**An astonishingly insightful and deeply felt collection of poems that meditate on time and the many stages of a woman's life—from girlhood to adolescence, from being a young wife and mother, to seeing your children grow up and depart—by the celebrated poet and bestselling author of A Working Girl Can't Win"The strength of Garrison’s poems is their ordinariness, in both language and subject matter. They are not pretentious. They speak to the reader directly: this is a conv...

Deborah Garrison, whose work as an editor and writer has enlivened the pages of The New Yorker for more than a decade, evokes the characters and events of her everyday life with intense feeling and, more important, conjures up the universal dilemmas and pleasures of a young woman trying to come to terms with love and work.

Nine years after the stunning debut of her critically acclaimed poetry collection A Working Girl Can’t Win, which chronicled the progress and predicaments of a young woman, Deborah Garrison now moves into another stage of adulthood–starting a family and saying good-bye to a more carefree self.In The Second Child, Garrison explores every facet of motherhood–the ambivalence, the trepidation, and the joy (“Sharp bliss in proximity to the roundness, / The globe alread...

**An astonishingly insightful and deeply felt collection of poems that meditate on time and the many stages of a woman's life—from girlhood to adolescence, from being a young wife and mother, to seeing your children grow up and depart—by the celebrated poet and bestselling author of A Working Girl Can't Win"The strength of Garrison’s poems is their ordinariness, in both language and subject matter. They are not pretentious. They speak to the reader directly: this is a conv...

Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize: “Thought-provoking, poignant, brutal, amusing, and always beautiful.”—Elizabeth BergHurrying through errands, attending a dying mother, helping her own child down the playground slide, the speaker in these poems wonders: what is the difference between the self and the soul? The secular and the sacred? Where is the kingdom of heaven? And how does one live in Ordinary Time—during those periods that are not apparently miraculous?...

Decades ago, when bands like the Everly Brothers rode the airwaves and vacancy signs shone like beacons in the night, a young man gets his first taste of love, loss, and the ethereal satisfaction that comes with knowing that the world is turning and life is being lived.

The award-winning author of Evening “reveals an ear for cadence and rhyme [and] her descriptive powers are fully realized” (Miami Herald) in this stunning collection of poems.“Exquisite . . . Minot negotiates a torturous course over the unsettled waters of frayed family ties, substance-free love, and the occasional adulterous affair.”—The Christian Science MonitorIn Poems 4 A.M., we come to know a differe...

Playfulness, spare elegance, and wit epitomize the poetry of Billy Collins.With his distinct voice and accessible language, America’s two-term Poet Laureate has opened the door to poetry for countless people for whom it might otherwise remain closed.Like the present book’s title, Collins’s poems are filled with mischief, humor, and irony, “Poetry speaks to all people, it is said, but here I would like to address / only those in my own time zone”–but also with quiet observation, int...

When a boy is given a box by an angel who asks him to care for it, the task shapes his entire life.Originally published in DRAGONS AND DREAMS (edited by Jane Yolen) this is one of Bruce Coville's personal favorites among all his stories.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry“One of the truly imaginative writers of our time.” —Los Angles Times Book ReviewYou never know what Charles Simic is up to until you reach the end of the line or the bottom of the paragraph. Waiting for you might be a kiss. Or a bludgeon. A smile at the absurdities of society, or a wistful, grim memory of World War II.He puns, pulls pranks. He can be jazzy and streetwise. Or cloak hims...

“The Walt Whitman of Los Angeles.”—Joyce Carol Oates“He brought everybody down to earth, even the angels.”—Leonard Cohen, songwriterArguably the most imitated and influential American poet of the previous half-century, Charles Bukowski remains a counter-culture icon more than a decade after his death. The Continual Condition is a collection of never-before-published poems by the inimitable Bukowski—raw, tough, odes to alcohol, women, work, and despair by a r...

From the Pulitzer Prize winning poet comes this “nearly perfect collection issued to celebrate his being named poet laureate of the United States” (The New York Times).Charles Simic has been widely celebrated for his slyly original poetic imagery; his social, political, and moral alertness; his uncanny ability to make the ordinary extraordinary; and, not least, his sardonic humor. Gathering much of his material from the seemingly mundane minutiae of Americ...