Seventy lighthearted poems, selected for both popularity and literary quality, cover a wide range of subjects: books, words, imagination, the beauty of the natural world, travel, adventure, play, and, of course, love and friendship. Features an incredible array of poets, from Lewis Carroll and Ernest Lawrence Thayer to Shel Silverstein and Ogden Nash.

This anthology features poems by Mark Doty, Ross Gay, Donald Hall, Marie Howe, Naomi Shihab Nye and many others. These poets, from all walks of life, and from all over America, prove to us the possibility of creating in our lives what Dr. Martin Luther King called the "beloved community," a place where we see each other as the neighbors we already are. Healing the Divide urges us, at this fraught political time, to move past the negativity that often fills the airwaves, and to embrace the ordinary moments of kindness and connection that fill our days.

At once wistful and exhilarating, this lyrical story evokes the inexorable passage of time - and the awe-inspiring power of nature to lift us up.

Gerald Costanzo, long known as one of the best contemporary poets of satire, focuses specifically on American themes that, though presented as parables, fables, jokes, and put-ons, remain darkly serious in tone. His subject is the mythic landscape of America itself: the transitory, popular, consumer culture of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century life. Costanzo evokes a sense of having arrived on the scene too late, of having missed the heyday of American innocence and possibility, and now-in the present-is forced to live with diminished experience. He mourns a culture where genuine emotion cannot be found but where its semblance can be endlessly marketed. Regular Haunts is a retrospective collection of Costanzo's work that also includes nearly thirty new poems.

The poems in Produce Wagon explore the vast and varied circumstances of the human experience. Roy Scheele delves into his love for his wife in "Remembrances," the opening poem from his first chapbook, and "Driving after Dark"; his fascination with the natural world in poems such as "How the Fox Got Away" and "Late Autumn Woods"; his appreciation of his family in "A Kitchen Memory" and "The Long Rise"; and his fondness for stories in "The Carny Circuit" and "In the Clear." In these and the other poems in the collection, Scheele uses a variety of traditional verse forms as well as free verse and syllabics, carefully fitting the form of each poem to his subject matter. Though most of the poems are set in Nebraska and neighboring states, there is a universality to the subjects Scheele addresses. In these poems anywhere is everywhere.

Joyce Sutphen’s evocations of life on a small farm, coming of age in the late 1960s, and traveling and searching for balance in a very modern world are both deeply personal and familiar. Readers from Maine to Minnesota and beyond will recognize themselves, their parents, aunts and uncles, and neighbors in these poems, which move us from delight in keen description toward something like wisdom or solace in the things of this world. In addition to poems selected from the last twenty-five years, Carrying Water to the Field includes more than forty new poems on the themes of luck, hard work, and the ravages of time—erasures that Sutphen attempts to ameliorate with her careful attention to language and lyrical precision.   

This anthology of contemporary American poetry, short fiction, and nonfiction, explores issues of identity, oppression, injustice, and social change. Living American writers produced each piece between 1980 and the present; works were selected based on literary merit and the manner in which they address one or more pressing social issues.

William Reichard has assembled some of the most respected literary artists of our time, asking whose voices are ascendant, whose silenced, and why. The work as a whole reveals shifting perspectives and the changing role of writing in the social justice arena over the last few decades.

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The Woods Are On Fire is Fleda Brown's deeply human and intensely felt poetic explorations of her life and world. Her account includes her brain-damaged brother, a rickety family cottage, a puzzling and sometimes frightening father, a timid mother, and the adult life that follows with its loves, divorces, and serious illnesses. Visually and emotionally rich, Brown's poems call on Einstein, Shakespeare, Sophocles, Law and Order, Elvis, and Beethoven. They stand before the Venus de Milo as well as the moon, as they measure distances between what we make as art and who we are as humans. In wide-ranging forms-from the sestina to prose poems-they focus on the natural world as well as the Delaware legislature and the inauguration of William Jefferson Clinton. The Woods Are On Fire includes nearly fifty new poems, along with poems selected from seven previous books, showcasing an influential American poet's work over the last few decades.

For decades a restorer of old homes, Connie Wanek shows us that poetry is everywhere, encountered as easily in the waterways, landscapes, and winters of Minnesota, as in the old roofs and darkened drawers of a home long uninhabited. Rival Gardens includes more than thirty unpublished poems, along with poems selected from three previous books-all in Wanek's unmistakable voice: plainspoken and elegant, unassuming and wise, observant and original. Many of her new poems focus on the garden, beginning with the Garden of Eden. A deep feeling for family and for the losses and gains of growing into maturity mark the tone of Rival Gardens, with Wanek always attending to the telling detail and the natural world.

2022 High Plains Book Award Winner in Poetry Marjorie Saiser's strong, clear language makes the reader feel at home in her poems. Dealing with all the ways love goes right and wrong, this collection honors the challenges of holding firm to who we really are, as well as our connections to the natural world. The Track the Whales Make includes poems from Saiser's seven previous books, along with new ones. Her poetry originates from the everyday things we might overlook in the hurry of our daily routines, giving us a chance to stop and appreciate the little things, while wrapped in her comforting diction. Because the poems come from ordinary life, there is humor alongside happiness and sadness, the mixed bag we survive or create, day by day.

