With the help of an old sailing buddy living in Maine, Charlie plans to go AWOL permanently, buy a boat, and hit the high seas, where he will live out the remainder of his life on his own terms.Nothing ever goes quite as planned, though, and as Charlie heads towards Maine on a 46-foot sailboat, he strikes up an unexpected romance with Abigail, a woman decades his junior. Things take a darker turn, though, when he discovers a former FBI agent-turned-insurance-investigator hot on his trail. Agent Roberts has been hired to find out what happened to Charlie: bring him back if he s alive, or determine he s dead so his estranged sons can collect on his life insurance policy. Roberts doesn t expect a fight from the old man, but that s just what he gets. Because Charlie has no intention of ever returning to Sunset, whether in handcuffs or a pine box.Funny, heart-warming, and heart-breaking, "That Good Night" tells the story of a man who, rather than rail against going gentle into that good night, as Dylan Thomas wrote, instead wishes to simply sail into a sunset of his own choosing."

    Rootless, bouncing from bed to bed, she knows she is pure of heart. If only she could find where her heart got lost. Irreverent and achingly honest, she points to the small but infinitely deep cracks in our masks, drawing the reader into her world of misadventure -- erotic, comic, and deeply unsettling. Juggling four men -- her husband, "the hit man," "the multimedia artist," and "the love of her life" -- she can't decide whether she is out to prove or disprove the Talmudic wisdom: If you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there.

    These poems are allusive and tough. While they celebrate the pleasures of the natural world--mutability, desire, and the flowering of things--they are compounded by a critical awareness of contemporary culture. As we traverse their associative leaps, we discover a linguistic landscape that is part garden, part wilderness, where a poem can perform its own natural history. Divided into four cantos interrupted by lyrics and errata, Meteoric Flowers mirrors the form of Erasmus Darwin's 18th-century scientific pastorals. In attending to poetry's investigative potential, Willis shifts our attention from product to process, from commodity to exchange, from inherited convention to improvisational use.

    What the Living Do reflects "a new form of confessional poetry, one shared to some degree by other women poets such as Sharon Olds and Jane Kenyon. Unlike the earlier confessional poetry of Plath, Lowell, Sexton et al., Howe's writing is not so much a moan or a shriek as a song. It is a genuinely feminine form . . . a poetry of intimacy, witness, honesty, and relation" (Boston Globe).

    It is told in 29 tangos. A tango (like a marriage) is something you have to dance to the end.This clear-eyed, brutal, moving, darkly funny book tells a single story in an immediate, accessible voice–29 “tangos” of narrative verse that take us vividly through erotic, painful, and heartbreaking scenes from a long-time marriage that falls apart. Only award-winning poet Anne Carson could create a work that takes on the oldest of lyrical subjects–love–and make it this powerful, this fresh, this devastating.

    The late Kenneth Rexroth ( 1905-1982) is surely one of the most readable of this century's great American poets. He is also one of the most sophisticated.

    Toklas had rented in the Rhone Valley, Stanzas in Meditation is one of Stein's most abstract and complex works. It is almost as if Stanzas was conceived as a mirror opposite of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, penned in the same year. The latter, written in a more direct and normative language, brought Stein international acclaim and resulted in the attention she received from 1934 on, while the former remained unavailable until its publication, after her death, in 1956. To Stein readers and admirers, however, this is one of her most important works, a poetic achievement central to her canon. From John Ashbery's groundbreaking essay-review of Stanzas in 1957 to Richard Bridgman's 1970 publication, Gertrude Stein in Pieces, poets and critics have recognized the importance of this masterpiece.

    A collection of quintessentially American poems, the seminal work of one of the most influential writers of the nineteenth century.

    "An oblique conversation with Degas reigns throughout this collection of oddly heartbreaking pieces. Against the backdrop of his paintings and sketches, we find ourselves in an intimate world, coherent but uncanny, where private memory becomes inseparable from the culture we hold in common, and all of it just barely cracked open, riven by interstices through which we glimpse the vivid but unsayable. White has given us a truly exceptional first collection, deeply musical and intricately haunting" Cole Swensen."

    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.

    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 presents poems that poignantly capture the current moment, such as the sonnets John Updike wrote to chronicle his dying weeks. And there are exciting poems from a constellation of rising stars: Bob Hicok, Terrance Hayes, Denise Duhamel, Dean Young, and Elaine Equi, to name a very few. The anthology’s mainstays are in place: It opens with series editor David Lehman’s incisive foreword about the state of American poetry and has a marvelous introduction by Amy Gerstler. Notes from the poets, illuminating their poems and their writing processes, conclude this delightful addition to a classic series.Dick Allen * John Ashbery * Sandra Beasley * Mark Bibbins * Todd Boss * Fleda Brown * Anne Carson * Tom Clark * David Clewell * Michael Collier * Billy Collins * Dennis Cooper * Kate Daniels * Peter Davis * Tim Dlugos * Denise Duhamel * Thomas Sayers Ellis * Lynn Emanuel * Elaine Equi * Jill Alexander Essbaum * B. H. Fairchild * Vievee Francis * Louise Glück * Albert Goldbarth * Amy Glynn Greacen * Sonia Greenfield * Kelle Groom * Gabriel Gudding * Kimiko Hahn * Barbara Hamby * Terrance Hayes * Bob Hicok * Rodney Jones * Michaela Kahn * Brigit Pegeen Kelly * Corinne Lee * Hailey Leithauser * Dolly Lemke * Maurice Manning * Adrian Matejka * Shane McCrae * Jeffrey McDaniel * W. S. Merwin * Sarah Murphy * Eileen Myles * Camille Norton * Alice Notley * Sharon Olds * Gregory Pardlo * Lucia Perillo * Carl Phillips * Adrienne Rich * James Richardson * J. Allyn Rosser * James Schuyler * Tim Seibles * David Shapiro * Charles Simic * Frank Stanford * Gerald Stern * Stephen Campbell Sutherland * James Tate * David Trinidad * Chase Twichell * John Updike * Derek Walcott * G. C. Waldrep * J. E. Wei * Dara Wier * Terence Winch * Catherine Wing * Mark Wunderlich * Matthew Yeager * Dean Young * Kevin Young

    But what if one man decided to use a social network for one of the most idiotic causes in human history? Join the hopeless and brain damaged Andy Boring in his quest to FILL THE GRAND CANYON AND LIVE FOREVER!!!!

    Here, Wallace turns his critical eye with equal enthusiasm toward Roger Federer and Jorge Luis Borges; Terminator 2 and The Best of the Prose Poem; the nature of being a fiction writer and the quandary of defining the essay; the best underappreciated novels and the English language's most irksome misused words; and much more.Both Flesh and Not restores Wallace's essays as originally written, and it includes a selection from his personal vocabulary list, an assembly of unusual words and definitions.

    He has a flourishing bar in the heart of Soho and in six months he will be marrying Ashley. There's just one problem. Phil has been married before, 20 years ago. To a woman. In fact, technically Phil and Hazel are still married. And what Phil doesn't know yet is that Hazel has a son - a 19-year-old son.

    The complete works of an extraordinary poet who consistently refines the notion of what constitutes an American sound.