The first full-length volume of poems in a decade by the former poet laureate of the United States. He illuminates the evocative, iconic objects of deep memory -- "a cowbell," "a white stone perfectly round," "a three-legged milking stool" -- that serve to foreground the rich meditations on time and mortality that run through his remarkable new collection. While Hall's devoted readers will recognize many of his long-standing preoccupations -- baseball,...

"Nestled in the Appalachian mountains, Owsley County is the poorest county in Kentucky and the second poorest in the country. Buildings are crumbling and fields sit vacant, as tobacco farming and coal mining decline. But strong women are finding creative ways to subsist in their hollers in the hills. Cassie Chambers grew up amidst these hollers, and through the women who raised her, she traces her own path out of and back into the Kentucky mountains....

"If Avery Chambers can't fix you in 10 sessions, she won't take you on as a client. Her successes are phenomenal -- she helps people overcome everything from domineering parents to assault -- and almost absorb the emptiness she sometimes feels since her husband's death. Marissa and Mathew Bishop seem like the golden couple -- until Marissa cheats. She wants to repair things, both because she loves her husband and for the sake of their 8-year-old son....

"Late summer blooms in beautiful Sea Harbor, Massachusetts, and while a harvest thrives, Izzy Chambers Perry and the other Seaside Knitters will need to cast on their sleuthing skills to save a local farm. Unfortunately, finding a killer can be like looking for a needle in a haystack. Seaside Knitter Birdie Favazza has long loved knitting, but lately she's taken on a new challenge--making a family farm operational again. With help from friends, Lambswool...

"Milton concludes "Lycidas," his great pastoral elegy, with the sudden appearance of the pastoral elegist, a youth with no audience but trees and running water: "Thus sang the uncouth swain to th'oaks and rills, / While the still morn went out with sandals grey." This moment epitomizes, for me, the Western tradition of pastoral poetry, and of pastoral elegy in particular. My collection began as a series of elegies, written for the many dead of my...

"Zofia, a teenage Holocaust survivor, travels across post-war Europe as she searches for her younger brother and seeks to rebuild her shattered life"-- Germany, 1945. The Gross-Rosen concentration camp have been liberated, but nothing feels over to Zofia Lederman. Three years ago she and her younger brother, Abek, were the only members of their family to be sent to the right, away from the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Everyone else -- parents,...

"Widely acknowledged as one of the most important English writers of the last century, Angela Carter's work stands out for its bawdiness and linguistic zest, its hospitality to the fantastical and the absurd, and its extraordinary inventiveness and range. Her life was as vigorously modern and unconventional as anything in her fiction. This is the story of how Angela Carter invented herself - as a new kind of woman and a new kind of writer - and how...

The first anthology ever to present the entire range of ancient Greek and Roman stories -- from myths and fairy tales to jokes Captured centaurs and satyrs, talking animals, people who suddenly change sex, men who give birth, the temporarily insane and the permanently thick-witted, delicate sensualists, incompetent seers, a woman who remembers too much, a man who cannot laugh -- these are just some of the colorful characters who feature in the unforgettable...