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Two of Wrigley's finest collections of poems are now together in one volume.

Gary Short’s new collection is the work of a mature poet at the peak of his powers, confident of his ability to speak of human betrayal and the fragility of life without bitterness or cheap sentiment, to find poignancy in loss and exaltation in the outwardly mundane. His voice is lyrical, tough, and capable of touching us profoundly.

Short knows Nevada’s austere landscape, its ephemeral beauty, and its stoic people as few writers in any genre do. He also understands the complexities of the human soul and the contradictions of love. So he tells of how his mother, dying of cancer, revisits a day thirty years in the past when her sons trapped a trout and kept it in their father’s horse trough and how now, in her mind’s eye, she carries the boxed-in fish to the stream to release it, “a moment/of having, not loss.” And of how the feathers of a dead owl in a long-dead oak tree have blown loose, “caught and leafed out/from each taloned twig and limb . . . each feather/a separate flight, shining to live.” This is rich and wondrous poetry, deeply moving, unforgettable.

Winner, 2016 Miller Williams Poetry Prize, edited by Billy Collins

Randall Jarrell said that when you read a poem “you are entering a foreign country whose laws and language and life are a kind of translation of your own.” In [explicit lyrics], we are visitors to a world that is familiar as if the poems are occurring in our town, on the streets where we live. But the laws have changed, and what is normally important is no longer relevant. What was meaningless is now everything.

As the title indicates, these poems are lyrics—musings on the small decisions required by existence in the modern world. They contain the grand themes of art—life, love, and mortality—but not where you expect. The smallest and most mundane objects become the catalyst for reevaluating our roles in society and the world. This is not poetry as art. This is life as art, from a country where poetry is the only language.

This is the first modern edition of verse by Anne Killigrew, a poet and portrait painter born in 1660 at the very start of the Restoration, who grew up as part of the complicated political, religious, and artistic worlds of the Restoration courts of Charles II and his brother James, Duke of York. Killigrew never chose to print her verses, but instead participated in a literary circulation network including family, friends, and members of the court; her position in relation to court culture and her family’s involvement with the London commercial stage gave her a unique perspective into the issues confronting a young single woman in a period during which libertinism was the dominant ethos of the courtiers. This edition lightly modernizes the spelling and punctuation of the posthumous volume of her collected verse, provides notes identifying the classical and biblical allusions which shape her works, and provides a historical context for her literary and artistic career in the introduction.