This year’s winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition is Davis McCombs’s Ultima Thule, which was acclaimed as a book of exploration, of searching regard.... a grave, attentive holding of a light” by the contest judge, the distinguished poet W. S. Merwin. The poems are set above and below the Cave Country of south central Kentucky, where McCombs lives and which is home to thousands of caves. The book is framed by two sonnet sequences, the first about a slave guide and...

Winner of the Agha Shahid Ali Poetry PrizeDrawn from the rich folk traditions of his native Mammoth Cave region in Kentucky as well as the folklore of his adopted Ozark Mountains of Arkansas, the poems in Davis McCombs’s third collection exist along the fraught lines where nature and agriculture collide or in those charged moments where modernity intrudes on an archaic world. These poems celebrate out-of-the-way places, the lore of plants, wild animals and their unknowable lives, a...

Gregory Orr’s genius is the transformation of trauma into art. Whether writing about his responsibility for a brother’s death during a hunting accident, drug addiction, or being jailed during the Civil Rights struggle, lyricism erupts in the midst of desolation and violence. Orr’s spare, succinct poems distill myth from the domestic and display a richness of action and visual detail.This long-awaited collection is soulful work from a remarkable poet, whose poems have been described...

**Winner of the John Burroughs Medal for Lifetime Achievement in Nature PoetryAn award-winning poet who “writes transporting poems of discovery, contemplation, and gratitude” (Booklist)**Pattiann Rogers has won acclaim as one of the most original voices in contemporary American poetry. The poems in her new collection, Holy Heathen Rhapsody, embrace and embody the forces of the Earth and the creative power of its lifeforms in all the wildness of their varie...

Departing from the more whimsical tone of A Glossary of Chickens, Whitehead's last book, this new collection explores, among other subjects, childlessness in middle age, the vicissitudes of divorce, the pain of parental aging, and the mystery of mortality. Laden with regret and misgiving, but illuminated by glimmers of hopefulness and joy, the poems flow organically and without sections, one building on the other with thematic or linguistic links, moving from silence to song, from...

Petrified Creature is a little bit wild and a little bit literary. It is the culmination of five years worth of exploring, discovering, and reflecting. The author recommends pairing this poetry with a warm cup of tea or coffee. It is also best read outside or with an open window. Come back to it sometimes and ponder more.

In her first magical collection of poetry, Jennifer Elise Foerster weaves together a mythic and geographic exploration of a woman’s coming of age in a dislocated time. Leaving Tulsa, a book of road elegies and laments, travels from Oklahoma to the edges of the American continent through landscapes at once stark and lush, ancient and apocalyptic. The imagery that cycles through the poems—fire, shell, highway, wing—gives the collection a rich lyrical-dramatic texture. Each poem buil...

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize“The book is a form of meditation, written with headlong urgency, about seeing. . . . There is an ambition about [Dillard's] book that I like. . . . It is the ambition to feel.” — Eudora Welty, New York Times Book ReviewPilgrim at Tinker Creek is the story of a dramatic year in Virginia's Roanoke Valley, where Annie Dillard set out to chronicle incidents of "beauty tangled in a rapture w...

 If we had the chance to do things again differently, would we?           Hard to say when the snow began falling. In the 2020s, there were rumors of global warming, of severe weather changes and it was not all rumor. Many of us could feel the changes. Warm and then cold. Rain and then the sunniest of days. Then all went bad, warmer and warmer each day.

In recognition of her long and lauded career as a master essayist, a landmark collection including her most beloved pieces and some rarely seen work, rigorously curated by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author herself. With a foreword by Geoff Dyer.“A writer who never seems tired, who has never plodded her way through a page or sentence, Dillard can only be enjoyed by a wide-awake reader,” warns Geoff Dyer in his foreword to this stellar collection. Carefully culled from her past work,...

Dream Work, a collection of forty-five poems, follows both chronologically and logically Mary Oliver's American Primitive, which won her the Pulitzer Prize for the finest book of poetry published in 1983 by an American poet. The depth and diversity of perceptual awareness—so steadfast and radiant in *American Primitive—*continue in Dream Work. She has turned her attention in these poems to the solitary and difficult labors of the spirit—to accepting the ...

Two volumes of fiction from the National Book Award–winning author of Arctic Dreams : "Lopez feels a deep spiritual connection to the natural world." — San Francisco ChronicleTo National Book Award–winning author Barry Lopez, the desert and the river are landscapes alive with poetry, mystery, seduction, and enchantment. In these two works of fiction, the narrator responds viscerally and emotional...