August Kleinzahler has earned admiration for his musical, precise, wise, and sometimes madcap poems that are grounded in the wide array of places, people, and most especially voices he has encountered in his real and imaginative worlds. Snow Approaching on the Hudson is a collection that moves seamlessly through the often hypnogogic, porous realms of dreams, the past and present, inner and outer landscapes. His haunting, shifting atmospheres are peopled by characters, intimately portrayed, that are at one historical and invented. The poet's signature rhythmic propulsion serves as the engine for his newest collection, and his always masterful free verse conveys a life thoroughly lived and brilliantly perceived.

A thrilling new collection from one of the most original poets of his generation "His work is a modernist swirl of sex, surrealism, urban life and melancholy with a jazzy backbeat." That praise appeared in the pages of The New York Times in 2005, but it applies no less to August Kleinzahler's newest collection. Kleinzahler's poetry is, as ever, concerned with permeability: Voices, places, the real and the dreamed, the present and the past, all mingle together in verses that always ring true. Whether the poem is three lines long or spans several pages; whether the voice embodied is that of "an adult male of late middle age, // about to weep among the avocados and citrus fruits / in a vast, overlit room next to a bosomy Cuban grandma" as in "Whitney Houston," or that of the title character in "Hootie Bill Do Polonius," who is bidding "adios compadre // To a most galuptious scene Kid"—Kleinzahler finds the throbbing human heart at the core of experience. This is a poet searching for—and finding—a cadence to suit life as it's lived today. Kleinzahler's verses are, as noted in the judges' citation for the 2004 Griffin Poetry Prize (which he won for his collection The Strange Hours Travelers Keep), "ferociously on the move, between locations, between forms, between registers." The Hotel Oneira finds Kleinzahler at his shape-shifting, acrobatic best, unearthing the "moments of grace" buried under the detritus of our hectic, modern lives.

In a debut of great delicacy and distinction, a young nature philosopher describes his journey as he follows the northern migration of the snow goose and reflects on the powerful attraction of home. Every spring, millions of geese embark on an arduous three-thousand-mile homeward journey from their winter quarters in the southern United States to their breeding grounds in the Canadian Arctic. One year William Fiennes, recovering from a long illness, decided to go with them. Intrigued by what he’d read about the birds’ extraordinary annual journey, he was also desperate to escape the depression that had dogged his convalescence, and the belief that at age twenty-six, his life had ground to a halt. Part memoir, part nature study, part travelogue, the story of Fiennes’s journey is not just about geese. It’s about homecoming: the birds on their long trip home, the pull of nostalgia, the urge to leave home and the even stronger urge to return. Fiennes is a gifted natural writer with a distinctive voice that is deeply thoughtful, wry and keenly observant. His book vibrates with ideas, with stories and anecdotes, with humankind as well as wild fowl. The joy of being alive, being on the move and – above all – going home are poignantly captured in this intelligent, exuberant book.

“With her trademark brio and deep-tissue understanding, Maria Tatar opens the glass casket on this undying story, which retains its power to charm twenty-one times, and counting.” —Gregory Maguire, author of Wicked The story of the rivalry between a beautiful, innocent girl and her cruel and jealous mother has been endlessly repeated and refashioned all over the world. The Brothers Grimm gave this story the name by which we know it best, and in 1937 Walt Disney sweetened their somber version to make the first feature-length, animated fairy tale, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Since then, the Disney film has become our cultural touchstone—the innocent heroine, her evil stepmother, the envy that divides them, and a romantic rescue from domestic drudgery and maternal persecution. But each culture has its own way of telling this story of jealousy and competition. An acclaimed folklorist, Maria Tatar brings to life a global melodrama of mother-daughter rivalries that play out in unforgettable variations across countries and cultures. “Fascinating...A strange, beguiling history of stories about beauty, jealousy, and maternal persecution.” —Wall Street Journal “Is the story of Snow White the cruelest, the deepest, the strangest, the most mythopoeic of them all?...Tatar trains a keen eye on the appeal of the bitter conflict between women at the heart of the tale...a feast of rich thoughts...An exciting and authoritative anthology from the wisest good fairy in the world of the fairy tale.” —Marina Warner “The inimitable Maria Tatar offers us a maze of mothers and daughters and within that glorious tangle an archetype with far more meaning than we imagine when we say ‘Snow White.’” —Honor Moore “Shocking yet familiar, these stories...retain the secret whisper of storytelling. This is a properly magical, erudite book.” —Literary Review

Cutty, One Rock takes the reader on a wild journey by airplane, bus, ferry, and foot from childhood to early manhood in the company of a New Jersey family in equal measures cultivated and deranged. We witness scenes of passionate, even violent intensity that give rise to meditations on eros and literature, the solitariness of travel, and the poetics of place. These individual pieces, most of which first appeared in The London Review of Books and won an international cult following, are by turns "poignant, surreal, down home and lyrical, a mixture of qualities that inheres in his language with uncommon delicacy and effect" (Leonard Michaels). Together they make up an intellectual and emotional autobiography on the run. The book's final section, about Kleinzahler's adored, doomed older brother, is unforgettable, and since its appearance last year in the LRB, has already entered the literature as one of the most moving contemporary memoirs.

1996 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In Green Sees Things in Waves, a powerful and inventive collection, August Kleinzahler succeeds in creating a new idiom for American lyric poetry that captures the velocity and swerves of contemporary life in the city. He pushes the language very hard to get there, and the results are breathtaking: an angular, propulsive poetry that transforms character, voice, and setting into buzzing, luminous events.

Here 'Downland' refers to the chalk countriside of Southern England and the Isle of Wight.