This is an anthology of irreverence and humor in the hands of our best poets. Can serious poetry be funny? Chaucer and Shakespeare would say yes, and so do the authors of these 187 poems that address timeless concerns but that also include comic elements. Beginning with the Beats and the New York School and continuing with both marquee-name poets and newcomers, ""Seriously Funny"" ranges from poems that are capsized by their own tomfoolery to those that glow with quiet wit to ones in which a laugh erupts in the midst of terrible darkness. Most of the selections were made in the editors' battered compact car, otherwise known as the Seriously Funny Mobile Unit. During the two years in which Barbara Hamby and David Kirby made their choices, they'd set out with a couple of boxes of books in the back seat, and whoever wasn't driving read to the other. When they found that a poem made both of them think but laugh as well, they earmarked it. Readers will find a true generosity in these poems, an eagerness to share ideas and emotions and also to entertain. The singer Ali Farka Toure said that honey is never good when it's only in one mouth, and the editors of ""Seriously Funny"" hope its readers find much to share with others.

Gathering works from five of B. H. Fairchild's previous volumes stretching over thirty years, and adding twenty-six brilliant new poems, The Blue Buick showcases the career of a poet who represents "the American voice at its best: confident and conflicted, celebratory and melancholic" (The New York Times). Fairchild's poetry covers a wide range, both geographically and intellectually, though it finds its centre in the rural Midwest: in oilfields and dying small towns, in taverns, baseball fields, one-screen movie theatres and skies "vast, mysterious and bored." Ultimately, its cultural scope-where Mozart stands beside Patsy Cline, with Grunewald, Goedel and Rothko only a subway ride from the Hollywood films of the 1950s-transcends region and decade to explore the relationship of memory to the imagination and the mysteries of time and being. And finally there is the character of Roy Eldridge Garcia, a machinist/poet/philosopher who sees in the landscape and silence of the high plains the held breath of the earth, "as if we haven't quite begun to exist. That coming into being still going on."

"Fairchild's ability not only to choose a story but to pace it and to reveal its meaning through the unfolding of the narrative is probably unmatched in contemporary American poetry. The incisive psychology, the vividly descriptive diction, the large repertoire of vocabulary, the weightiness of his settings and plots: all these contribute to the delightful sensation that one is reading, simultaneously, the best poetry and best prose. I cannot think of another living poet capable of delivering such pleasure... Not since James Wright has there been a poet so skilled at representing the minds and imaginations of ordinary American working people."
--"The Southern Review"
"With elegance and restrained subtlety, Mr. Fairchild interweaves topics that become something like musical themes, including the central theme of machine work... Anyone who can lay claim to the authorship of this much excellent poetry wins my unqualified and grateful admiration."
--Anthony Hecht
"In an American culture which has always ignored or disdained class issues, Fairchild and Philip Levine are the only contemporary poets... who take work and the working class as their subjects... Almost throwbacks, like Steinbeck novels or Walker Evans photographs, Fairchild's poems recover an America from which we have always turned our heads."
--PN Review (England)

Employing dramatic monologues, among other forms, Usher embraces a range of subject matter and modes, from the elegiac to the comic. At its heart, however, is the long poem "Trilogy," consisting of three interrelated dramatic monologues spoken by a circus performer, a theological student and part-time usher, and Hart Crane.

Although many of the poems here unfold among the small towns, abandoned farms, and slate skies of the rural Midwest, their larger landscape is the sheer fact; geographical, psychological, metaphysical; of "absences like so many lighted windows as you walk through a strange city, wanting to fill them with imaginary lives and words and stories."

B. H. Fairchild's memory systems are the collective vision of America's despairing dreamers failed baseball players, oil field laborers, a surrealist priest, college boys at a burlesque theater, the last remaining cast members of "The Wizard of Oz." Looming over all is the fact and the mystery of our continued renewal."

B.H. Fairchild's "The Art of the Lathe "is a collection of poems centering on the working-class world of the Midwest, the isolations of small-town life, and the possibilities and occasions of beauty and grace among the machine shops and oil fields of rural Kansas.

From Manhattan to the rural Midwest-one of our most distinguished poets offers a verbal cinema of America. Employing dramatic monologues, among other forms, Usher embraces a range of subject matter and modes, from the elegiac to the comic. At its heart, however, is the long poem "Trilogy," consisting of three interrelated dramatic monologues spoken by a circus performer, a theological student and part-time usher, and Hart Crane. A Los Angeles Times Favorite Book of 2009.