Imperfect Thirst includes beautiful love poems and approaches elemental subjects with a remarkable balance of good nature and holy dread: recollections of childhood, snapshots of impassive cruelty, reflections on art and nature. This energetic collection will prove once again why Galway Kinnell is one of America's masters of the art.

    But like his celebrated teacher, Elizabeth Bishop, Gioia is meticulously painstaking and self-critical about his own poems. In an active 25-year career he has published only two previous volumes of poetry. Although Gioia is often recognized as a leading force in the recent revival of rhyme and meter in American poetry, his own work does not fit neatly into any one style.Interrogations at Noon displays an extraordinary range of style and sensibility—from rhymed couplets to free verse, from surrealist elegy to satirical ballad. What unites the poems is not a single approach but their resonant musicality and powerful but understated emotion. This new collection explores the uninvited epiphanies of love and marriage, probing the quiet mysteries of a seemingly settled domestic life. Meditating on the inescapable themes of lyric poetry—time, mortality, nature, and the contradictions of the human heart—Gioia turns them to provocative and unexpected ends.

    Levine had years earlier recognized Levis as "the most gifted and determined young poet I have ever had the good fortune to have in one of my classes"; after Levis's death, Levine edited the poems Levis had left behind. What emerged is this haunting collection, Elegy. The poems were written in the six years following publication of his previous book, The Widening Spell of the Leaves, and continue and extend the jazz improvisations on themes that gave those poems their resonance. There are poems of sudden stops and threats from the wild: an opossum halts traffic and snaps at pedestrians in posh west Los Angeles; a migrant worker falls victim to the bites of two beautiful black widow spiders; horses starve during a Russian famine; a thief, sitting in the rigging of Columbus’s ship, contemplates his work in the New World. The collection culminates in the elegies written to a world in which culture fragments; in which the beasts of burden—the horses, the migrant workers—are worked toward death; a world in which "Love's an immigrant, it shows itself in its work. / It works for almost nothing"; a world in which "you were no longer permitted to know, / Or to decide for yourself, / Whether there was an angel inside you, or whether there wasn't."Elegy, as Levine says, was "written by one of our essential poets at the very height of his powers. His early death is a staggering loss for our poetry, but what he left is a major achievement that will enrich our lives."

    What is the difference, he asks, between good and evil, cruelty and instruction, risk and trust? Against the backdrop of the natural world, Phillips pitches the restlessness of what it means to be human, as he at once deepens and extends a meditation on that space where the forces of will and imagination collide with sexual and moral conduct.

    Subversive in their treatment of the contemporary voice, broad in their subject matter, and often delightfully funny, the poems in this collection have a brilliant ear language.

    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, intense wonder, and a reverence for the everyday: "The birds are in their trees, / the toast is in the toaster, / and the poets are at their windows. / They are at their windows in every section of the tangerine of earth-the Chinese poets looking up at the moon, / the American poets gazing out / at the pink and blue ribbons of sunrise."Through simple language, Collins shows that good poetry doesn't have to be obscure or incomprehensible, qualities that are perhaps the real trouble with most "serious" poetry: "By now, it should go without saying / that what the oven is to the baker / and the berry-stained blouse to the drycleaner / so the window is to the poet."In this dazzling new collection, his first in three years, Collins explores boyhood, jazz, love, the passage of time, and, of course, writing-themes familiar to Collins's fans but made new here. Gorgeous, funny, and deeply empathetic, Billy Collins's poetry is a window through which we see our lives as if for the first time.

    Snow and sunshine, barns and cornfields and cars on the empty nighttime roads, abandoned Minnesota lakes and the mood of America now--these are his materials. He sees and talks clearly: he uses no rhetoric nor mannered striving for effect, but instead the simple statement that in nine lines can embody a mood, reveal a profound truth, illuminate in an important way the inward and hidden life. This is a poet of the modern world, thoroughly aware of the complexities of the moment but equally mindful of the great stream of life--all life--of which mankind is only a part.

