Guest editor Rita Dove, a distinguished figure in the poetry world and the second African-American poet ever to win the Pulitzer Prize, brings all of her dynamism and well-honed acumen to bear on this project. Dove used a simple yet exacting method to make her selections: "The final criterion," she writes in her introduction, "was Emily Dickinson's famed description -- if I felt that the top of my head had been taken off, the poem was in." The result is a marvelous collection of consistently high-quality poems diverse in form, tone, style, stance, and subject matter. With comments from the poets themselves illuminating their poems and a foreword by series editor David Lehman, The Best American Poetry 2000 is this year's must-have book for all poetry lovers.

    And like his best work to date, these poems create new experiences with language owed to Jackson’s willingness to once again seek a rhythmic sound that expresses the unique realities of the twenty-first century with humor and understanding. Whether set in Nairobi, Madrid, or Greece, the poems are sensuously evocative and unapologetically with-it, in their effort to build community across borders of language and style.From Urban Renewal, “The Dadaab Suite”:I have come to Dadaab like an actoron a press release, unprepared for the drained facesof famine-fleeing refugees, my craft’s glamourdimmed by hundreds of infant graves, childrenwhose lolling heads’ final drop landed on their mothers’backs like soft stones. What beauty can I spell inthis swelter of dust?

    

    The Elements of Scoring explains how paying attention to the way you play -- regardless of your level of skill -- will guarantee you fewer strokes, a better overall game, and at the end of the day, more fun. With a practical and encouraging touch, Raymond Floyd shares his vision of what makes a scorer and shows how you can become this most dangerous of opponents. Discover the ten mistakes amateurs make that pros never doLearn why the 6-foot putt is the most important shot in golfPlay to your strengths and hide your weaknessesBanish first-tee jitters and focus on the rest of your gameKnow when bogey can be a good score Golf is a game of mistakes: The secret to better golf lies in making fewer of them and making sure the ones you do make don?t prove too costly. With Raymond Floyd as your teacher, you are sure to shoot the lowest scores you can, day in and day out, playing the game like a true scorer.

    The Last American Valentine is a unique anthology of non-sappy love poetry and flash fiction. Poet Laureates, rock musicians, actors, famed prose writers and a few talented American barfly's have been handpicked, hunted down and crammed together with an artist the world has never met.

    they were written in the late hours of the last 3 years of his life, in hotel rooms, park benches and various apartments. they are stories of lost love, touring, reclusion and new found renown.

    To enter into these poems one must be fully committed, as the poet is, to seeing this world as it is, to staying with it, moment by moment, day by day. Yet these poems hold a dark promise: this is how you can do it, but you must be fully engaged, which means you must be fully awake, you must wake up inside it. As we proceed, the how-to of the beginning poems subtly transform, as the animals (or, more specifically, the livestock) we are engaging begin to, more and more, become part of us, literally and figuratively we enter inside of that which we devour.--Nick FlynnThis is the book you want with you in the cellar when the tornado is upstairs taking your house and your farm. It's the book you want in the bomb shelter, and in the stalled car, in the kitchen waiting for the kids to come home, in the library when the library books are burned. Its instructions are clear and urgent. Rebecca Gayle Howell has pressed her face to the face of the actual animal world. She remembers everything we have forgotten. Read this! It's not too late. We can start over from right here and right now.--Marie HoweIn every one of these haunting and hungry poems, Howell draws a map for how to enter the heat and dew of the human being, naked and facing the natural world, desperate to feel. I did not realize while reading RENDER how deeply I was handing everything over.--Nikky Finney

    Whether writing as son of a dying father or as father of a daughter about to be wed, Berry plumbs the complexities of conflict, grief, loss, and love. He celebrates life from the domestic to the eternal, finding in the everyday that which is everlasting.

    In such classics as "The Beekeeper's Daughter," "The Disquieting Muses," "I Want, I Want," and "Full Fathom Five," she writes about sows and skeletons, fathers and suicides, about the noisy imperatives of life and the chilly hunger for death. Graceful in their craftsmanship, wonderfully original in their imagery, and presenting layer after layer of meaning, the forty poems in The Colossus are early artifacts of genius that still possess the power to move, delight, and shock.

    Adopting a sunny, genial tone, Dunthorne lures the reader to darker places, exploring death and dread, failure and regret - the 'lounge of our suffering'. Often, he catches us off-guard: a 'whiplash' effect where poems shift from laughter to slaughter in a moment. Impertinent owls, an immersive theatre troupe, ancient men from the Great War and idiot balloonists - such characters dramatise our human fancies and foibles, joining the protagonist in scenarios both humorously bizarre and all-too-familiar. These performances serve to probe and unpeel the layers of the self - all the way down to the raw.

    A notion that proved false when years later, they come with a new demand: she must take her sister’s place and marry a brutish Scotsman.Honoring a deal made by his father, Oscar Burns, Laird of MacLeod, has to marry an Englishwoman he has never seen before. Until the day he finally meets her, for she is the woman of his dreams. And she seems to loath him.Newly ignited, their passion sweeps both Oscar and Rowena off their feet, challenging everything she was ever taught at the abbey. When a cloaked figure tries to abduct her, Rowena realizes she is not ready for the evils of the world. What is a girl to do when she must juggle winning over a bunch of brooding Scotsmen hellbent on hating her and avoiding abduction?

    Speaking in the unique lyrical voice that he called his "Ohioan," Wright created poems of immense sympathy for sociey's alienated and outcast figures and also of ardent wonder at the restorative power of nature.Selected Poems fills a significant gap in Wright's bibliography: that of an accessible, carefully chosen collection to satisfy both longtime readers and those just discovering his work. Edited and with an introduction by Wright's widow, Anne, and his close friend the poet Robert Bly, who also wrote an introduction, Selected Poems is a personal, deeply considered collection of work with pieces chosen from all of Wright's books. It is an overdue--and timely--new view of a poet whose life and work encompassed the extremes of American life.

    A satiric edge, tempered by profound compassion, cuts through many of the poems in Lux’s book. While themes of intolerance, inhumanity, loss, and a deep sense of mortality mark these poems, a lighthearted grace instills even the somberest moments with unexpected sweetness. In the title poem Lux writes, “there’s no reason for God to feel guilt / I think He was downhearted, weary, too weary / to be angry anymore . . . / He wanted each of us, / and all the things we touch . . . / to have a tiny piece of Him / though we are unqualified, / of even the crumb of a crumb.” Dark, humorous, and strikingly imaginative, this is Lux’s most compassionate work to date.

    By turns moving and witty, sharp-eyed and impressionistic, Gabbert writes with technical sophistication and keen intelligence. This is a terrific book"--Kevin Prufer.