"As I looked about me I felt that the grass was the country, as the water is the sea. The red of the grass made all the great prairie the colour of wine-stains, or of certain seaweeds when they are first washed up. And there was so much motion in it; the whole country seemed, somehow, to be running."--"My Antonia," Willa Cather
It is often called "Catherland"--Webster County, Nebraska, where the quintessential American novelist Willa Cather spent her childhood and found inspiration for her stories of European immigrants on the prairie. Richard Schilling, with his watercolor paintings and ink sketches, conducts us to that land, to scenes that might have influenced Cather, but as they appear today. Schilling's images take us to Red Cloud, Cather's childhood home; to the Willa Cather Memorial Prairie, a botanical jewel of mixed-grass prairie restored to its pre-1900 condition; and on to "the divide," the high prairie land between the Little Blue River to the north and the Republican River to the south. Each evocative original watercolor is paired with an excerpt from Cather's work and with the author's own musings on the history, geography, and ecology of the landscape.

Ted Kooser sees a writer's workbooks as the stepping-stones on which a poet makes his way across the stream of experience toward a poem. Because those wobbly stones are only inches above the quotidian rush, what's jotted there has an immediacy that is intimate and close to life.

Kooser, winner of the Pultizer Prize and a former U.S. poet laureate, has filled scores of workbooks. "The Wheeling Year" offers a sequence of contemplative prose observations about nature, place, and time arranged according to the calendar year.

Written by one of America's most beloved poets, this book is published in the year in which Kooser turns seventy-five, with sixty years of workbooks stretching behind him.

For nearly half a century Jared Carter has been quietly mapping the American heartland. Line by line, his poetry has shown us the landscape, sounded the voices, conjured the music, and tested the silence of the ever-changing and yet ever-constant Midwest that figures so prominently in the American story. And yet what we find in Carter's poetry is endlessly new. Here, in poems selected from his first five books, is the summer-long buzz of the cicada and the crack of the cue ball, the young rebel on his big Harley, and the YMCA secretary who backstrokes her way across the indoor pool. Here, too, are thirty new poems in fixed form that illustrate Carter's continued quest for a poetry of "universal interest." Taken together, these selections are, truly, poetry in the American grain.

In this captivating collection of poetry, celebrated poets Ted Kooser and Connie Wanek, along with illustrator Richard Jones, explore the wonders of nature in a spirited and magical way - and invite our imaginations out to play. This stunning gift-book contains thirty exquisite poems by celebrated US poets Ted Kooser and Connie Wanek, beautifully illustrated by artist Richard Jones. A freewheeling romp through the world of imagery and metaphor, this quietly startling collection is framed by the four elements and divided into thoughtfully-curated sections, exploring art and reality, fact and fancy. Look around: what do you see? A clown balancing a pie in a tree, or an empty nest perched on a leafless branch? This charming compendium of the fleeting and unexpected turns the everyday - towering trees and tiny tadpoles; roaring fires, lazy afternoons, and pillowy white marshmallows - into poetic gold. A brilliant and timeless collaboration that evokes both the mystery and grandeur of the natural world and the cosy, mundane moments of daily life, this wonderfully illustrated collection is the go-to gift book of the season for poetry fans of all ages.

Here are twenty classroom-tested exercises that really work, written and used by some of America's best teachers and writers of poetry. Meant for the student and teacher alike, Mapping the Line is also meant for those who have never been in a poetry writing class but have, perhaps, been writing on their own or have been wanting to. This collection is a good place to begin, and to continue.

Magazine. Poetry. Fiction. Literary Nonfiction. Art. ABLE MUSE WINTER 2012 continues the tradition of masterfully crafted poetry, fiction, essays, art & photography, and book reviews that have become synonymous with the ABLE MUSE--online and in print. After more than a decade of online publishing excellence, the print edition of ABLE MUSE maintains the superlative standard of the work presented all these years in the online edition and the ABLE MUSE ANTHOLOGY (Able Muse Press, 2010).

"Poems dipped out of the air" describes the manner in which Ted Kooser composed the poems in Cotton Candy, the result of his daily routine of getting up long before dawn, sitting with coffee, pen, and notebook, and writing whatever drifts into his mind. Whether those words and images are serious or just plain silly, Kooser tries not to censor himself. His objective is to catch whatever comes to him, to snatch it out of the air in words, rhythms, and cadences, the way a cotton candy vendor dips an airy puff out of a cloud of spun sugar and hands it to his customer. Poems written in fun and now shared with the reader, Kooser's playful and magical confections charm and delight.

Like the yellow, pink, and blue irises that had been transplanted from house to house over the years, the stories of poet Ted Kooser's family had been handed down until, as his mother lay ill and dying, he felt an urgency to write them down. With a poet's eye for detail, Kooser captures the beauty of the landscape and the vibrancy of his mother's Iowa family, the Mosers, in precise, evocative language. The center of the family's love is Kooser's uncle, Elvy, a victim of cerebral palsy. Elvy's joys are fishing, playing pinochle, and drinking soda from the ice chest at his father's roadside Standard Oil station. Kooser's grandparents, their kin, and the activities and pleasures of this extended family spin out and around the armature of Elvy's blessed life. Kooser has said that writing this book was the most important work he has ever undertaken because it was his attempt to keep these beloved people alive against the relentless erosion of time.

This anthology of contemporary American poetry, short fiction, and nonfiction, explores issues of identity, oppression, injustice, and social change. Living American writers produced each piece between 1980 and the present; works were selected based on literary merit and the manner in which they address one or more pressing social issues. William Reichard has assembled some of the most respected literary artists of our time, asking whose voices are ascendant, whose silenced, and why. The work as a whole reveals shifting perspectives and the changing role of writing in the social justice arena over the last few decades.