I often feel as though I've entereda standoff between whathappens around me & what'sgoing on inside--& this lifethat goes on & on inside my headgoes on & on & on it seemsalmost without me, asit has since childhood . . .--from "Standoff"For three decades, David Rivard has written from deep within the skin of our times. With Standoff, he asks an ess...

**NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the two-term Poet Laureate of the United States Billy Collins comes his first volume of new and selected poems in twelve years.“America’s favorite poet.”—The Wall Street Journal**Aimless Love combines fifty new poems with generous selections from his four most recent books—Nine Horses, The Trouble with Poetry, Ballistics, and Horoscopes for the Dead. Collins’s unmistakable voice, which brings to...

City of Victoria Butler Book Prize: M.A.C. Farrant, The World Afloat (Winner)In The World Afloat, a series of seventy-five “miniatures” that melds narrative with elements of prose poem and farce, master of the absurd and expert observer M.A.C. Farrant peers into the complexities of human experience – through the rear window.Inside the linoleum-lined kitchens and lace-trimmed living rooms that drift through these stories, Farrant interrupts the daily routine...

The debut collection of a poet whose savage, hilarious work has already received extraordinary notice.Since his poems first began to appear in the pages of The New Yorker and Poetry, there has been a lot of excited talk about the fresh and inventive work of Michael Robbins. Equal parts hip- hop, John Berryman, and capitalism seeking death and not finding it, Robbins's poems are strange, wonderful, wild, and completely unlike anything else being wr...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins comes a twelfth collection of poetry offering over fifty new poems that showcase the generosity, wit, and imaginative play that prompted The Wall Street Journal to call him “America’s favorite poet.”The Rain in Portugal—a title that admits he’s not much of a rhymer—sheds Collins’s ironic light on such subjects as travel and art, cats and dogs, loneliness and love, be...

This is a short story. I love the tales of Stephen King, and hope this is a worthy tribute to his freakish ability to pants the hell out of the written word. Also a thank you to the King for The Plant, which forged a revolution in the publishing industry.

The Romans believed that an artist's inspiration came from a spirit, called a genius, that lived in the walls of the artist's home. This character appears throughout the book, providing charming commentary and biting insight on the young author's creative process and emotional path.

In Mindy Nettifee's second book Rise of the Trust Fall her poems possess a magic that can only come from a seasoned writer willing to share more on the page than she's comfortable with. Whether exploring the strange alchemy of healing the perils of self-actualization or the contemporary experience of womanhood the poems in this daring collection are gorgeous and vibrant bitingly funny and unflinchingly honest. Rise of the Trust Fall challenges more than our understanding of ourselves. It c...

In 1988 the University of Arkansas Press published Billy Collins’s The Apple That Astonished Paris, his “first real book of poems,” as he describes it in a new, delightful preface written expressly for this new printing to help celebrate both the Press’s twenty-fifth anniversary and this book, one of the Press’s all-time best sellers. In his usual witty and dry style, Collins writes, “I gathered together what I considered my best poems and threw them in the mail.” After “what seemed like a...

This is a collection of poems that are usually dark and sexual in nature. Symbols from literature and mythology inform the author's thoughts on his life and the world in which he lives. Sometimes shocking, sometimes funny, always engaging.

"Inseminating the Elephant [is] a collection of poems, often laced with humor, that examines popular culture, the limits of the human body, and the tragicomic aspects of everyday experience."-Pulitzer Prize finalist citation"These poems are tough and witty."-The New Yorker"Whoever told you poetry isn't for everyone hasn't read Lucia Perillo."-Time Out New YorkA 2009 Pulitzer Prize finalist, Inseminating the Elephant delivers hard-...

A community theater's production of Special Yearnings triggers a string of underground nuclear explosions from St. Louis to Worcester, Massachusetts. A man frantically swats at the blaze that his girlfriend has ignited in his trousers, while her family tries to figure out whether his agonized sign language means "Under the Volcano" or "No Time for Sergeants." Charo, Marianne Faithfull, and Napoleon's sister swap glittering witticisms and pornographic come-ons with languid aesthetes and unh...