Comic poetry is serious stuff, combining incongruity, satire and psychological effects to provide us a brief victory over reason--which could help us save ourselves, if not the world. This book champions the literary movement of comic poetry in the U.S., providing an historical context and exploring the work of such writers as Denise Duhamel, Campbell McGrath, Billy Collins, Thomas Lux and Tony Hoagland. Their techniques reveal how they make us laugh while addressing important social concerns.

Lists over 5,200 titles of books published by American poets between 1973 and 1983.

“Ryan is a scrupulously observant poet with a gift for going for the jugular . . . His work is finely honed, provocative, questing, and humane.” – Edward Hirsch, Washington Post Book World Michael Ryan’s first collection in fifteen years shows the acclaimed poet at the height of his powers. Highlighting the wit and passion displayed throughout his career, Ryan’s latest work comprises fifty-seven poems from three award-winning volumes and thirty-one new poems. In both dramatic lyrics and complex narratives, Ryan renders the world with startling clarity, freshness, and intimacy. New and Selected Poems is filled with the stuff of everyday life, and as the New York Times Book Review said, it “include[s] pain and fear but also surprise, joy, laughter, everything human.” "New and Selected Poems reminds us how much we have relied on this poet to forge a path for us in plain style.” – Carol Muske-Dukes, Los Angeles Times Book Review "Ryan's poems have always felt as if they neded to be written. They seem to exist because of some pressure to respond, not because of a facility for language alone. This is a rare quality among poets. The commitment to it is as hard-won, and real, as any you are likely to find in poetry." – David Rivard, American Poetry Review Michael Ryan is the author of many acclaimed books, including three previous volumes of poetry. Among the honors for his work are the prestigious Kingsley Tufts Award, the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, a Whiting Writers’ Award, and NEA and Guggenheim fellowships. Ryan is a professor of English and creative writing at the University of California at Irvine.

The Cradle Place is a collection from Thomas Lux, a self-described "recovering surrealist" and winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award. These fifty-two poems bring to full life the "refreshing iconoclasms" Rita Dove so admired in Lux's earlier work. His voice is plainspoken but moody, humorous and edgy, and ever surprising. These are philosophical poems that ask questions about language and intention, about the sometimes untidy connections between the human and natural worlds. In the poem "Terminal Lake," Lux undermines notions of benign nature, finding dark currents beneath the surface: "it's a huge black coin, / it's as if the real lake is drained / and this lake is the drain: gaping, language- / less, suck- and sinkhole." In the ominous "Render, Render," the narrator asks us to consider a concentration of the essences of our lives: all that is physical, spiritual, remembered, and dreamed for, melded together to make the messy self we present to the world. Lux's voice is intelligent without being bookish, urgent and unrelentingly evocative. He has long been a strong advocate for the relevance of poetry in American culture. The Los Angeles Times praises Lux for his "compelling rhythms, his biting irony, and his steady devotion to a craft that often seems thankless." As Sven Birkerts noted, "Lux may be one of the poets on whom the future of the genre depends."

One of the New York Public Library's 25 "Books to Remember" in 1997 Lux comments on the absurd, the pathetic, and the commonplace in our culture, writing with compassion as well as satire. He is "singular among his peers in his ability to convey with a deceptive lightness the paradoxes of human emotion," says Publishers Weekly, and Robert Hass, in the Washington Post Book World, takes special note of Lux's "bitter wit, the kind of irony that comes with a quick, impatient intelligence."

The Index of American Periodical Verse is an important work for contemporary poetry research and is an objective measure of poetry that includes poets from the United States, Canada, and the Caribbean as well as other lands, cultures, and times. It reveals trends in the output of particular poets and the cultural influences they represent. The publications indexed cover a broad cross-section of poetry, literary, scholarly, popular, general, and "little" magazines, journals, and reviews.

The Street of Clocks, Thomas Lux's first all-new collection since 1994, is a significant addition to the work of an utterly original, highly accomplished poet. The poems gathered here are delivered by a narrator who both loves the world and has intense quarrels with it. Often set against vivid landscapes - the rural America of Lux's childhood and unidentified places south of the border - these poems speak from rivers and swamps, deserts and lawns, jungles and the depths of the sea.