Named U.S. Poet Laureate for 2004-2006, Ted Kooser is one of America's masters of the short metaphorical poem. Dana Gioia has remarked that Kooser has written more perfect poems than any poet of his generation. Long admired and praised by other poets, Kooser is also accesible to the reader not familiar with contemporary poetry.

Poems look at high school sports, failure, nature, death, family life, reincarnation, the past, religion, and parenthood.

What are the forces that cause us to strike out and harm each other? "Captivity" explores the way in which the individual is held hostage by society; how the forces of racism, sexism, and classism frequently express themselves as violence within the family. The book also explores a deeper captivity, like the Jews in Egypt yearning for the Promised Land, the soul trapped in exile from God."

Celebratory or eligiac, these poems record the author's two-headed journey to root herself - geographically and emotionally - in the world. Becker's poems are from remote and familiar outposts: the watery evanescence of Venice contrasts with the desert of the American Southwest; we lean with her over the rim of a canyon or stand back to study a Giacometti sculpture. From such settings arise poems on the death of a sibling, the consoling power of painting and sculpture; others celebrate the erotic and the capacity of the female body for pleasure and pain.

The author of collection book of poems has contributed frequently to American Poetry Review, Antaeus and Field. His previous books include Wrecking Crew, which won the Lamont award of the Academy of American Poets, the Dollmaker's Ghost, and Winter Stars

Peter Meinke was a master of traditional poetic forms long before the current interest in "the new formalism." His work is, in turn, witty, comic, sane, deeply moving, and always readable. Liquid Paper collects the best of his previously published poems from the late 1960s on with a generous selection of new work.

A book of poems about children in the widest sense--from children of the Nazi-torn Warsaw ghettos to the American poor, as well as poems of domesticity, love, and daily life."

Kooser's third book in the Pitt Poetry Series is a selection of poems published in literary journals over a period of ten years. His work has been praised for its clarity and accessibility, and its mastery of figurative language.

This collection of poems enacts the struggle of a young black gay man in his search for identity. The poet's aim is to rescue some portion of the drowned and the drowning. Shepherd is the winner of the 1993 Associated Writing Programs' Award Series in Poetry.

Although Kathleen Norris's best-selling Dakota: A Spiritual Geography has brought her to the attention of many thousands of readers, she is first and last a poet. Like Robert Frost, another poet identified with a particular landscape, she can reveal the miraculous in the ordinary, and she writes with clarity, humor, and deep sympathy for her subjects.