A poetry collection that includes new works as well as previously published poems.

"Peter Guralnick's remarkable work... covers old ground from new perspectives, offering deeply felt, masterful, and strikingly personal portraits of creative artists, both musicians and writers, at the height of their powers. "You put the book down feeling that its sweep is vast, that you have read of giants who walked among us," rock critic Lester Bangs wrote of Guralnick's earlier work in words that could just as easily be applied to this new one....

A reference guide to 145 writers whose works illustrate the vast differences in the languages, religions, and ethnic backgrounds of the American people. Each section contains an introduction, followed by essays on the writers, plus a bibliography.

"Songbooks, a critical guide to American popular music writing, unfolds chronologically, with entries on authors, artists, and topics beginning with William Billings's 1770 New-England Psalm-Singer. Outsiders proliferate in these pages: women and/or writers of color, authors displaced by sexuality, self-educated scholars, elites deviating from norms. Their work routinely took non-academic shapes: compilations of songs, memoirs and biographies, fiction...

"One hundred of the most evocative modern poems on joy, selected by an award-winning contemporary poet. Christian Wiman, a poet known for his meditations on mortality, has long been fascinated by joy and by its relative absence in modern literature. Why is joy so resistant to language? How has it become so suspect in our times? Manipulated by advertisers, religious leaders, and politicians, joy can seem disquieting, even offensive. How does one speak...

"Offering both familiar poems and some fascinating unfamiliar ones, this anthology contains over 250 poems that deal with Christianity. Ranging from the Anglo-Saxon masterpiece "The Dream of the Rood" to the works of modern poets such as T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Sir John Betjeman, and John Berryman, Davie has chosen works from around the world, including several women poets--such as Elizabethan Countess of Pembroke and Emily Dickinson--as well as the...

As a natural outgrowth from her anthology of contemporary American farm poems, Handspan of Red Earth, editor Catherine Webster has devoted herself over the past years to gathering this collection of farm poems from writers around the world. Over This Soil urges us to preserve our farmlands, to increase our responsibilities of land stewardship, and to intelligently maintain the agricultural necessities of our lives.