Here are the words of some of the women I have been, am being still, will come to be, writes Audre Lorde of this volume, in which she brings together many of the most important poems she has written over the past thirty years."

Features poems that affirm the conflicts, fears, and hopes of the poet in words conveying vision and courage

"Children are poets before they grow up and they should live with poems. I hope this book will encourage them to do so."—Eleanor Roosevelt Beloved and treasured for over 60 years, here is the only poetry collection your family needs—brimming with favorite, classic poems carefully selected to inspire young readers. Over 700 classic and modern poems written by poets from William Shakespeare to J. R. R. Tolkien, Emily Dickinson to Langston Hughes, and covering a range of favorite topics—pets, playtime, family, nature, and nonsense—ensure that there’s a poem to please every child. A truly comprehensive collection that is the ideal way of introducing children to the joys of reading poetry. "If your children think they don't like poetry, expose them to this collection . . . and I defy them to resist its magic."—Kirkus "A fine book for parents to read aloud to their children."—Library Journal "This volume stands out for the comprehensiveness of its selection."—The Horn Book

Justly celebrated as one of our strongest poets, Stephen Dunn selects from his eight collections and presents sixteen new poems marked by the haunting "Snowmass Cycle."

Gathers poems from each period of Hall's career, including "The One Day," the long poem that won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

"This healthy collection of new poems and selections from seven previous volumes is remarkable for its generosity of spirit, manifested in a warm surrealism that is often turned with humor toward his own past as a way of understanding the recurrent questions of growing old: 'Why did it take so long / for me to get lenient? What does it mean one life / only?' " -- Publishers Weekly (starred review) "Gerald Stern's achievement is immense. In this beautiful gathering . . . one encounters a poet who praises and mourns in turn and even at once." -- Grace Schulman, The Nation "Stern is one of those rare poetic souls who makes it almost impossible to remember what our world was like before his poetry came to exalt it." -- C. K. Williams

"In Young's work, the big essential questions—mortality, identity, the meaning of life—aren't simply food for thought; they're grounds for entertainment."—Toronto Star "Surrealism seldom seems as much like real life as in Young's hilarious and cautionary poems."—Booklist Bender gathers a generous selection of new work along with treasure from Dean Young's twelve volumes. Strongly influenced by Surrealism, Dean Young's poems flash with extravagant imagery, humorous speech, sly views of the quotidian, and the exposed nerves of heartache. As the American Academy of Arts and Letters raved, "Young's poems are as entertaining as a three-ring circus and as imaginative as a canvas by Hieronymus Bosch. He is one of the most inventive and satisfying poets writing today." From "Even Funnnier Looking Now": If someone had asked me then, Do you suffer from the umbrage of dawn's dark race horses, is your heart a prisoner of raindrops? Hell yes! I would have said or No way! Never would I have said, What could you possibly be talking about? I had just gotten to the twentieth century like a leftover girder from the Eiffel Tower. My Indian name was Pressure-Per-Square-Inch. I knew I was made of glass but I didn't yet know what glass was made of: hot sand inside me like pee going all the wrong directions, probably into my heart which I knew was made of gold foil glued to dust . . .

Second-hand coat -- Where I came from -- At the center -- Poetry -- How to catch Aunt Harriette -- Scars -- What can you do? -- Drought in the lower fields -- Moving right along -- Pokeberries -- Mother's picture -- Liebeslied -- Curtains -- Something -- From the arboretum -- Winter -- Shadows -- The miracle -- You may ask -- Names -- Why kid yourself -- Message from your toes -- Sunday -- Pine cones -- Father's day -- Orange poem praising brown -- The room -- American milk -- How Aunt Maud took to being a woman -- Comments of the mild -- An academic life -- Procedure -- When the furnace toes on in a California tract house -- Icons from Indianapolis -- Snow trivia -- The latest hotel guest walks over particles that revolve in seven other dimentsions controlling latticed space -- Years later -- Surviving in Earlysville with a broken window -- Turning -- Happiness -- Turn your eyes away -- Body among trees -- Some things you'll need to know before you join the union -- Women laughing -- Translations -- A last cloud -- Ceam -- Codicle -- Loss -- From the other side -- The tree -- Habit -- Illinois -- Fading -- U of my -- Drams of wild birds -- Vegetables I -- Vegetables II -- Periphery -- Separate -- Overlapping Edges -- Communion -- And yet -- Being a woman -- Cocks and mares -- Shotgun wedding -- Family -- Mine -- The infant -- Laguna beach -- Out of Lost Angeles -- The nost -- Bazook -- Something deeper -- The song of Absinthe granny -- Dream of light in the shade -- The talking fish -- Memory of knowledge and death at the mother of scholars -- Being human -- Tenacity -- The excuse -- Salt -- Denouement -- Between th elines -- The plan -- Poles -- Emily -- Green apples -- Haying -- Habitat -- Eclat -- The principle of mirrors -- behind the facade -- I have three daughters -- A mother looks at her child -- Advice -- End of summer -- Seat belt fastened? -- Disappeared child -- The sotry of the churn -- It -- Metamorphosis -- Topography -- The magnet -- In an iridescent time -- The season -- The burned bridge -- Orchard -- The splinter -- The mold -- An old song -- Love's relative -- Vernal Equinox.

“One of the finest poets of the last fifty years.” —Salt to the Nth, like the truth of an ending unskeined across the crust of the white field. Though it happened only once, I am sending the thought of the thought continuing. To return to the field before the mowing. When a goldfinch swayed on a blue stem stalk, and the wind and the sun stirred the hay. —from “After the Mowing” Cinder: New and Selected Poems gathers for the first time poetry from across Susan Stewart’s thirty-five-year career, including many extraordinary new poems. From brief songs to longer meditative sequences, and always with formal innovation and exquisite precision, Stewart evokes the innocence of childhood, the endangered mysteries of the natural world, and deeply felt perceptions, both acute and shared. “Stewart explores our insatiable desire to remember and make meaning out of this remembering,” Ange Mlinko writes in The Nation. “Stewart’s elegiac bent has broadened, over time, from the personal lyric . . . to what might be called the cultural lyric. Fewer and fewer of her poems reference what she alone remembers; they are about what you and I remember.” Reading across this retrospective collection is a singular experience of seeing the unfolding development of one of the most ingenious and moving lyric writers in contemporary poetry.

A finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize. “Ruth Stone is . . . a pre-eminent American poet.” —Harvard Review