Selected by Peter Davison with an introduction by Edward Hirsch. Sissman was a true phenomenon in American poetry. He published his first book, a collection of antic, autobiographical episodes in blank verse, in 1968. Eight years and three books later, he died of Hodgkin's disease at the age of forty-eight. Of Sissman's remarkable final poems John Updike wrote, "What other poet had ever given such wry and unblinking witness to his own dying? His poetry gave back to life more generously tha...

Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for FictionA harvest and not a winnowing, this volume collects 103 stories, almost all of the short fiction that John Updike wrote between 1953 and 1975. “How rarely it can be said of any of our great American writers that they have been equally gifted in both long and short forms,” reads the citation composed for John Updike upon his winning the 2006 Rea Award for the Short Story. “Contemplating John Updike’s monumental achievement...

John Ashbery writes like no one else among contemporary American poets. In the construction of his intricate patterns, he uses words much as the contemporary painter uses form and color- words painstakingly chosen as conveyors of precise meaning, not as representations of sound. These linked in unexpected juxtapositions, at first glance unrelated and even anarchic, in the end create by their clashing interplay a structure of dazzling brilliance and strong emotional impact. From this preocc...

A T. S. Eliot Prize and Irish Times Poetry Now Award–winning poetry collection from the Irish Nobel laureate."The world shines up from these pages with refreshed particularity and tactile exactitude." —Peter Campion, The Boston Sunday GlobeIn their haunted, almost visionary clarity, the poems of District and Circle, Seamus Heaney's critically acclaimed collecti...

The collected works of Adrienne Rich, whose poetry is "distinguished by an unswerving progressive vision and a dazzling, empathic ferocity" (New York Times). A Finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.Adrienne Rich was the singular voice of her generation and one of our most important American poets. She brought discussions of gender, race, and class to the forefront of poetical discourse, pushing formal boundaries and consistently examining both sel...

Michael Schmidt’s anthology includes the work of more than a hundred poets from every part of the English-speaking world. What links their diverse voices is a common language: each poem, in its own way, adds to the resources of the medium and makes it new.The poems in this book are allowed to slip free of their moorings in the biography and history of the last century to create new spaces and times. They have been chosen because they are exceptional, profound and unique in what the...

This definitive collection showcases thirty years of work by one of the most significant American poets of the twentieth century, bringing together verse that originally appeared in eight acclaimed books of poetry ranging from Hello: A Journal (1978) to Life & Death (1998) and If I were writing this (2003). Robert Creeley, who was involved with the publication of this volume before his death in 2005, helped define an emerging counter-tradition to the prevailing l...

A stunning collection of poems that John Updike wrote during the last seven years of his life and put together only weeks before he died for this, his final book.The opening sequence, “Endpoint,”is made up of a series of connected poems written on the occasions of his recent birthdays and culminates in his confrontation with his final illness. He looks back on the boy that he was, on the family, the small town, the people, and the circumstances that fed his love of...

In this condensed edition of Selected Poems, Robert Lowell’s poems are brought together from all of his books of verse*.* Chosen and introduced by Katie Peterson on the occasion of Robert Lowell’s one hundredth birthday, New Selected Poems offers a perfectly chosen and illuminating representation of one of the great careers in twentieth-century poetry.

Bruce Weber in the New York Times called Billy Collins “the most popular poet in America.” He is the author of many books of poetry, including, most recently, The Rain in Portugal: Poems.In 1988 the University of Arkansas Press published Billy Collins’s The Apple That Astonished Paris, his “first real book of poems,” as he describes it in a new, delightful preface written expressly for this new printing to help celebrate both the Press’s twenty-fifth anni...

In his brilliant third collection, award-winning and critically-acclaimed poet Ken Babstock finds momentary stays against our gathering darknesses in the irrepressible, acrobatic, free play of the mind. Poems of conscience collide with the problems of consciousness, the concrete and the conceptual find equal footing, and formal beauty mixes with imagistic brinksmanship as the speaker attempts to leave our "homes half-sheathed Tyvek" and "drift into the pain of our neighbours." Like Babstoc...

Galway Kinnell's twelfth book of poems is powerful and thrilling. Imperfect Thirst includes beautiful love poems and approaches elemental subjects with a remarkable balance of good nature and holy dread: recollections of childhood, snapshots of impassive cruelty, reflections on art and nature. This energetic collection will prove once again why Galway Kinnell was one of America's masters of the art.