Books in the Ted Kooser Contemporary Poetry series

For nearly half a century, Jared Carter has been quietly mapping the American heartland. In this title, in poems selected from his first five books, is the summer-long buzz of the cicada and the crack of the cue ball, the young rebel on his big Harley, and the YMCA secretary who backstrokes her way across the indoor pool.

For decades a restorer of old homes, Connie Wanek shows us that poetry is everywhere, encountered as easily in the waterways, landscapes, and winters of Minnesota, as in the old roofs and darkened drawers of a home long uninhabited. Rival Gardens includes more than thirty unpublished poems, along with poems selected from three previous books.

Offer a deeply human and intensely felt poetic explorations of Fleda Brown's life and world. Her account includes her brain-damaged brother, a rickety family cottage, a puzzling and sometimes frightening father, a timid mother, and the adult life that follows with its loves, divorces, and serious illnesses.

Gerald Costanzo, long known as one of the best contemporary poets of satire, focuses specifically on American themes that, though presented as parables, fables, jokes, and put-ons, remain darkly serious in tone. His subject is the mythic landscape of America itself: the transitory, popular, consumer culture of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century life.

Joyce Sutphen's evocations of life on a small farm, coming of age in the late 1960s, and travelling and searching for balance in a very modern world are both deeply personal and familiar. Readers from Maine to Minnesota will recognise themselves, their parents, aunts and uncles, and neighbours in these poems.

The poems in Produce Wagon explore the vast and varied circumstances of the human experience: the poet's love for his wife, his love of nature, his love for the family he grew up in, and his love of stories.