On the Great Atlantic Railway is Kenneth's Koch's inspired collection of 32 years of work. Koch, David Lehman said in The American Poetry Review, is "a masterly innovator . . . who has used his extravagant powers of wit and invention to enlarge the sphere of the poetic . . . he has stretched our ideas of what it is possible to do in poetry."

In this volume, the themes and variations of One Train May Hide Another, the poems by ships at sea, and the post-Apollinaire couplets of A Time Zone, for example, reveal Kenneth Koch's interest in new forms, directions and kinds of writing.

Essays, interviews, parodies and cartoons by a distinguished poet and teacher

The story of the men who build the transcontinental railroad in the 1860's.

A compelling read for history buffs and railroad enthusiasts alike.

Kenneth Koch has been called “one of our greatest poets” by John Ashbery, and “a national treasure” in the 2000 National Book Award Finalist Citation. Now, for the first time, all of the poems in his ten collections–from Sun Out, poems of the 1950s, to Thank You, published in 1962, to A Possible World, published in 2002, the year of the poet’s death–are gathered in one volume. Celebrating the pleasures of friendship, art, and love, the poetry of Kenneth Koch has been dazzling readers for fifty years. Charter member–along with Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, and James Schuyler–of the New York School of poets, avant-garde playwright and fiction writer, pioneer teacher of writing to children, Koch gave us some of the most exciting and aesthetically daring poems of his generation. These poems take sensuous delight in the life of the mind and the heart, often at the same time: “O what a physical effect it has on me / To dive forever into the light blue sea / Of your acquaintance!” (“In Love with You”). Here is Koch’s early work: love poems like “The Circus” and “To Marina” and such well-remembered comic masterpieces as “Fresh Air,” “Some General Instructions,” and “The Boiling Water” (“A serious moment for the water is when it boils”). And here are the brilliant later poems–“One Train May Hide Another,” the deliciously autobiographical address in New Addresses, and the stately elegy “Bel Canto”–poems that, beneath a surface of lightness and wit, speak with passion, depth, and seriousness to all the most important moments in one’s existence. Charles Simic wrote in The New York Review of Books that, for Koch, poetry “has to be constantly saved from itself. The idea is to do something with language that has never been done before.” In the ten exuberant, hilarious, and heartbreaking books of poems collected here, Kenneth Koch does exactly that.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1995 Written in a voice that moves between elegy and prayer, The Simple Truth contains thirty-three poems whose aim is to weave a complex tapestry of myth, history (both public and private), family, memory, and invention in a search for truths so basic and universal they often escape us all.