By the age of thirty, Weldon Kees (1914?55) was a poet, journalist, musician, painter, photographer, and short story writer living in New York City. Despite a contract for aøforthcoming novel, however, he stopped writing fiction, moved to San Francisco, and worked as an artist and filmmaker. On July 18, 1955, his car was found on the Golden Gate Bridge, and he has not been seen since. These stories by Kees, predominantly set in Depression-era mid-America, feature bleak, realistic settings and characters resigned to their meager lives. The owner of an auto parts store occasionally "sells" his sister Betty Lou to interested patrons; a cryptic message in library books indicates the yearnings of a silenced patron; a young woman taking tickets at the Roseland Gardens futilely dreams of escape from the future she sees for herself; and an old man carefully saves his money to fulfill the requirements of a chain letter only to be disappointed by a spiteful daughter-in-law. Many of these stories are set in the Nebraska of Kees's youth, and they are written from a Midwestern sensibility: keenly observant, darkly humorous, and absurdly fantastic. In this new edition, Dana Gioia has added three stories to the fourteen gathered in the first edition, The Ceremony and Other Stories. The New York Times named that first edition, published in 1984, a notable book of the year.

The Collected Poems of Weldon Kees showcases the dark brilliance of one of America's most fascinating artistic and literary figures, Weldon Kees (1914-55). --University of Nebraska Press.

"Fall Quarter is an academic black comedy about a young professor who battles the dreariness and banality of a staid Nebraskan college."--Goodreads

Kees was, I believe, one of the four or five most talented members of his generation. And this is the great post-modern generation of American poets which includes Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, John Berryman, Randall Jarrell, and Theodore Roethke. That these other writers are so widely known and discussed while Kees is so forgotten seems strange indeed. -Dana Gioia, "The Achievement of Weldon Kees"

Presents a collection of the selected poems of twentieth-century American poet Donald Justice depicting memories of childhood and youth, eulogies for the dead, and reflections of life's disappointments.

Collected Poems brings together nearly four decades of C. K.Williams's work: more than four hundred poems that, though remarkable in their variety, have in common Williams's distinctive outlook—restless, passionate, dogged, and uncompromising in the drive to find words for the truth about life as we know it today. Williams's rangy, elastic lines are measures of thought, and in these pages we watch them unfold from his confrontational early poems through the open, expansive Tar and With Ignorance. His voice is both cerebral and muscular, capable of both the eightline poems of Flesh and Blood and the inward soundings of A Dream of Mind—and of both together in the award-winning recent books Repair and The Singing. These poems feel spontaneous, individual, and directly representative of the experience of which they sing; open to life, they chafe against summary and conclusion. Few poets leave behind them a body of work that is global in its ambition and achievement. C. K. Williams is one of them.

Critic, novelist, filmmaker, jazz musician, painter, and, above all, poet, Weldon Kees performed, practiced, and published with the best of his generation of artists—the so-called middle generation, which included Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, and John Berryman. His dramatic disappearance (a probable suicide) at the age of forty-one, his movie-star good looks, his role in various movements of the day, and his shifting relationships with key figures in the arts have made him one of the more intriguing—and elusive—artists of the time. In this long-awaited biography, James Reidel presents the first full account of Kees’s troubled yet remarkably accomplished life. Reidel traces Kees’s career from his birth in 1914 and boyhood in Beatrice, Nebraska, to his stint as an award-winning short-story writer and novelist, his rise as a poet and critic in New York, his branching off into abstract expressionism, jazz music, and theater, and his experimental and scientific filmmaking and photography. Going beyond the cult status that has grown up around Kees over the years, this work fairly and judiciously places him as a cultural adventurer at a particularly rich and significant moment in postwar twentieth-century America.