"An award-winning poet and teacher demystifies poetry's most elusive element. In this accessible and distilled craft guide, acclaimed poet Tony Hoagland approaches poetry through the frame of poetic voice, that mysterious connective element that binds the speaker and reader together. A poem strong in the dimension of voice is an animate thing of shifting balances, tones, and temperatures, by turns confiding, vulgar, bossy, or cunning--but above all,...

"A collection of reviews and essays by David Orr, the New York Times poetry columnist and one of the most respected critics in America today, his best work of the past fifteen years in one place Poetry is never more vital, meaningful, or accessible than in the hands of David Orr. In the pieces collected here, most of them written originally for the New York Times, Orr is at his rigorous, conversational, and edifying best. Whether he is considering...

"How does life survive on Earth? Why is Pluto no longer considered a planet? And just how big is Jupiter, really? The answers to these questions and more are explored in this innovative non-fiction book featuring 14 beautifully written poems about space. Every object in our solar system is paired with a different kind of poem, from lyrical sonnets to bouncy rhyming couplets, twisty sestinas to joyful free verse. As they explore the solar system, readers...

"From the widely acclaimed poet, novelist, critic, and scholar, a lucid and edifying exploration of the building blocks of poetry and how they've been used over the centuries to assemble the most imperishable poems. We treasure our greatest poetry, Brad Leithauser reminds us in these pages, "not for its what but its how." In chapters on everything from iambic pentameter to how stanzas are put together to "rhyme and the way we really talk," Leithauser...

"The staggering thing about a life's work is it takes a lifetime to complete," Craig Morgan Teicher writes in these luminous essays. We Begin in Gladness considers how poets start out, how they learn to hear themselves, and how some offer us that rare, glittering thing: lasting work. Teicher traces the poetic development of the works of Sylvia Plath, John Ashbery, Louise Glück, and Francine J. Harris, among others, to illuminate the paths they forged-by...

"This collection of graphic reviews, illustrated prose, and visualized poetics addressing the last century of American poetry establishes the roots of Terrance Hayes's poetic influences and reconstructs modes of poetic engagement, demonstrating what makes a poem both move and be moving and illustrating how drawing itself can be a kind of critical, poetic discourse"-- Provided by publisher.