For over two decades, the award-winning poet and author Gary Soto has been offering his readers a vision that transcends the ordinary, making him one of today’s most celebrated Chicano writers. New and Selected Poems includes the best of his seven full-length collections, plus over 23 new poems previously unpublished in book form. From the charged, short-lined poems of Soto’s early writing to an unflinching look at poverty and hard labor in California’s Central Valley to the off-beat humor in his longer, more recent work, New and Selected Poems is a timely tribute to a brilliant writer whose work confirms the power of the human spirit to survive and soar.
Year: 1995
New and Selected Poems
“He is one of our finest poets, ” Anthony Hecht has said of Donald Justice. Winner most recently of a 1996 Lannan Literary Award, Justice has been the recipient of almost every contemporary grant and prize for poetry, from the Lamont to the Bollingen and the Pulitzer. The present volume replaces his 1980Selected Poems and contains, in addition, poems from the last 15 years.
In the Crevice of Time: New and Collected Poems
Josephine Jacobsen’s distinguished career as poet and writer spans more than six decades, from the publication of her first poem at age eleven to her 1994 American Academy of the Arts Citation, which celebrated her as a recipient of “almost every major poetry award.” From 1971 to 1973 she served two terms as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, a post recently retitled National Poet Laureate. In the Crevice of Time brings together 176 new and previously published poems by one of the most accomplished and most widely acclaimed poets of our time.
Collected Poems, 1945-1990
Passing Through: The Later Poems
Stanley Kunitz, one of the masters of contemporary poetry, presents his ninth collection, gathering a rich selection of his work, including new poems that remind us of his prefatory statement: “Art is the chalice into which we pour the wine of transcendence.” Nearly all the poems of Kunitz’s later years, beginning with The Testing-Tree (1971), are included, and most of the poems in Passing Through are unavailable in any other edition.
In “Touch Me,” the last poem in the collection, Kunitz propounds a question, “What makes the engine go?” and gives us his answer: “Desire, desire, desire.” These poems fairly hum with the energy, the excitement, the ardor, that make Kunitz one of our most enduring and highly honored poets. In the words of Carolyn Forché, “he is a living treasure.”
Ghosts of Mississippi
A Civil Action
A Civil Action tells the story of the landmark Woburn lawsuit—one of the most tortuous and complex civil lawsuits in the history of American law. Eight Massachusetts families, whose children were stricken with cancer, sued two corporate giants, blaming them for carcinogens in the municipal water supply. Granted unprecedented access to the major participants, Harr recounts the nine years it took to build the case, prepare for trial, go to court in 1986, and later appeal the jury’s verdict. It is a fascinating, revealing, and remarkable account that offers students an inside view of trial law.
Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meaning of Life
In a book that is both groundbreaking and accessible, Daniel C. Dennett, whom Chet Raymo of The Boston Globe calls “one of the most provocative thinkers on the planet,” focuses his unerringly logical mind on the theory of natural selection, showing how Darwin’s great idea transforms and illuminates our traditional view of humanity’s place in the universe. Dennett vividly describes the theory itself and then extends Darwin’s vision with impeccable arguments to their often surprising conclusions, challenging the views of some of the most famous scientists of our day.
Salvation on Sand Mountain: Snake Handling and Redemption in Southern Appalachia
For New York Times reporter Dennis Covington, what began as a journalistic assignment—covering the trial of an Alabama pastor convicted of attempting to murder his wife with poisonous snakes—would evolve into a headlong plunge into a bizarre, mysterious, and ultimately irresistible world of unshakable faith: the world of holiness snake handling.
Set in the heart of Appalachia, Salvation on Sand Mountain is Covington’s unsurpassed and chillingly captivating exploration of the nature, power, and extremity of faith—an exploration that gradually turns inward, until Covington finds himself taking up the snakes.