Books in the Illinois Poetry Series series

Winner of Poetry's Frederick Bock Prize and the Indiana Review Poetry Prize, the author casts a wide net over the "ineffable befuddlement" of everyday life. This book explores the shifting shore between self and other with clarity and compassion.

Takes us on a journey through seductive, treacherous waterways. Conveying a stormy sense of place defined less by geography than by the push and pull of the mind at odds with circumstance, this title presents the poems that plumb the depths of the sea and of the human heart in muscular, graceful language.

Offers author's past work as well as a collection of poems.

The men and women who live and work near Opelika, Alabama, gather at the Hollow Log Lounge. There, under the watchful eye of the stuffed fox, they unload their gripes and worries, tell their stories, argue, joke, commune, complain, and confess. This collection of poems paints an imagined portrait of the community in the small-town bar.

In X=, Stephen Berg winds through the wreck of longing and loss, navigating the strains of curious beauty with flashes of electrifying clarity. Stripping bare the burdens of gnawing, unknowing fear, Berg has found his way into a voice of great energy and spontaneity, into a form of overwhelming urgency and detail.

Shimmering with saturated color and heat, this title features a sequence of memory poems about growing up in the tropics, threaded through the myth of Caliban from Shakespeare's "The Tempest". It gives entry to a place of blue possibility and daily undoing, where the sting of salt-fresh air is compounded by the ache of displacement and loss.

Perceptive verses infused with vitality and wry wit

Renowned poet Lorna Goodison has written a new collection of elegies and praise songs which explore the close link between history and genealogy in the Caribbean experience. Her subjects range from the economic genius of market women to the complex beauty of the natural world.

Evokes thematic preoccupations that have shadowed the author throughout his long career. Appearing as a phrase in the poems themselves, this work more generally points to the author's enduring interest in the intersection between inner and outer worlds of experience - those liminal moments in other worlds where we become aware of ourselves.

In A Deed To the Light Jeanne Murray Walker asks probing questions about the depth of grief, about letting go, and about the possibility of faith. Her poems have been described by John Taylor, writing in Poetry, as "splendid, subtly erudite, uplifting, and funny."

A collection of poems that find epiphanies of meaning in unexpected and even unpleasant experiences and emotions. It comments on the power of culture to interject itself into our desire for an idealized self, the way our inner and outer lives lack correspondence, harmony, and integration.

A collection of poems which remind readers that the old debates about fate and free will, nature and nurture, are also matters of personal urgency.

By continually discovering what's new in each day without forgetting yesterday's surprises, the author constantly expanded his range in a career that spans more than 50 years. In this book, the range includes his usual forays into nature and personalities, and poetry for all ages, young and old, amidst a vivid array of memories and explorations.

A poetic rendering of life in New York City

Features G E Murray's eighth collection of poems.

Powerful new poems from one of America's most revered poets

Reflections on everyday living and bereavement

Talks about the loss of loved ones - whether that loss be through death, a son moving away to college, or simply how people fade from our lives and memories.

Part of the "Illinois Poetry Series", this work presents an array of poetic forms, blending pathos, humor, and social commentary. It features these poems - ranging from meditative narratives to improvisational lyrics - that explore art's capacity to embody as well as express contemporary culture.

A collection of poems of one of America's most revered poets. Michael S. Harper is an artist and a truth teller who tempers his technical virtuosity with a compassionate and healing vision. He calls a complacent society vigorously to account while cradling the wounded and remembering the lost.

Poems reflecting the rich panoply of personal and public life in modern America, from the Poet Laureate of Illinois

A poetic exploration of the power of human imagination

Luminous poetry offering glimpses of intimacy

Co-winner of the prestigious Poets' Prize for "To the Bone", Sydney Lea is known for his mastery of the narrative style and his clear and unwavering vision of the natural world and humanity's place in it. This work of his is marked by this acuity and by his uncanny ear for language as well as his willingness to speak for the unlucky.