show why William Cole, writing in the Saturday Revi...

Delightfully universal, Raft by Pulitzer Prize-winner Ted Kooser travels the Midwest landscape, attuned to life’s shared experiences and emotions**—**illness, aging, beauty, and love.Raftis our fourth collection of poetry from Pulitzer Prize-winner and former U.S. Poet Laureate, Ted Kooser. Open in his desire to write for the everyday reader, these poems maintain the open-handed and accessible style that thousands have come to lov...

Red Stilts finds Pulitzer Prize-winner and former U. S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser at the top of his imaginative and storytelling powers. Here are the richly metaphorical, imagistically masterful, clear and accessible poems for which he has become widely known. Kooser writes for an audience of everyday readers and believes poets “need to write poetry that doesn’t make people feel stupid.” Each poem in Red Stilts strives to reveal the complex beauties of the ordinary, of the world that’s righ...

Ted Kooser sees a writer’s workbooks as the stepping-stones on which a poet makes his way across the stream of experience toward a poem. Because those wobbly stones are only inches above the quotidian rush, what’s jotted there has an immediacy that is intimate and close to life.Kooser, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a former U.S. poet laureate, has filled scores of workbooks. The Wheeling Year offers a sequence of contemplative prose observations about nature, place, and...

One of the "Big Indie Books of Fall 2014"—Publishers Weekly"Ted Kooser must be the most accessible and enjoyable major poet in America. His lines are so clear and simple."—Michael Dirda,The Washington Post“Readers [of Splitting an Order] will find ‘characters’ both strange and wonderful, animal or human. There is a sense that time is passing quickly and that everything worthy must be captured and savored, from an old couple loving...