Poems deal with mortality, travel, kindness, strangers, fate, guilt, love, religion, friendship, terrorism and sadness.

Justly celebrated as one of our strongest poets, Stephen Dunn selects from his eight collections and presents sixteen new poems marked by the haunting Snowmass Cycle.

In this tenth collection, Stephen Dunn turns his -wise, well-practiced eye- (Library Journal) on an America growing ever more stringent with its daily mercies. Not content merely to observe the world, Dunn's stance is always dual, complicit. And as he navigates through each paradox of his moral and aesthetic and erotic selves, this poet, described by Sydney Lea as one -who remains open to contradictions, - travels to a place of exact and complicated vision.

Stephen Dunn experiments with short, related pieces that play off each other in the manner of jazz improvisations. The resulting pairs cover such subjects as "Scruples/Saints," "Hypocrisy/Precision," and "Anger/Generosity." The wisdom and startling turns we've come to expect from Dunn are everywhere in the ninety miniatures (forty-five pairs) that comprise this volume.

In a second sequence of poems, nineteenth-century novelists become "local visitors" to the author's South Jersey towns. "Chekhov in Port Republic," "Jane Austen in Egg Harbor," "Dostoyevsky in Wildwood": these inventions and others give Dunn provocative new latitudes. As in his previous books, "he balances the casual and the vivid as he plumbs the ambiguity and mystery of human relations" New York Times Book Review).

"Beauty isn't nice. Beauty isn't fair;" So, in part, states an epigraph for this stunning new collection, his thirteenth, by the Pulitzer Prize winner for Poetry (2000). First traversing betrayal and loss, Stephen Dunn then moves to speak of new love, with its attendant pleasures and questioning. The title poem, perhaps emblematic of the book as a whole, is evocative of beauty's often surprising manifestations even in the light of tragedy; as on that terrible day "when those silver planes came out of the perfect blue." Because beauty jars us, makes us look twice, it is as startling as a good...

In his fourteenth collection, Stephen Dunn, one of our indispensable poets (Miami Herald), continues to probe brilliantly the unsaid and the elusive in the lives we live, in language that Gerald Stern has called unbearably fearless and beautiful. "

Winner of the 2nd annual Poulin Prize Award, chosen by Pulitzer-Prize-winning poet Stephen Dunn.

An anthology edited by Nathan Brown, the 2013 - 2014 Poet Laureate of Oklahoma. It includes poems "about" Oklahoma that are written by natives, ex-pats, and visitors alike. These poems are an honest, and sometimes raw, look at the state's past and present by way of three chapters titled: People, Places, and Odds & Ends. Among the poets represented are Pulitzer winners Stephen Dunn and N. Scott Momaday, as well as Naomi Shihab Nye, Joy Harjo, George Bilgere, Ron Padgett, and many others.

From "Before We Leave"

Where are we going? It's not an issue of here or there And if you ever feel you can' take another step, imagin how you might feel to arrive if not wiser, a little more awar how to inhabit the middle groun between misery and joy