"[Le Guin] never loses touch with her reverence for the immense what is." — Margaret Atwood Though internationally known and honored for her imaginative fiction, Ursula K. Le Guin started out as a poet, and since 1959 has never ceased to publish poems. Finding My Elegy distills her life's work, offering a selection of the best from her six earlier volumes of poetry and introducing a powerful group of poems, at once earthy and transcendent, written in the first decade of the twenty-first century. The fruit of over a half century of writing, the seventy selected and seventy-seven new poems consider war and creativity, motherhood and the natural world, and glint with humor and vivid beauty. These moving works of art are a reckoning with a whole life.

Earth Songs unveils extraordinary views of the world discovered by a soldier-turned-poet amid a bitter war and brittle peace. From flowers blooming in battle zones to a dying love's parting words, these poems crackle with life amid death, a storyteller's own true song.

“The quirky and macabre [ninth] book from Thomson is rich with breathtaking juxtaposition. ... These elegant poems are full of surprising and moving revelations.” —Publishers Weekly

“One of the finest poets of the last fifty years.” —Salt to the Nth, like the truth of an ending unskeined across the crust of the white field. Though it happened only once, I am sending the thought of the thought continuing. To return to the field before the mowing. When a goldfinch swayed on a blue stem stalk, and the wind and the sun stirred the hay. —from “After the Mowing” Cinder: New and Selected Poems gathers for the first time poetry from across Susan Stewart’s thirty-five-year career, including many extraordinary new poems. From brief songs to longer meditative sequences, and always with formal innovation and exquisite precision, Stewart evokes the innocence of childhood, the endangered mysteries of the natural world, and deeply felt perceptions, both acute and shared. “Stewart explores our insatiable desire to remember and make meaning out of this remembering,” Ange Mlinko writes in The Nation. “Stewart’s elegiac bent has broadened, over time, from the personal lyric . . . to what might be called the cultural lyric. Fewer and fewer of her poems reference what she alone remembers; they are about what you and I remember.” Reading across this retrospective collection is a singular experience of seeing the unfolding development of one of the most ingenious and moving lyric writers in contemporary poetry.

"In Young's work, the big essential questions—mortality, identity, the meaning of life—aren't simply food for thought; they're grounds for entertainment."—Toronto Star "Surrealism seldom seems as much like real life as in Young's hilarious and cautionary poems."—Booklist Bender gathers a generous selection of new work along with treasure from Dean Young's twelve volumes. Strongly influenced by Surrealism, Dean Young's poems flash with extravagant imagery, humorous speech, sly views of the quotidian, and the exposed nerves of heartache. As the American Academy of Arts and Letters raved, "Young's poems are as entertaining as a three-ring circus and as imaginative as a canvas by Hieronymus Bosch. He is one of the most inventive and satisfying poets writing today." From "Even Funnnier Looking Now": If someone had asked me then, Do you suffer from the umbrage of dawn's dark race horses, is your heart a prisoner of raindrops? Hell yes! I would have said or No way! Never would I have said, What could you possibly be talking about? I had just gotten to the twentieth century like a leftover girder from the Eiffel Tower. My Indian name was Pressure-Per-Square-Inch. I knew I was made of glass but I didn't yet know what glass was made of: hot sand inside me like pee going all the wrong directions, probably into my heart which I knew was made of gold foil glued to dust . . .