Brilliant new poems and an expansive gathering from six collections by a Pulitzer Prize winner celebrated as “indispensable.”What Goes On displays the evolving style and sensibility of a major award-winning poet, and a traceable growth that has blossomed into a provocative confrontation with questions of consciousness and existence. Stephen Dunn’s poems probe life’s big questions without ever losing sight of the significance of the mundane.

**“An indispensable volume.” —Ron Charles, Washington Post Book ClubA radiant celebration of Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Stephen Dunn’s enduring oeuvre.**Hailed as "indispensable" (David Wojahn), Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Stephen Dunn masterfully shifts between the metaphysical and the ironic, never wavering in his essential honesty. His graceful poems confront our contradictions with tenderness and wit, enliven the ordinary with penetrating observation, and aler...

In wise and masterful poems, Stephen Dunn “reveals a deep understanding of human longing and the desire to become more than what we are” (Washington Post).Incisively capturing the oddities of our logic and the whimsies of our reason, the poems in Whereas show there is always another side to a story. With graceful rhythm and equal parts humor and seriousness, Pulitzer Prize winner Stephen Dunn examines the difficulties of telling the truth, and the...

"Between Angels affirms what we are capable of in our best moments—grace, tenderness, love—while acknowledging that the human heart can be merciless. It's a book of great breadth."--Gregory Djanikian, Philadelphia Inquirer

Wise and searching new poems from the winner of the 2000 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.In his twelfth collection, his first since winning the Pulitzer Prize, Stephen Dunn turns his keen gaze on Sisyphus, our contemporary Everyman. Free, for the time being, from the power of the gods and the ceaseless weight of the rock, he struggles to navigate twenty-first-century America. In language by turns mordant and tender, often elegiac, Dunn illuminates the quotidian burdens of...

“Essential to contemporary poetry collections.”—Library JournalIn his fourteenth collection, Stephen Dunn, “one of our indispensable poets” (Miami Herald), continues to probe brilliantly the unsaid and the elusive in the lives we live, in language that Gerald Stern has called “unbearably fearless and beautiful.”

"Dunn's new poems are driven by the same tireless force that made his New and Selected Poems (1994) so powerful, but there is a new tone here, a deepening of his recognition of life's perversities."—BooklistIn this tenth collection, Stephen Dunn turns his "wise, well-practiced eye" (Library Journal) on an America growing ever more stringent with its daily mercies. Not content merely to observe the world, Dunn's stance is always dual, comp...

“A wonderful example of the poet’s ability to satisfy readers and anticipate their thoughts.”—Elizabeth Lund, Washington PostIn his sixteenth collection, Stephen Dunn continues to bring his imagination and intelligence to what Wallace Stevens calls “the problems of the normal,” which of course pervade most of our lives. The poem “Don’t Do That” opens with the lines: “It was bring-your-own if you wanted anything / hard, so I brought Johnnie Walker Red / alo...

Committed to exploring the role of poetry and poets in our culture, Stephen Dunn provides new, expanded versions of the essays originally published by W. W. Norton in 1993, now out of print. In Walking Light, Dunn discusses the relationship between art and sport, the role of imagination in writing poetry, and the necessity for surprise and discovery when writing a poem. Humorous, intelligent and accessible, Walking Light is a book that will appeal to writers, readers, and...

“A sly, companionable collection” (New York Times Book Review) that offers indispensable truths from a master of contemporary poetry.In this meditative and incisive collection, Pulitzer Prize winner Stephen Dunn draws on themes of morality and mortality to explore the innermost machinations of human nature. Shifting in tone but never wavering in their essential honesty, these poems reflect on desire, restraint, and the roles we play in an ever-evolving soc...

This reissue was first published in 1982. It deals specifically with the ‘Asiatic mode of production’ described by Karl Marx in his basic evolutionary model for human society. The term defines a special form of society marked by state ownership of the means of production and extensive intervention by the state in all forms of social life. In the soviet Union, the concept has had a chequered and controversial career: leading writers, primarily Stalin, have denied its very existence, mobiliz...

Persuasion. Philosophers have worried about it. Political and economic actors have weaponised it. Psychologists have measured it. Prose writers have required it. We’re all subjected to it. And some have even mastered it. Of them, we are often very suspicious. Why is that? Persuasion: A Key Idea for Business and Society asks the disciplines of philosophy, politics, psychology, and prose analysis – the 4 Ps of persuasion – to answer this important question.The book is writte...