James Merrill himself once called his body of work “chronicles of love and loss,” and in twenty books written over four decades he used the details of his own life—comic and haunting, exotic and domestic—to shape a portrait that in turn mirrored the image of our world and our moment. This...

In this haunting, beautiful third collection from Jill Bialosky, the poet examines the intrusion of eros, art, and the imagination on ordinary life.

The lover who whispers “Is it still snowing? . . . Will you stay with me?” in the first poem reappears throughout the book in different guises—sometimes seemingly real...

In One Secret Thing, her ninth collection, Sharon Olds completes her cycle of family poems.

The book opens with a poem in twelve parts, which focuses on fearsome images of war. This vision of strife between nations is followed by indelible new poems of conflict within a family. Here are poems of...

Brad Leithauser’s “most satisfying collection in years” (Library Journal), a bracing poetic journey that begins in a warm, peopled world and concludes in a cooler and more private place, embracing love of the human and natural world in all its states.

Las Vegas, Nashville, despair, the Midwest, “Bar-B-Q Heaven” and his family’s Louisiana home: these are the American places that Kevin Young visits in his powerful, heartfelt sixth book of poetry. Begun as a reflection on family and memory, Dear Darkness became a book of elegies after the sudden death of the...

The award-winning “lively and excellent collection” (Los Angeles Times) about the South and its legacy, about African-American griefs and passages, from the author of Jelly Roll and Black Maria, a poet who has “set himself apart from his peers with his supple, variable, blues-inflected lines” (Publishers Weekly).

From one of the most important British poets at work today comes a brilliant new collection that meditates on human battles past and present, on youth and age, on monsters and underdogs, on the life of nations and the individual heart.

In Tyrannosaurus Rex Versus the Corduroy Kid, we meet a writer...