“My heart is bursting with homage as I / head off to a hostile eternity,” writes Jane Mayhall, now eighty-five, who wrote most of these poems in an urgent outpouring over the last few years. From the decades-outdated subway token in the bottom of her shoulder bag, which calls forth earlier days in New York City, to the violin her father practiced among the pantry’s jam jars in her Kentucky childhood, Mayhall plucks small treasures that bespeak her fierce devotion to life, with its clutter ...

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...

From "a genuine American Dostoevsky" ( The Washington Post): a dazzling, funny, bittersweet exploration of the mysteries of relationship, both human and animal.When his favorite cat Biscuit goes missing, Peter Trachtenberg sets out to find her. The journey takes him 700 miles and many years into his past-- into the history of his relationships with cats and the history of his relationship with his wife F., who may herself be on the verge of disappearing. Wh...

SOMETHING WAS WRONG WITH THE WORLD The pendulum clock struck slowly, its every other chime as usual setting up a sympathetic vibration in the pewter vase that stood upon the mantel. Mr. Chambers got to his feet, strode to the door, opened it and looked out. Moonlight tessellated the street in black and silver, etching the chimneys and trees against a silvered sky. But the house directly across the street was not the same. It was strangely lopsided, its dimensions out of proportion, like a ...

“Fried’s stories are laugh-out-loud hilarious and wonderfully weird, yet his many strange worlds also have the power to haunt.” --Dan ChaonIn “Loeka Discovered,” a buzz flows throughout a lab when scientists unearth a perfectly preserved prehistoric man who suggests to them the hopefulness of life, but the more they learn, the more the realities of ancient survival invade their buoyant projections. “Frost Mountain Picnic Massacre” meditates on why an entire town en...

This definitive collection showcases thirty years of work by one of the most significant American poets of the twentieth century, bringing together verse that originally appeared in eight acclaimed books of poetry ranging from Hello: A Journal (1978) to Life & Death (1998) and If I were writing this (2003). Robert Creeley, who was involved with the publication of this volume before his death in 2005, helped define an emerging counter-tradition to the prevailing l...

Pulitzer Prize winner Sylvia Plath’s complete poetic works, edited and introduced by Ted Hughes.By the time of her death on 11, February 1963, Sylvia Plath had written a large bulk of poetry. To my knowledge, she never scrapped any of her poetic efforts. With one or two exceptions, she brought every piece she worked on to some final form acceptable to her, rejecting at most the odd verse, or a false head or a false tail. Her attitude to her verse was artisan-like: if she couldn...

New edition (revised and expanded) available 8/13/02.Fairy tales are one of the most enduring forms of literature, their plots retold and characters reimagined for centuries. In this elegant and thought-provoking collection of original essays, Kate Bernheimer brings together twenty-eight leading women writers to discuss how these stories helped shape their imaginations, their craft, and our culture. In poetic narratives, personal histories, and penetrating commenta...

About Threshold Songs, the voices in these poems perform at the interior thresholds encountered each day, where we negotiate the unfathomable proximities of knowing and not knowing, the gulf of seeing and feeling, the uncanny relation of grief to joy, and the borderless nature of selfhood and tradition. Both conceptual and haunted, these poems explore the asymmetry of the body's chemistry and its effects on expression and form. The poems in Threshold Songs tune us to the microtonal music o...

One of Ashbery's most acclaimed and beloved collections since Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, filled with his signature wit and generous intelligenceThe poems in John Ashbery's award-winning 1984 collection A Wave address the impermanence of language, the nature of mortality, and the fluidity of consciousness—matters of life and death that in other hands might run the risk of sentimentality. For John Ashbery, however, these considerations provide...

Writing Past Dark charts the emotional side of the writer's life. It is a writing companion to reach for when you feel lost and want to regain access to the memories, images, and the ideas inside you that are the fuel of strong writing. Combining personal narrative and other writers' experiences, Friedman explores a whole array of emotions and dilemmas writers face—envy, distraction, guilt, and writer's block—and shares the clues that can set you free. Supportive, intimate, and re...