Nelson Ball has had a significant impact on contemporary Canadian poetry not only as a poet but as an editor, with his Weed/Flower Press in the 1960s and 70s. Certain Details provides a major overview of the breadth and many paths of Ball’s poetry over six decades. This selection of his work includes his trademark minimalist poems in addition to longer works and sequences; it spans nature poems, homages, meditations, narratives, found poems, and visual poems. The book contains sel...

The incomparable Ali Smith melds the tale and the essay into a magical hybrid form, a song of praise to the power of stories in our livesA book that refuses to be tied down to either fiction or the essay form, Artful is narrated by a character who is haunted-literally-by a former lover, the writer of a series of lectures about art and literature.A hypnotic dialogue unfolds, a duet between and a meditation on art and storytelling, a book about love,...

From the nuts and bolts of craft to the sources of inspiration, this book is for anyone who wants to write poetry-and do it well.In this fortuitous collaboration, two spirited poets, themselves teachers of poetry, offer guidance to aspiring beginners and those who have already published. Brief essays on the elements of poetry, technique, and suggested subjects for writing are each followed by distinctive writing exercises. ("Compare an actual family photograph with one that was nev...

Most poets are or have been at one time or another members of what Mark Strand here calls “The Midnight Club”: they are insomniacs, or feel most productive in the middle of the night, or, if nothing else, are people whose work requires an openness to the dreams, visions, and scraps of inspired language that may drift across our path in the wee hours. In this selection, drawn from Knopf’s Poem-a-Day program (the daily e-mails we’ve sent to our fans every April for the last dozen years or mo...

An “optimistic, warm, unpretentious” (San Francisco Chronicle) guide to unlocking your inner poet, blending thoughtful anecdotes and practical exercises to foster inspiration and promote creativity“This is a wonderful book—smart, wide-eyed, joyful, helpful, inspiring. You’re going to love it, and love writing poetry more for having read it.”—Anne Lamott, author of Bird by BirdIt’s impossible to teach anyone to write a ...

Award-winning poet David Wagoner and renowned editor David Lehman present the 2009 edition of Best American Poetry—"a ‘best’ anthology that really lives up to its title" (Chicago Tribune).Eagerly anticipated by scholars, students, readers, and poets alike, Scribner’s Best American Poetry series has achieved brand-name status in the literary world, serving as a yearly guide to who’s who in American poetry. Known for his marvelous narrative...

Every day people tune in to The Writer's Almanac on public radio and hear Garrison Keillor read them a poem. And here, for the first time, is an anthology of poems from the show, chosen by the narrator for their wit, their frankness, their passion, their "utter clarity in the face of everything else a person has to deal with at 7 a.m."The title Good Poems comes from common literary parlance. For writers, it's enough to refer to somebody having writ...

"The book is full of strong, memorable poems that stick with readers like a friend during a long, hard night. " - The Christian Science MonitorHere, readers will find solace in works that are bracing and courageous, organized into such resonant headings as "Such As It Is More or Less" and "Let It Spill." From William Shakespeare and Walt Whitman to R. S. Gwynn and Mary Oliver, the voices gathered in this collection will be more than welcome to those who've been str...

**AMY GERSTLER’S COMMITMENT TO INNOVATIVE POETRY that conveys meaning, feeling, wit, and humor informs the cross section of poems in the 2010 edition of *The Best American Poetry.***The works collected here represent the wealth, the breadth, and the tremendous energy of poetry in the United States today. Featuring poems from some of our country’s top bards, including John Ashbery, Anne Carson, Louise Glück, Sharon Olds, and Charles Simic, The Best American Poetry 2010 also present...

This thoughtful, provocative, and moving poetry collection celebrates the deep tradition of eroticism in American poetry, from the editor of *The Best American Poetry.***These poems range across the varied landscapes of love and sex and desire—from the intimate parts of the body to the end of an affair, from passion to solitary self-pleasure. With candor and imagination, they capture the delights and torments of sex and sexuality, nudity, love, lust, and the secret...

Robert Pinsky, distinguished poet and man of letters, selects the top 100 poems from twenty-five years of The Best American PoetryThis special edition celebrates twenty-five years of the Best American Poetry series, which has become an institution. From its inception in 1988, it has been hotly debated, keenly monitored, ardently advocated (or denounced), and obsessively scrutinized. Each volume consists of seventy-five poems chosen by a major Amer...

"If readers would like to sample the genius and diversity of American poetry in the last century, there's no better place to start." — World Literature TodayWhen Harriet Monroe founded Poetry magazine in Chicago in 1912, she began with an image: the Open Door. For a century, the most important and enduring poets have walked through that door—William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens in its first years, Rae Armantrout and Kay Ryan in 2011. And at ...