Although Dickinson was a prolific private poet, fewer than a dozen of her nearly eighteen hundred poems were published during her lifetime. The work that was published during her lifetime was usually altered significantly by the publishers to fit the conventional poetic rules of the time. Although most of her acquaintances were probably aware of Dickinson's writing, it was not until after her death in 1886-when Lavinia, Emily's younger sister, discovered...

Jim Harrison's compelling and provocative Songs of Unreason explores what it means to inhabit the world in atavistic, primitive, and totemistic ways. "This can be disturbing to the learned," Harrison admits. Using interconnected suites, brief lyrics, and rollicking narratives, Harrison's passions and concerns—creeks, thickets, time's effervescence, familial love—emerge by turns painful and celebratory, localized and exiled.

A collection of poems by American Matthew Zapruder, including the title poem, which acts as a elegy for the poet's heroes and mentors, including Zapruder's father, David Foster Wallace, and others.

One of the most successful poets in America and a fascinating literary figure of the early twentieth century, Edna St. Vincent Millay found her voice in a national poetry contest at the age of twenty. Her poems received critical praise and became the first step toward receiving the Pulitzer Award years later. An acclaimed poet of the Jazz Age, this liberated, often rebellious, woman enchanted us with her beautiful sonnets and lyrics, even as she surprised...

"A lively sampling from the work of one of the most celebrated and daring poets of the twentieth century John Berryman was perhaps the most idiosyncratic American poet of the twentieth century. Best known for the painfully sad and raucously funny cycle of Dream Songs, he wrote passionately: of love and despair, of grief and laughter, of longing for a better world and coming to terms with this one. The Heart Is Strange, a new selection of his poems,...

A collection of poems originally published in 1956 by beat generation poet Allen Ginsberg.

Wait finds C. K. Williams by turns ruminative, stalked by "the conscience-beast, who harries me," and "riven by idiot vigor, voracious as the youth I was for whom everything was going too slowly, too slowly." Poems about animals and rural life are set hard by poems about shrapnel in Iraq and sudden desire on the Paris Métro; grateful invocations of Herbert and Hopkins give way to fierce negotiations with the shades of Coleridge, Dostoevsky, and Celan....