Library of Congress.

The Library of Congress brings booklovers an enriching tribute to the power of the written word and to the history of our most beloved books. Featuring more than 200 full-color images of original catalog cards, first edition book covers, and photographs from the library's magnificent archives, this collection is a visual celebration of the rarely seen treasures in one of the world's most famous libraries and the brilliant catalog system that has kept...

The former U.S. poet laureate and best-selling author of Nine Horses and Around the Room presents a new compilation of his acclaimed poems, some of which have never before been published.

A collection of poems by twentieth-century American poet William Stafford, featuring unpublished works from his last year of life, including the poem he wrote the day he died, and providing selections drawn from throughout his career, from the 1960s through the 1990s.

This volume presents a collection of poems reflecting the author's life. Mysteries of light, darkness, temporality, and eternity weave throughout his poetry. His memories are focused and profound, of Pennsylvania miners and neighborhood streetcars, a conversation with a boyhood teacher or parent, the distinct qualities of autumnal light and gentle rain, well-cultivated loves, and "our long evenings and astonishment." From the universe's contradictions,...

"In his nineteenth collection, Charles Simic, the poet of the vaguely ominous sound and the disturbing, potentially significant image, moves closer to the dark heart of history and human behavior." "Simic understands the strange interplay between ordinary life and extremes, between reality and imagination, and he writes with absolute purity about those contradictory but simultaneous states of being or feeling: "Everything about you / My life, is both...

An improvised, even desperate music, yearning toward knowledge across a gulf, informs Robert Pinsky's first book of poetry since Jersey Rain (2000). On the large scale of war or the personal scale of family history, in the movements of people and cultures across oceans or between eras, these poems discover connections between things seemingly disparate. Gulf Music is perhaps the most ambitious, politically impassioned, and inventive book by this major...

An overview of our storehouses of knowledge, from the earliest library building (Philadelphia, 1745) to midcentury modern and beyond. Although new technologies appear poised to alter it, the library remains a powerful site for discovery, and its form is still determined by the geometry of the book and the architectural spaces devised to store and display it. American Libraries provides a history and panorama of these structures, inside and out, encompassing...