Impelled by metaphor and lilting repetition, Mulberry seeks a sense of the world, and ultimately, finds a sense of the Infinite. Affording continual discoveries, Mulberry is a major work for the new century by an assured and lavishly gifted poet. Dan Beachy-Quick is the author of North True South Bright and Spell, He is chair of the MFA Writing Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and recipient of a Lannan Foundation Residency.

    But while the selected poems in this volume may focus upon loss and grief, they also reflect solace, respite, and joy.  A goodbye is an opportunity for kindness, for forgiveness, for intimacy, and ultimately for love and a deepening acceptance of life as it is rather than what it was. Goodbyes can be poignant, sorrowful, sometimes a relief, and—now and then—even an occasion for joy.  They are always transitions that, when embraced, can be the door to a new life both for ourselves and for others. In this inspiring and consoling volume, Housden encourages readers to embrace poetry as a way of enabling us to better see and appreciate the beauty of the world around and within us.

    In response he began to write daily prose-poem letters to Yesenin. Through this one-sided correspondence, Harrison unloads to this unlikely hero, ranting and raving about politics, drinking problems, family concerns, farm life, and a full range of daily occurrences. The rope remains ever present.Yet sometime through these letters there is a significant shift. Rather than feeling inextricably linked to Yesenin's inevitable path, Harrison becomes furious, arguing about their imagined relationship: "I'm beginning to doubt whether we ever would have been friends."In the end, Harrison listened to his own poems: "My year-old daughter's red robe hangs from the doorknob shouting Stop."

    The result is a celebration of the pleasures of poetry. In his charming and candid introduction Collins explains how he chose seventy-five poems from among the thousands he considered. With insightful comments from the poets illuminating their work, and series editor David Lehman's thought-provoking foreword, The Best American Poetry 2006 is a brilliant addition to a series that links the most noteworthy verse and prose poems of our time to a readership as discerning as it is devoted to the art of poetry.

    The author of Revenants and Shut Up Shut Down, he is also a frequent contributor to the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet blog.

    Stark juxtaposition of images evokes the New York School, verbal collages suggest the associative method of the postmodernists, and his playful attention to sound recalls elements of Language School poetry. While these elements surface in Lemon’s work, his poetry remains profoundly original, his voice remarkably distinct. Lemon is also, like Frank O’Hara, an autobiographical poet, using the materials of life for inspiration. At 29, he is already a survivor of brain surgery. Still coping with the surgery’s effects, including a gradual loss of vision, he invokes, proclaims, decries, and serenades the world that results after the violation of identity. When the membranes that divide mind and body rupture, the result is not a void, but a strange sensory landscape where all stimuli exist on the same level. Avoiding the easy temptations of both despair and consolation, Hallelujah Blackout embraces the full range of the human experience.

    During that time, some of these poems appeared in various journals and on Web sites, including The Poetry Daily site, which ran thirty of Lehman's poems in as many days throughout the month of April 1998. For The Daily Mirror, Lehman has selected the best of these "daily poems" -- each tied to a specific occasion or situation -- and telescoped two years into one. Spontaneous and immediate, but always finely crafted and spiced with Lehman's signature irony and wit, the poems are akin to journal entries charting the passing of time, the deaths of great men and women, the news of the day. Jazz, Sinatra, the weather, love, poetry and poets, movies, and New York City are among their recurring themes. A departure from Lehman's previous work, this unique volume provides the intimacy of a diary, full of passion, sound, and fury, but with all the aesthetic pleasure of poetry. More a party of poems than a standard collection, The Daily Mirror presents an exciting new way to think about poetry.

    Why do we act this way? Johnson asks. How should we act? His best poems are examples of what the finest poetry can do: bring us closer to ourselves and at the same time put us in touch with something larger.

    In six long poems, Schnackenberg's rhyme-rich blank verse, with its densely packed images, shifts effortlessly between the lyric and the epic, setting passion to a verbal music that is recognizably her own.An exceptional and moving new collection from one of the most talented American poets of our time, Heavenly Questions is a work of intellectual, aesthetic, and technical innovation—and, more than that, a deeply compassionate and strikingly personal work.

    Collins’ emotional complexity and uncommon range make this debut both thrillingly imaginative and ethical in its uncompromising attention to detail. In her Foreword, contest judge Louise Glück observes, “I know no poet whose sense of fraud, the inflated emptiness that substitutes for feeling, is more acute.” Glück calls Collins’ volume “savage, desolate, brutally ironic . . . a book of astonishing originality and intensity, unprecedented, unrepeatable.”

    His third book in a decade, Some Values of Landscape and Weather revives poetic architectures such as elegy, song and litany, to build what he calls "a comprehensive music." Here musical and pictorial values perform against a backdrop of political, social and ethical values. These intense and exacting poems traverse a landscape of cultural memory that opens into the explosive, vibrant registers of the now. John Ashbery has written that Gizzi's poems are "simultaneously all over the page and right on target. He is the most exciting poet to come along in quite a while."

    Simic] is one of the wisest poets of his generation, and one of the best".* For this new edition of his selected poems, Simic has added twenty-eight poems and extensively revised others, making this the most complete collection available of his early work.In the spare, haunting vision of these poems, the familiar takes on a disturbing, often sinister, presence. A fork "resembles a bird's foot/Worn around the cannibal's neck" and a bird's chirp is "Like a match flickering / In a new grave". Life's horrors -- violence, hunger, poverty, illness -- lurk unnervingly in the background. And yet, despite the horror, a sense of wonder pervades these poems, transforming the ordinary world into a mysterious place of unknowable forces.Classic displays of the economy and grace of Simic's work, these poems occupy an established place in American poetry.

    In his "daring and urgent" (The New York Times Book Review) memoir, My Bright Abyss, he asks, "What is poetry's role when the world is burning?" Hammer Is the Prayer: Selected Poems might be read as an answer to that question.From the taut forms of his first book to the darker, more jagged fluencies of his second, into the bold and pathbreaking poems of his last two collections, Hammer Is the Prayer bears the reckless, restless interrogations and the slashing lyric intensity that distinguish Wiman's verse. But it also reveals the dramatic and narrative abilities for which he has been widely praised--the junkyard man in "Five Houses Down" with his "wonder-cluttered porch" and "the eyesore opulence / of his five partial cars," or the tragicomic character in "Being Serious" who suffers "the world's idiocy / like a saint its pains."Hammer Is the Prayer brings together three decades of Wiman's acclaimed poetry. Selected by the author, these poems reveal the singular music and metaphysical urgency that have attracted so many readers to his work and firmly assert his place as one of the most essential poets of our time.

    The 1996 Pulitzer winner in poetry and a major collection, Jorie Graham's The Dream of the United Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994 spans twenty years of writing and includes generous selections from her first five books: Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts, The End of Beauty, Region of Unlikeness,and Materialism.

    The wildly inventive imagery in these cinematic pieces lodges them somewhere between the surreal and the pure symbol, colorful and smooth like the lyrics of John Ashbery or Linda Pastan. In Chelotti’s poems, diamonds talk and sheriffs balance frogs on the tips of pens.The rain says, Listen to Debussy,go ahead, Debussy will fix you.—From “Migraine Cure”The secret to including everythingis to intricately divide your mindand then, all of a sudden,undivide it.—From “Still Life on a Scrolling Background”