"Long before she earned accolades for her genre-defining memoirs, Mary Karr was winning poetry prizes. Now the beloved author returns with a collection of bracing poems as visceral and deeply felt and hilarious as her memoirs. In Tropic of Squalor, Karr dares to address the numinous--that mystery some of us hope towards in secret, or maybe dare to pray to. The "squalor" of meaninglessness that every thoughtful person wrestles with sits at the core...

Marking the year of his ninetieth birthday, one of the masters of contemporary poetry presents his ninth collection. Stanley Kunitz, recipient of both the Pulitzer and the Bollingen Prizes, here gathers a rich selection of his work, including new poems that remind us of his prefatory statement: "Art is that chalice into which we pour the wine of transcendence." Nearly all the poems of his later years, beginning with The Testing Tree (1971), are included,...

Jane Hirshfield's long-awaited third collection of poetry explores the ways that radiance dwells most truly in the ordinary, the difficult, and the plain. The poems address subjects ranging from the importance of "sabbath" moments in which nothing seems to happen and the love between two aged horses to Lavoisier's discovery of modern chemistry and the 1989 "velvet revolutions" of Eastern Europe. Grounded in a series of meditations upon the life of...

A collection of all of the published poetry of the first Poet Laureate of the United States features collations of all versions of the poems, accompanied by textual and explanatory notes. Winner of the 1998 Jules and Frances Laundry Award. In this indispensable volume, John Burt has assembled every poem (with the exception of Brother to Dragons) ever published by Robert Penn Warren.

Penguin proudly presents an unparalleled survey of the best poems of the past century. Selecting from the canon of American poetry throughout the 20th century, Dove has created an anthology that represents the full spectrum of aesthetic sensibilities--from styles and voices to themes and cultures--while balancing important poems with significant periods of each poet.

"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...

A sequel to A Coney Island of the Mind (written forty years after the original in what the author has called "a poetry seizure" that lasted more than a year), A Far Rockaway of the Heart is a sequence of one hundred and one related poems with recurrent themes. The author also thinks of it as a kind of caustic critique of modern poetry, including confrontations with or parodies of major figures in the literary avant-garde before the arrival of the...