    But this poetry is not a sentimental celebration of the goodness of nature, and harmony with the world is never something assumed. The harmony Forché seeks goes deeper than simple submission to natural processes or identification with an ethnic group, and it must be fought for with a tenuous faith, the balance that must be found between the ugliness, the harshness of her history—both natural and social—and its intense beauty, is what distinguishes Forché’s poetry, gives it is depth and dimension.

    A collection of poetic meditations by the National Book Critics Circle Award-finalist author of Leaving Saturn evaluates the solemn richness of everyday lives, from a grandfather who gardens in a tenement backyard to a teacher to renames her black students after French painters.

    Moved by the presence and withdrawal of light, these internal clocks influence rhythms of sleeping and waking: the opening and closing of flowers, the speed at which the heart pumps blood, the migratory cycles of birds. With love poems and wintry prayers, Joanna Klink offers us patterns of glowing alertness and shared life, patterns that speak to the flickering circuit between inner and outer landscapes, that bind each beating heart to the pull of the tides.

    With breathtaking freshness, he writes of mutability, of the passage of time, and of growth, decay, and death as they are reflected in both ourselves and the changing of the seasons. By turns playful, melancholy, and mysterious, the poems in "April Galleons" reaffirm the extraordinary powers that have made Ashbery such a significant figure in the American literary landscape.

    The result is a poetry that upends the deeply and dangerously assumed concepts of such a culture—that new knowledge is always better knowledge, that history is a steady progress, that humans are in control of the natural order. Nick Lantz’s poems hurtle through time from ancient theories of physics to the CIA training manual for the practice of torture, from the history of the question mark to the would-be masterpieces left incomplete by the deaths of Leonardo da Vinci, Nikolai Gogol, Bruce Lee, and Jimi Hendrix. Selected by Linda Gregerson for the esteemed Bakeless Prize for Poetry, We Don’t Know We Don’t

    In Taboo he examines the role of blacks in Western history, and how these roles are portrayed in art and literature. In taut, meticulously crafted three-line stanzas, Rubens paints his wife looking longingly at a black servant; Aphra Behn writes Oroonoko "as if she'd rehearsed it/for years in her spleen"; and in Monticello, Thomas Jefferson is "still/at his neo-classical desk/musing, but we know his mind/is brushing aside abstractions/so his hands can touch flesh." Taboo is the powerful first book in a new trilogy by a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet whose work never ceases to challenge and delight his readers.

    poet laureate, a National Humanities Medal, and a National Medal of Art. Gathering thirty years and seven books, this volume compiles Dove’s fresh reflections on adolescence in The Yellow House on the Corner and her irreverent musings in Museum. She sets the moving love story of Thomas and Beulah against the backdrop of war, industrialization, and the civil right struggles. The multifaceted gems of Grace Notes, the exquisite reinvention of Greek myth in the sonnets of Mother Love, the troubling rapids of recent history in On the Bus with Rosa Parks, and the homage to America’s kaleidoscopic cultural heritage in American Smooth all celebrate Dove’s mastery of narrative context with lyrical finesse. With the “precise, singing lines” for which the Washington Post praised her, Dove “has created fresh configurations of the traditional and the experimental” (Poetry magazine).

    I can think of just about no contemporary poets who publish such consistently great work.” —Corduroy Books “Bob Hicok's poetry is a fleeting comfort, a temporary solace from the chaos of the world. Smart, honest, powerfully inventive, his writing asks the biggest questions while acknowledging that there are no answers beyond the imposed structure of the page.” —Los Angeles Times on This Clumsy Living “The most potent ingredient in virtually every one of Bob Hicok's compact, well-turned poems is a laughter as old as humanity itself, a sweet waggery that suggests there's almost no problem that can't be solved by this poet's gentle humor.” —New York Times Book Review on Insomnia Diary