"David Orr is no starry-eyed cheerleader for contemporary poetry; Orr's a critic, and a good one. . . . Beautiful & Pointless is a clear-eyed, opinionated, and idiosyncratic guide to a vibrant but endangered art form, essential reading for anyone who loves poetry, and also for those of us who mostly just admire it from afar." --Tom Perrotta
Award-winning New York Times Book Review poetry columnist David Orr delivers an engaging, amusing, and stimulating tour through the world of poetry. With echoes of Francine Prose's Reading Like a Writer, Orr's Beautiful...
"David Orr is no starry-eyed cheerleader for contemporary poetry; Orr's a critic, and a good one. . . . Beautiful & Pointless is a clear-e...
A cultural biography of Robert Frost s beloved poem, arguably the most popular piece of American literature
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood . . . One hundred years after its first publication in August 1915, Robert Frost s poem The Road Not Taken is so ubiquitous that it s easy to forget that it is, in fact, a poem. Yet poetry it is, and Frost s immortal lines remain unbelievably popular. And yet in spite of this devotion, almost everyone gets the poem hopelessly wrong. David Orr s The Road Not Taken dives directly into the controversy,...
A cultural biography of Robert Frost s beloved poem, arguably the most popular piece of American literature
