Brilliant new poems and an expansive gathering from six collections by a Pulitzer Prize winner celebrated as “indispensable.” What Goes On displays the evolving style and sensibility of a major award-winning poet, and a traceable growth that has blossomed into a provocative confrontation with questions of consciousness and existence. Stephen Dunn’s poems probe life’s big questions without ever losing sight of the significance of the mundane.

Brilliant new poems and an expansive gathering from six collections by a Pulitzer Prize winner celebrated as “indispensable.” What Goes On displays the evolving style and sensibility of a major award-winning poet, and a traceable growth that has blossomed into a provocative confrontation with questions of consciousness and existence. Stephen Dunn’s poems probe life’s big questions without ever losing sight of the significance of the mundane.

Justly celebrated as one of our strongest poets, Stephen Dunn selects from his eight collections and presents sixteen new poems marked by the haunting "Snowmass Cycle."

“A wonderful example of the poet’s ability to satisfy readers and anticipate their thoughts.”—Elizabeth Lund, Washington Post In his sixteenth collection, Stephen Dunn continues to bring his imagination and intelligence to what Wallace Stevens calls “the problems of the normal,” which of course pervade most of our lives. The poem “Don’t Do That” opens with the lines: “It was bring-your-own if you wanted anything / hard, so I brought Johnnie Walker Red / along with some resentment I’d held in / for a few weeks.” In other poems, Dunn contemplates his own mortality, echoing Yeats—“That is no country for old men / cadenced everything I said”—only to discover he’s joined their ranks. In “The Writer of Nudes” his speaker is in search of the body’s “grammar” but tells his models, “Don’t expect to see yourself as other / than I see you.” Full of grace, wit, humor, and masterful precision, the poems in Here and Now attest to the contradictions we live with in the here and now. Political and metaphysical, these astonishing poems remind us of the essential human comedy of getting through each day. from "The House on the Hill" . . . from out of the fog, a large, welcoming house would emerge made out of invention and surprise. No things without ideas! you'd shout, and the doors would open, and the echoes would cascade down to the valleys and the faraway towns.

“An indispensable volume.” —Ron Charles, Washington Post Book Club A radiant celebration of Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Stephen Dunn’s enduring oeuvre. Hailed as "indispensable" (David Wojahn), Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Stephen Dunn masterfully shifts between the metaphysical and the ironic, never wavering in his essential honesty. His graceful poems confront our contradictions with tenderness and wit, enliven the ordinary with penetrating observation, and alert us to the haunting wonders and relationships that surround us. The Not Yet Fallen World draws from all nineteen of Stephen Dunn’s crystalline volumes, including his most recent, Pagan Virtues (2019); the National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist Loosestrife (1996); and the Pulitzer Prize–winning Different Hours (2000). By turns sardonic and profound, Dunn examines the disguises we don to hide from ourselves and reveals sublime beauty hidden within seemingly mundane interactions. Nine new poems extend the poet’s inquiry into the paradoxes of contemporary life; as he writes in "Love Poem Near the End of the World," "Something keeps me holding on / to a future I didn’t think possible." Arranged to further Dunn’s signature themes—mortality, morality, and the roles we play in the essential human comedy of getting through each day—this final collection captures the breadth of an acclaimed poet’s achievement. His legacy is a poetic expanse suffused with fearless generosity and perceptive wisdom.

In his tenth collection, Stephen Dunn turns his "wise, well-practiced eye" (LIBRARY JOURNAL) on an America growing ever more stringent with its daily mercies. Stephen Dunn received a 1995 Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Literature. His most recent publications are NEW AND SELECTED POEMS and WALKING LIGHT: ESSAYS AND MEMOIRS.

A superb new collection from “a great American poet . . . still at work on his almost-song of himself” (The New York Times Book Review). In both lively prose poems and more formal verse, Philip Levine brings us news from everywhere: from Detroit, where exhausted workers try to find a decent breakfast after the late shift, and Henry Ford, “supremely bored” in his mansion, clocks in at one of his plants . . . from Spain, where a woman sings a song that rises at dawn, like the dust of ages, through an open window . . . from Andorra, where an old Communist can now supply you with anything you want—a French radio, a Cadillac, or, if you have a week, an American film star. The world of his poetry is one of questionable magic: a typist lives for her only son who will die in a war to come; three boys fish in a river while a fine industrial residue falls on their shoulders. This is a haunted world in which exotic animals travel first class, an immigrant worker in Detroit yearns for the silence of his Siberian exile, and the Western mountains “maintain that huge silence we think of as divine.” A rich, deeply felt collection from one of our master poets.