Poems Seven: New and Complete Poetry, the winner of the National Book Award, presents the life work of a giant of American letters, tracks a forty-year career of honest, tough artistry, and shows a man at nearly 80 years of age and still at the height of his poetic power. Dugan’s new poems continue his career-long concerns with renewed vigor: the poet’s insistence that art is a grounded practice threatened by pretension, the wry wit, the jibes at the academic and sententious, and the arresting observations on the quotidian battles of life. All the while he peppers his poems with humorous images of the grim and daunting topics of existential emptiness.

David Daniel explores a city-entire lives-swept clean off the map in this haunting debut As breezes lap the shallow-tugged tide flow And swallows twitter and skirt the dusk, We lie within the wreckage of the stars- The moon spill, our planets' pull-this sad machine.

An ant to the stars or stars to the ant—which is more irrelevant? Weekend Jet Skiers— rude to call them idiots, yes, but facts are facts. Clamor of seabirds as the sun falls—I look up and ten years have passed." —from "Dawn Notebook" Such is the expansive terrain of Seven Notebooks: the world as it is seen, known, imagined, and dreamed; our lives as they are felt, thought, desired, and lived. Written in forms that range from haiku to prose, and in a voice that veers from incanta­tory to deadpan, these seven poetic sequences offer diverse reflections on language and poetry, time and consciousness, civilization and art—to say nothing of bureaucrats, surfboards, and blue margaritas. Taken collectively, Seven Notebooks composes a season-by-season account of a year in the life of its narrator, from spring in Chicago to summer at the Jersey Shore to winter in Miami Beach. Not a novel in verse, not a poetic journal, but a lyric chronicle, this utterly unique book reclaims territory long abandoned by American poetry, a characteristic ambition of Campbell McGrath, one of the most honored, accessible, and humanistically engaged writers of our time.

Publishers Weekly called Jim Harrison "an untrammeled renegade genius," a poet who performed "absolutely brilliant and outrageous things with language."

In The Seven Deadly Sins and Other Poems, veteran poet David R. Slavitt touches on topics from the mundane to the mysterious with his signature wit and intelligence. In OC Stupid, OCO for instance, he transforms a simple head cold into an appreciation for the richness of consciousness, and in OC Waking, OCO the very effort of rising from bed becomes something like a miracle: OC I heave myself up to a sitting position, pause / a moment, and am amazed by what I have done. . . .OCO Slavitt explores the range of the human condition with such ease and insight that readers cannot help but ponder what life isOCoand what it could be. What ifOColike the mythic sea creature in OC The DogfishOCOOCohumans could return to the womb when frightened? In the collectionOCOs title poem, Slavitt gives a voice to the Seven Deadly Sins, each of which claims, persuasively, to possess a value to humans that is seldom noticed or appreciated. Slavitt has a unique ability to examine an ideaOCobe it virtue or vice, dark or blitheOCoand offer perspective and wisdom about the conundrums of our existence."

How to Read a Poem is an introduction to creative reading, the art of coming up with something to say about a text. It presents a new method for learning and teaching the skills of poetic interpretation, providing its readers with practical steps they can use to construct perceptive, inventive readings of any poem they might read. The Introduction sets out the aims of the book and provides some basic operating principles for applying the seven steps. In each subsequent chapter, the step is introduced and explained, relevant points of interpretative theory and methodology are discussed and illustrated with multiple examples, and the step is put into practice in a final section. Through these final sections, step by step, the book develops an extended reading of a single poem, Letitia Landon’s "Lines Written under a Picture of a Girl Burning a Love-Letter" from 1822. That reading is sustained across the whole arc of the book, providing a detailed worked example of how to read a poem. This accessible and enjoyable guide is the ideal introduction to anyone approaching the detailed study of poetry for the first time and offers valuable theoretical insights for those more experienced in the area.