These exquisite poems passionately portray what remains after devastating loss, the death of an only child. A stunning sequel to State of Grace: The Joshua Elegies, this collection unfolds a bittersweet journey of complex relationships that endure. It's a remarkable and powerful book which will change how you look at loss and love.

The Night We Set the Dead Kid on Fire, a collection of poetry, is a book chocked-full of characters (both women and men) that don't receive much attention in Contemporary American Poetry, --the dishwashers, the addicts, the truckers, the card players, the convicts, the boxers, the grave-diggers, the mechanics, the farmers, the blue-collar "others"--And many of these characters are either the victims or the perpetrators of violence. This book's speakers (both women and men) lie and cheat and drink and fist-fight in parking lots, campgrounds, and dive bars. They get cheap in casinos, broken apartments, hospitals, and hotel rooms. In this book, you will find STI's, tattoos, and shotguns, rattlesnakes, brass knuckles, and bottles across the face. Assault. Overdose. Suicide. BUT, though my hometown (A-Town), can get ugly and violent, can hold grudges and punch holes in the walls or set a car on fire, it is also a place capable of great love, sacrifice, and loyalty as its people carve out a meaningful life every day in spite of the wreckage around them, as they wrestle with the shifting space between community and self. Yes, much of the subject matter in these poems is hard to look at, but I believe there is poetry in those dark places too. I seek to celebrate and to elegize small towns and the people who go to work in them

Poems over the ages lamenting the dead. In Elegy for Himself, written in the London Tower before his execution, Chidiock Tichborne wrote: "My tale was heard, and yet it was not told; / My fruit is fall'n, and yet my leaves are green; / My youth is spent, and yet I am not old; / I saw the world and yet I was not seen."

Written in the poet's unique personal idiom, these early poems include "Chicago," "Fog," "Who Am I?" "Under the Harvest Moon," plus more on war, love, death, loneliness and the beauty of nature.

Tom Hipps writes well on many subjects. He is quite adept at writing about nature; love; science; and social problems. Writer Bill Martin calls his love poetry "delicate and beautiful". Chuck Stone of the Philadelphia Inquirer describes his poetry as "absolutely marvelous". Sarah Jones, a close friend; says that Hipps book, Loving You is "wonderful" and she calls him a "true talent". The Child Within is a collection of poems that deal with the craft of writing poetry personalizing it more. Moon Wine is a selection of nature poems. Finally, Poetically Yours is more of a general collection of poetry.

American women have created an especially vigorous and innovative poetry, beginning in 1632 when Anne Bradstreet set aside her needle and picked up her "poet's pen." The topics of American women poets have been various, their images their own, and their modes of expression original. Emily Stipes Watts does not imply that the work of American men and that of American women are two different kinds of poetry, although they have been treated as such in the past. It is her aim, rather, to delineate and define the poetic tradition of women as crucial to the understanding of American poetry as a whole. By 1850, American women of all colors, religions, and social classes were writing and publishing poetry. Within the critical category of "female poetry," developed from 1800 to 1850, these women experimented boldly and prepared the way for the achievement of such women as Emily Dickinson in the second half of the nineteenth century. Indeed at times—for example from 1860 through 1910—it was women who were at the outer edge of prosodic experimentation and innovation in American poetry. Moving chronologically, Professor Watts broadly characterizes the state of American poetry for each period, citing the dominant male poets; she then focuses on women contemporaries, singling out and analyzing their best work. This volume not only brings to light several important women poets but also represents the discovery of a tradition of women writers. This is a unique and invaluable contribution to the history of American literature.

An illustrated introduction to the poetry of Emily Dickinson.