Failure

Author

Kay Ryan

Kay Ryan, named the Pulitzer Prize Winner for Poetry 2010, is just the latest in an amazing array of accolades for this wonderfully accessible, widely loved poet. She was appointed the Library of Congress’s sixteenth poet laureate from 2008 to 2010. Salon has compared her poems to “Fabergé eggs,...

Author	Carl Dennis
ISBN	0141002301

Winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.Practical Gods is the eighth collection by Carl Dennis, a critically acclaimed poet and recent winner of one of the most prestigious poetry awards, the Ruth Lilly Prize. Carl Dennis has won acclaim for "wise, original, and often deeply moving" poems that...

Author	Rita Dove
ISBN	0887480217

No one can help him anymore.
Not the young thing next door
in the red pedal pushers,
not the canary he drove distracted

with his mandolin. There’ll be
no more trees to wake him in moonlight,
nor a single dry spring morning
when the fish are lonely for company.

She’s...

Author	W.S. Merwin
ISBN	1556592841

Winner of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

Featured on NPR's "Fresh Air" and "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer" on PBS.

Honored as one of the "Best Books of the Year" from Publishers Weekly.

"In his personal anonymity, his strict individuated manner, his defense of the earth,...

Author	Claudia Emerson
ISBN	0807130842

In Late Wife, a woman explores her disappearance from one life and reappearance in another as she addresses her former husband, herself, and her new husband in a series of epistolary poems. Though not satisfied in her first marriage, she laments vanishing from the life she and her husband shared for...

Author	Paul Muldoon
ISBN	0374528845

Paul Muldoon's ninth collection of poems, his first since Hay (1998), finds him working a rich vein that extends from the rivery, apple-heavy County Armagh of the 1950s, in which he was brought up, to suburban New Jersey, on the banks of a canal dug by Irish navvies, where he now lives. Grounded, glistening,...

Author	Franz Wright
ISBN	0375710019

In this radiant new collection, Franz Wright shares his regard for life in all its forms and his belief in the promise of blessing and renewal. As he watches the “Resurrection of the little apple tree outside / my window,” he shakes off his fear of mortality, concluding “what death . . . There is only...

Author	Charles Wright
ISBN	0374525366

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award

Black Zodiac offers poems suffused with spiritual longing—lyrical meditations on faith, religion, heritage, and morality. The poems also explore aging and mortality with restless grace. Approaching his vast subjects...

Author	Alan Dugan
ISBN	1583225129

Poems Seven: New and Complete Poetry, the winner of the National Book Award, presents the life work of a giant of American letters, tracks a forty-year career of honest, tough artistry, and shows a man at nearly 80 years of age and still at the height of his poetic power. Dugan’s new poems continue his...

Author	James Wright
ISBN	0819560227

I may skip a detailed review on this, simply because poetry reviews are a real ass kicker for me. Like work. But, that said, it deserves one. Wright is one best poets I've read (and I've read A LOT). One reason for this is that he's SO American in his settings and voice. If you like Whitman, you should like this...

Author	Galway Kinnell
ISBN	0395320461

Did you know Galway Kinnell was active in the Civil Rights movement, jailed in Louisiana for his role in voter registration activities? I didn't know that until I read the excerpts from Kinnell's long poem "The Last River" that are included in this 1982 compilation. "The Last River" is, interestingly,...

Author	C.K. Williams
ISBN	0374527067

Nominated for the National Book Award--The eighth book by one of our greatest poets

"Always, "These gigantic inconceivables."
Always, "What will have been done to me?"
And so we don our mental armor,
flex, thrill, pay the strict attention we always knew we should.
A violent...

Author	Stephen Dunn
ISBN	0393322327

Winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

A wise and graceful new collection by one of our "major, indispensable poets" (Sidney Lea). The mysteries of Eros and Thanatos, the stubborn endurance of mind and body in the face of diminishment--these are the undercurrents of Stephen Dunn's...

Author	Robert Hass
ISBN	0061349607

The poems in Robert Hass's new collection—his first to appear in a decade—are grounded in the beauty and energy of the physical world, and in the bafflement of the present moment in American culture. This work is breathtakingly immediate, stylistically varied, redemptive, and wise.

His...

Author	Philip Levine
ISBN	0679765840

Brilliant, engaging, human and personal. Levine is one of the greats.

Ask for Nothing

Instead walk alone in the evening
heading out of town toward the fields
asleep under a darkening sky;
the dust risen from your steps transforms
itself into a golden rain fallen
earthward...

Author	Rae Armantrout
ISBN	0819568791

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (2010)
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award (2009)

Rae Armantrout has always organized her collections of poetry as though they were works in themselves. Versed brings two of these sequences together, offering readers an expanded...

Author	Gregory Pardlo
ISBN	1935536508

From Epicurus to Sam Cook, the Daily News to Roots, Digest draws from the present and the past to form an intellectual, American identity. In poems that forge their own styles and strategies, we experience dialogues between the written word and other art forms. Within this dialogue we hear Ben Jonson,...

Author	Mark Strand
ISBN	0375701370

Strand's poems occupy a place that exists between abstraction and the sensuous particulars of experience. It is a place created by a voice that moves with unerring ease between the commonplace and the sublime. The poems are filled with "the weather of leavetaking," but they are also unexpectedly funny....

Author	Laura Kasischke
ISBN	1556593333

Laura Kasischke's poems have the same haunting qualities and truth as our most potent memories and dreams. Through ghostly voices, fragmented narratives, overheard conversations, songs, and prayers in language reminiscent of medieval lyrics converted into contemporary idiom, the poems in Space,...

Author

Vijay Seshadri

The long-awaited third poetry book by Vijay Seshadri, “one of the most respected poets working in America today” (Time Out New York)

First I had three
apocalyptic visions, each more terrible than the last.
The graves open, and the sea rises to kill us all.
Then the doorbell...

Author	W.D. Snodgrass
ISBN	0394722205

This Pulitzer Prize winner is considered to be the first volume of "confessional poetry." Snodgrass hated the term, but it can't be denied that something new began with Heart's Needle (1959). It is as resolutely formal as Yeats or Frost, yet remarkably frank about the particulars of its pain.

Snodgrass...

Author	James Schuyler
ISBN	0374516227

"The flowers, trees, birds, clouds, and effects of light that Schuyler describes with such �lan, even if only glimpsed from the window of his apartment, could easily be transposed to the poetry written in Japan or Persia many centuries ago. Even more, his culture and learning, worn so lightly as almost...