Welcome to the world of Little Nell; an adorable, plaid jumper-wearing, doe-eyed girl. Little Nell is cute and spunky with only one unfortunate, minor flaw. She has a habit of dying. ...a LOT. Craig Gilbert continues to make us smile and laugh with his poetic, gallows humor in this, the fourth installment of the Little Nell poems.

Clever, dark poems that make you laugh with unease. Little Nell is a sweet, adorable, little pig-tailed moppet who, in each poem, is introduced, commits an absurdly foolish act, and then promptly dies.....all in the span of four lines of verse. Honoring the rhyming talents of Dr. Seuss and the dark humor of Edward Gorey, The Little Nell Poems will make the warped child in every reader clutch their bellies with laughter.

Presenting a broad range of fully annotated selections from the long history of poetry in English, this anthology provides a rich and extensive resource for teaching traditional canons and forms as well as experimental and alternate trajectories (such as Language poetry and prose poetry). In addition to a chronological table of contents suited to a literary-historical course framework, the volume offers a list of conceptual and thematic teaching units called “Poems in Conversation.” Instructors will find the Conversations helpful for lesson plans; students will find them equally helpful as a resource for presentation and paper topics. Headnotes to each poet are designed to be useful to both instructors and students in the classroom: for instructors new to particular poets, the headnotes will provide helpful grounding in the most current scholarship; for students, they will provide frameworks and explanations to help them approach unfamiliar texts. As a unique feature in the current market, this anthology also incorporates contemporary song lyrics from alternative, indie, rap, and hip-hop songs, fully integrated into the Conversations as rich material for teaching in the under­graduate classroom.