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.

Everybody Out of the Pond

At the Water's Edge will change the way you think about your place in the world. The awesome journey of life's transformation from the first microbes 4 billion years ago to Homo sapiens today is an epic that we are only now beginning to grasp. Magnificent and bizarre, it is the story of how we got here, what we left behind, and what we brought with us.

We all know about evolution, but it still seems absurd that our ancestors were fish. Darwin's idea of natural selection was the key to solving generation-to-generation evolution -- microevolution -- but it could only point us toward a complete explanation, still to come, of the engines of macroevolution, the transformation of body shapes across millions of years. Now, drawing on the latest fossil discoveries and breakthrough scientific analysis, Carl Zimmer reveals how macroevolution works. Escorting us along the trail of discovery up to the current dramatic research in paleontology, ecology, genetics, and embryology, Zimmer shows how scientists today are unveiling the secrets of life that biologists struggled with two centuries ago.

In this book, you will find a dazzling, brash literary talent and a rigorous scientific sensibility gracefully brought together. Carl Zimmer provides a comprehensive, lucid, and authoritative answer to the mystery of how nature actually made itself.

Fifteen environmental success stories from young people around the world

From the winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Ruth Lilly Prize
This new collection by acclaimed poet Carl Dennis is about vocation in the largest sense, the work that we believe gives our lives meaning, and the challenges that come in defining such work and in doing it well. The poems approach their subject from a variety of perspectives: a calling may involve a compromise with limitations, or be an expression of individual purpose; if a calling in some poems provides an alternative to the disorder of the world, in others it offers a means to shape the world as we are shaped by it. As the poems speak to each other, they form a dialogue of attitudes that makes room for both frustration and achievement, a dialogue that includes us and takes us beyond ourselves.

A career-spanning collection of poems from Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Carl Dennis. The New York Times has called Carl Dennis's poetry "wise, original, and deeply moving." A poet with a growing audience of admirers, Dennis writes in a clear, classically simple language that is both personal and universal. Making use of a rich variety of genres--advice, meditation, elegy, and prophecy--his poems take unexpected turns as they explore their subjects, catching the reader off balance in a way that is liberating. This new anthology gathers the best of his eight previous books along with a generous sampling of new poems.

Winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

Practical Gods is the eighth collection by Carl Dennis, a critically acclaimed poet and recent winner of one of the most prestigious poetry awards, the Ruth Lilly Prize. Carl Dennis has won acclaim for "wise, original, and often deeply moving" poems that "ease the reader out of accustomed modes of seeing and perceiving" (The New York Times). Many of the poems in this new book involve an attempt to enter into dialogue with pagan and biblical perspectives, to throw light on ordinary experience through metaphor borrowed from religious myth and to translate religious myth into secular terms. While making no claims to put us in touch with some ultimate reality, these clear, precise, sensitive poems help us to pay homage to the everyday household gods that are easy to ignore, the gods that sustain life and make it rewarding.

With the careful consideration and insight of a master in his calling, Carl Dennis proposes that poems are acts of persuasion and that the strength of a poem's speaker is the key to engaging the reader. In Poetry as Persuasion, Dennis identifies the qualities of passion, discrimination, and inclusiveness that are essential in creating a compelling, successful speaker. Calling on such masters of the craft as Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, among others, Dennis uses a variety of poetic examples to show how to engage a reader. He demonstrates how a successful poem involves a relationship between the text and the reader's imagination: it convinces the reader that someone is standing behind the lines whose company is worth keeping, and whose experience evokes a universally enthralling response. The book offers detailed studies of point of view, irony, myth, genre - including a discussion on writing political poetry - and uses practical examples to demonstrate the art and rewards of revision. Lucidly written, Poetry as Persuasion offers both inspiration and indispensable advice for practicing poets and offers anyone with an interest in poetry a more thorough understanding and experience of its universal appeal. Carl Dennis is the author of seven books of poetry, including, most recently, Meetings with Time. A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, in 2000 he was awarded the Ruth Lilly Prize from Poetry Magazine and the Modern Poetry Association for his contribution to American poetry. He is a professor of English at the State University of New York at Buffalo and a sometime member of the faculty of the MFA program in creative writing at Warren Wilson College.

In his seventh book, Carl Dennis explores the ways in which our wishes - those in our power to fulfill at any moment and those that have no chance of ever being realized - define who we are. While some of the poems view wishing as a failure to do justice to the world we have, others regard it as a recognition that no present, however rich, can satisfy the imagination, and suggest that one of the functions of poetry is to keep significant wishes alive. In showing with moving clarity how wishes are essential to giving shape and direction to the moment, these poems make use of a rich variety of genres: elegy, advice, meditation, warning, consolation, and prophecy.