This second book of poems by a powerful, compassionate, and fiercely intelligent poet bravely explores the ways in which we humans encounter mortality: the assaults of disease and bodily harm, the cruel inequities of material and psychic well-being, domestic treachery, self-slaughter, failures of mind. Linda Gregerson's work emphasizes the resourcefulness of the human spirit, the intelligence of the body, the abundant beauty of the created world. What readers will love about these poems - many of them centered on young children - is the way they combine straightforwardness and complexity....

Reformation iconoclasts viewed verbal images with the same distrust and aversion as visual images, because they too were capable of shaping and thus waylaying the human imagination; and yet the Reformation also produced the defining monuments of English epic. In an extended analysis, both lucid and theoretically sophisticated, Linda Gregerson traces the contradictory cultural roots of The Faerie Queene and Paradise Lost, illuminating the ideological, political, and gender conflicts that Spenser and Milton confronted as they transformed the epic poem into an instrument for the reformation of...

Reformation iconoclasts viewed verbal images with the same distrust and aversion as visual images, because they too were capable of shaping and thus waylaying the human imagination; and yet the Reformation also produced the defining monuments of English epic. In an extended analysis, both lucid and theoretically sophisticated, Linda Gregerson traces the contradictory cultural roots of The Faerie Queene and Paradise Lost, illuminating the ideological, political, and gender conflicts that Spenser and Milton confronted as they transformed the epic poem into an instrument for the reformation of...

A stirring, brilliantly crafted collection, Linda Gregerson's third volume of poetry examines mortality in all its beauty and horror. Fluently rendered in Gregerson's distinctive three-line stanzas, these poems explore subjects from autism to genealogy to ecology. Their occasions are diverse -- a barn fire, a wounded deer, a child's determined struggle with a bicycle -- but their instinct is always to wrest from the impure world a vernacular of praise.

The New Yorker has written, "Gregerson's rich aesthetic allows her best poems to resonate metaphysically." In this new volume, Linda Gregerson makes clearer than ever her passionate premise that the metaphysical only and always derives from our profound embeddedness in physical reality.

From subjects as diverse as the Nazi occupation of Poland and a breakthrough discovery in cell biology, Gregerson seeks to distill "the shape of the question," the tenuous connection between knowing and suffering, between the brightness of the body and the shadows of the mind. "Choose any angle you...

A magnificent new collection from National Book Award finalist and Kingsley Tufts Award winner Linda Gregerson
In eloquent poems about Ariadne, Theseus, and Dido, the death of a father, a bombing raid in Lebanon, and in a magnificent series detailing Masaccio s Brancacci frescoes, The Selvage deftly traces the line between the wonder and woe of human experience. Keenly attuned to the precariousness of our existence in a fractured world of how little the world will spare us Gregerson explores the cruelty of human and political violence, such as the recent island massacre in Norway...

In her first book of collected work, prize-winning poet Linda Gregerson mines nearly forty years of poetry, bringing us a full range of her talents.

Ten new poems introduce Prodigal, followed by fifty poems, culled from Gregerson's five collections, that range broadlyin subject from class in America to our world's ravaged environment to the wonders of parenthood tothe intersection of science and art to the passion of the Roman gods, and beyond. This selection reinforces Gregerson s standing as one of poetry s mavens . . . whose poetics seek truth through the precise...