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Guests | October 15, 2009

Michelle Wildgen: IMG A Few Initial and Not-Comprehensive Meditations on Group Novels



I am a sucker for a book about a group. What reminded me of this was Joanna Smith Rakoff's A Fortunate Age, her homage to Mary McCarthy's endlessly re-readable... Continue »

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2 Burnside Poetry- A to Z
25 Local Warehouse Poetry- A to Z
21 Remote Warehouse Poetry- Anthologies

This title in other formats:

Other titles in the Pitt Poetry series:

  1. Accordian Breathing and Dancing
  2. After the Fall: Poems Old and New
  3. All-American Girl
  4. All-Night Lingo Tango
  5. Angel, Interrupted
  6. Astoria (06 Edition)
  7. Asylum
  8. Blessing the House
  9. Blue on Blue Ground
  10. Burn and Dodge
  11. Captivity
  12. Cathedral of the North (01 Edition)
  13. Children of Paradise
  14. City of a Hundred Fires
  15. City of Salt
  16. Cloud Moving Hands
  17. Dismantling the Hills
  18. Dog Angel: Poems
  19. Domestic Interior
  20. Elegy
  21. Emplumada
  22. Eve's Striptease
  23. First Course in Turbulence (99 Edition)
  24. For a Limited Time Only
  25. Giacometti's Dog
  26. Green Age
  27. In Every Seam
  28. In Praise of Falling
  29. Insomnia Diary
  30. Interrogation Palace
  31. It is Hard to Look at What We: Came to Think We'd Come to See
  32. Journey: New and Selected Poems, 1969-1999
  33. Ka-Ching!
  34. Late Empire
  35. Liquid Paper: New and Selected Poems
  36. Little Girls in Church
  37. M-80
  38. Mad River
  39. My Brother Is Getting Arrested Again
  40. Night Clerk at the Hotel of Both Worlds
  41. Night Mowing
  42. No Heaven (05 Edition)
  43. Open Interval
  44. Otherhood
  45. Pears, Lake, Sun
  46. Pitt Poetry: The Woman Behind You
  47. Poems of the River Spirit: Poems
  48. Queen for a Day : Selected and New Poems (01 Edition)
  49. Questions about Angels
  50. Reclaiming Rhetorica : Women in the Rhetorical Tradition (95 Edition)
  51. Red Sugar
  52. Red Under the Skin
  53. Refuge
  54. Satan Says
  55. Scars
  56. School Figures
  57. See Jack
  58. Shadow Ball: New and Selected Poems
  59. She Didn't Mean to Do It
  60. Sleeping Preacher
  61. Some Are Drowning
  62. South America Mi Hija
  63. Sure Signs: New and Selected Poems
  64. Tender
  65. The Art of Drowning
  66. The Book of Seventy
  67. The Cave: Selected and New Poems
  68. The Crack in Everything
  69. The Essential Etheridge Knight
  70. The Falling Hour
  71. The Horse Fair
  72. The Improbable Swervings of Atoms
  73. The Invention of the Kaleidoscope
  74. The Japanese Prime Minister and Public Policy
  75. The Land of Bliss
  76. The Last Person to Hear Your Voice
  77. The Little Space: Poems Selected and New, 1968-1998
  78. The Mother/Child Papers
  79. The New World
  80. The Niobe Poems
  81. The Ocean Inside Kenji Takezo
  82. The Pittsburgh Book of Contemporary American Poetry
  83. The Plum Flower Dance: Poems 1985 to 2005
  84. The Post-Rapture Diner
  85. The Post-Rapture Diner: Life in the Iron-Mills, Selected Fiction, and Essays.
  86. The Red Line
  87. The Uses of Adversity
  88. The Water Between Us
  89. The Widening Spell of the Leaves
  90. The Zoo
  91. Then, Suddenly
  92. Thirty-Seven Years from the Stone
  93. Time's Fancy
  94. Tormented Mirror (01 Edition)
  95. Velocity
  96. Walking Back Up Depot Street: Poems
  97. Weather Central
  98. Windfall: New and Selected Poems
  99. Wrong
  100. Zinc Fingers: Poems from A to Z

Picnic, Lightning (Pitt Poetry)

by Billy Collins

Picnic, Lightning (Pitt Poetry) Cover

Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments:

Over the past decade, Billy Collins has emerged as the most beloved American poet since Robert Frost, garnering critical acclaim and broad popular appeal. To celebrate his years as U.S. Poet Laureate, we are pleased to announce these special, limited editions, in hardcover, of the book that helped establish and secure his reputation during the 1990s.

Collins's poetry has been described by Gerald Stern as "heartbreakingly beautiful." Annie Proulx admits, "I have never before felt possessive about a poet, but I am fiercely glad that Billy Collins is ours." John Updike proclaims of these poems: "consistently starling, more serious than they seem, they describe all the world that are and were and some others besides." Everyone has a favorite Collins poem, whether it is his resigned meditation on "Forgetfulness" (Questions About Angels, 1991), his affectinate riff on his mechanic's calendars in "Pinup" (The Art of Drowning, 1995), his delight in "Taking Off Emily Dickinson's Clothes" (Picnic, Lightning, 1998), or any number of others about his dog; listening to jazz, or wondering whether the "Three Blind Mice" suffer from a congenital condition or were all caught in a fireworks explosion. The Washington Post declares Collins to be in possession of "one of the richest imagination around." Whether reading him for the first time or the fiftieth time, these books are must-haves for anyone interested in the poet the New York Times calls simply "the real thing."

Review:

"An evening spent reading the F section of a single-volume encyclopedia becomes the catalyst for a hilarious sequence of thoughts, and a tour through the candy-smooth pages of a Victoria's Secret catalog evolves into a performance of great wit and sweet self-mockery. Collins is jazzman and Buddhist, charmer and prince." Donna Seaman, Booklist

Review:

"Brings to mind the elegant wit of the sorely missed William Matthews, another poet of plenitude, irony, and Augustan grace." The New Yorker

About the Author

Billy Collins, named U.S. Poet Laureate in June 2001 and reappointed to the post in 2002, has published seven collections of poetry, including The Apple That Astonished Paris; Nine Horses; Picnic, Lightning; The Art of Drowning; and Sailing Alone Around the Room. A professor of English at Lehman College of the City University of New York, he lives in Somers, New York.

Product Details

ISBN:
9780822956709
Author:
Collins, Billy
Publisher:
University of Pittsburgh Press
Location:
Pittsburgh, Pa. :
Subject:
American
Subject:
American - General
Subject:
Poetry (poetic works by one author)
Subject:
Single Author / General
Edition Number:
1
Edition Description:
1
Series:
Pitt Poetry Series
Publication Date:
January 1998
Binding:
Paperback
Grade Level:
General/trade
Language:
English
Illustrations:
Yes
Pages:
104
Dimensions:
801x610x35 39

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