“Aliveness is Gary Gildner’s striking quality,” Crystal McLean writes in the magazine New Letters, and thise selection of Gary Gildner’s previously published poems, plus eighteen new poems, demonstrates the aptness of that perception. Accessible and eminently readable, the poems in Blue Like the Heavens also possess great emotional depth. Readers who complain about the obscurity of contemporary American poetry will delight in this book.

This is the book of an urban mystic, someone who believes that the streets he walks, the incidents he sees and in which he sometimes plays a part have significance; he understands that the hidden beauty and music of New York City. Madison Avenue, the Brooklyn Bridge, Central Park appear and reappear as though they, the poet, and the work were inseparable. The people he recalls - a bag lady, E. E. Cummings - are as familiar to us as the city itself, but here they are lyrical and light, these poems also hold love, loss, melancholy, and tenderness -they reflect the incessant rhythms between a man and his surroundings.

Shelton assembles the best of his previous work together with a selection of new poems.

A beautiful and moving collection of poetry by a new author.

A compelling second collection of poetry.

Emplumada is Lorna Dee Cervantes’s first book, a collection of poems remarkable for their surface clarity, precision of image, and emotional urgency. Rooted in her Chicana heritage, these poems illuminate the American experience of the last quarter century and, at a time when much of what is merely fashionable in American poetry is recondite and exclusive, Cervantes has the ability to speak to and for a large audience.

The work of Michael Burkard has a rich interior quality different from that of any other voice in American poetry. He captures a sense of the mind revising and revealing itself, altering its perceptions.

First published in 1980, the classic poetry of Sharon Olds’ Satan Says was introduced into college courses twenty years ago, and still maintains a wide usage today. Few first books have the power or vigor of design of Satan Says. Marilyn Hacker described it as “a daring and elegant first book. This is a poetry which affirms and redeems the art.”

Named U.S. Poet Laureate for 2004-2006, Ted Kooser is one of America's masters of the short metaphorical poem. Dana Gioia has remarked that Kooser has written more perfect poems than any poet of his generation. Long admired and praised by other poets, Kooser is also accesible to the reader not familiar with contemporary poetry.

Cage voices his concerns on the nature and future of music, they ways of dancers, the West's interpretation of Eastern ideas in this thought provoking collection of anecdotes and epigrams.

In Shelton’s fourth collection of poems, he writes of the desert Southwest, and through it gives his unique view of the world. The poems speak of landscape, marriage, freedom, and death.

John Ashbery writes like no one else among contemporary American poets. In the construction of his intricate patterns, he uses words much as the contemporary painter uses form and color- words painstakingly chosen as conveyors of precise meaning, not as representations of sound. These linked in unexpected juxtapositions, at first glance unrelated and even anarchic, in the end create by their clashing interplay a structure of dazzling brilliance and strong emotional impact. From this preoccupation arises a poetry that passes beyond conventional limits into a highly individual realm of effectiveness, one that may be roughly likened to the visual world of Surrealist painting. Some will find Mr. Ashbery's work difficult, even forbidding; but those who are sensitive to new directions in ideas and the arts will discover here much to quicken and delight them.A 35th anniversary edition of classic work from a celebrated American poet who has received the Pulitzer Prize, the national Book Award, and the national Book Critics Circle Award. John Ashbery's second book, The Tennis Court Oaths, first published by Wesleyan in 1962, remains a touchstone of contemporary avant-garde poetry.

Cynthia Genser's landscapes, like those of D.H. Lawrence, are analogues of human emotions; her men and women exist in their effects-prototypes one minute, passionate and distinctly visible individuals the next. Person and place invite the reader into an adventure that begins and ends everywhere.The language employed throughout is voluptuous, sensuous, yet precise. The appeal is to all the senses as well as to reason and intelligence: the poems, seamed with a difficult, sweaty beauty, stimulate every pleasure center. But pure language play also leads to hard, intelligent sense.Of her own work, Cynthia Genser has said, "Although I belong to no special school or group, I align my poetry with the work of others aiming their metaphors at the banality and reductionism of our world-at the terror or planned obsolescence, Vogue Magazine, the threat of nuclear warfare. I cannot agree more with the Marxist Henri Lefebvre that poetry is the enemy and eventual victor in the war against 'terrorism' and the terrorist society we now live in."

Poems devoted to family and the physical world.

Etai-Eken is a legend told in a series, a cycle of poems, which is to say, told in different languages. The action of the poems in the poem is their moving in and out of the legend by the changes of access to the larger legend; an access of the present in the ancient, of the present’s knowledge and experience of it.

The Axion Esti is probably the most widely read volume of verse to have appeared in Greece since World War II and remains a classic today. Those who follow the music of Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis have been especially drawn to Odysseus Elytis's work, his prose is widely considered a mirror to the revolutionary music of Theodorakis. The "autobiographical" elements are constantly colored by allusion to the history of Greece, thus, the poems express a contemporary consciousness fully resonant with those echoes of the past that have served most to shape the modern Greek experience.