Meditations on personal and cultural memory, race, and sexuality in the New SouthSelected by Afaa Weaver as the third annual winner of the South Carolina Poetry Book Prize, Signals is the first book-length collection from Ed Madden. Deeply rooted in the recognizable landscapes and legacies of the American South, these lyric poems couple daring engagements in topics of race and sexuality with tender reflections on personal and cultural histories. Madden's a...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • “One of contemporary literature’s most revered essayists revives her raw records from a 1970s road trip across the American southwest ... her acute observations of the country’s culture and history feel particularly resonant today.” —Harper’s BazaarJoan Didion, the bestselling, award-winning author of The Year of Magical Thinking and Let Me Tell You What I Mean, has always kept notebooks—of overheard dialogue, interv...

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...

"Seeds reads like the best of a roundtable discussion amongst John Muir, Bill Bryson, and David Sedaris. From the fields of Gettysburg to the home of Kerouac, Horan takes an unlikely premise and weaves it into a story that's poignant, insightful and unexpectedly humorous. This is more than a book about seeds—it's about literary heroes, forensic forestry, and self-discovery." —Spike Carlsen, author of A Splintered History of WoodThe Orchid Thief meets Botany of Desire meets Driving ...

Mary Oliver's twelfth book of poetry, Red Bird comprises sixty-one poems, the most ever in a single volume of her work. Overflowing with her keen observation of the natural world and her gratitude for its gifts, for the many people she has loved in her seventy years, as well as for her disobedient dog Percy, Red Bird is a quintessential collection of Oliver's finest lyrics.

A stunning collection of poems that John Updike wrote during the last seven years of his life and put together only weeks before he died for this, his final book.The opening sequence, “Endpoint,”is made up of a series of connected poems written on the occasions of his recent birthdays and culminates in his confrontation with his final illness. He looks back on the boy that he was, on the family, the small town, the people, and the circumstances that fed his love of...

The former US Poet Laureate shares "fine poems that inspire us with poetry's greatest gifts: the music of language and the force of wisdom" (Annie Dillard, Pulitzer Prize–winning author).Elephant Rocks, Kay Ryan's third book of verse, shows a virtuoso practitioner at the top of her form. Engaging and secretive, provocative and profound, Ryan's poems have generated growing excitement with their appearances in The New Yorker and other leading period...

In his debut chapbook of poetry, Saeed Jones walks on the periphery of the South, those places on the outskirts of town, in bars after midnight, and on dangerous backroads where most people keep their heads down or look the other way. Through Texas and Tennessee, Alabama and the riverbeds of the Mississippi, these poems wrap themselves in cloaks of masks and comfort; garments we learn are flammable if we stand too close to flames. D. A. Powell says of Saeed's work, "Like Aeneas carrying hi...

It’s just Penn Newburgh and his digital camera, all alone and out in the woods. He’s on the trail of a cougar, the biggest cat in North America. He’s got fresh tracks, but what are the odds? And that ain’t the half of it, as there’s more than one kind of cougar. A short and romantic tale of adventure.

You might expect the fact of dying--the dying of a beloved wife and fellow poet--to make for a bleak and lonely tale. But Donald Hall's poignant and courageous poetry, facing that dread fact, involves us all: the magnificent, humorous, and gifted woman, Jane Kenyon, who suffered and died; the doctors and nurses who tried but failed to save her; the neighbors, friends, and relatives who grieved for her; the husband who sat by her while she lived and afterward sat in their house alone with h...

Booth's eighth poetry collection, with its evocations of compassion, tenderness and invading darkness, implies that redemption will come only from having loved well and wisely. Publishers Weekly remarked, "Booth is a traveler keenly, almost mystically, aware that 'how you get there is where you'll arrive.' "

?National Book Award nominee Beth Kephart’s new book is an enchanting midlife meditation on aging, identity, and memory set against the backdrop of Chanticleer garden in Pennsylvania. On the morning of her forty-?rst birthday, Kephart — a mother, a wife, and a writer pressured by deadlines — finds herself at Chanticleer, one of the world’s most celebrated pleasure gardens. She knows little of the language of flowers. She cannot name the birds in the trees. She is a stranger among the garde...