New in September: Holding Pattern, All of It Singing, and Burning Down the House

In these taut, illuminating essays, Tony Hoagland explores matters of poetic craft—metaphor, tone, rhetorical and compositional strategies—in a buoyant conversational style less that of the scholar than of the serious enthusiast and practitioner.

“Each of the four sections of this book is punctuated by Burt’s brilliant version of a poem by Callimachus. Burt thereby casts an eerie light on the American life that fills the rest of his book, as the poems move from the endless deferral of adolescence (‘we will know who we are once we have won’) to the plenitude and deprivations that sustain adulthood. This is a masterly book by one of the most gifted poets of his generation.” —Frank Bidart