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The voices in Patricia Cleary Miller’s Warmer Than Yesterday: New and Selected Poems struggle with four of life’s greatest confusions: home, war, death, and love. With humor, pathos, and ambiguity—after all, today is warmer than yesterday—they savor their experiences even if they never seem to find out all the answers as they search in Kansas City and all over the world. As Miller writes, “The characters in this collection are confused; they can’t get it right. Mothers and children, lovers, soldiers: guardedly optimistic, because today is warmer than yesterday, they struggle with the ambiguity of love, death, regret.  But the book is not a downer: there are still yellow roses, mermaids, and a bit of tra-la-la in the forest.” This book highlights poems from her numerous books spanning over thirty years.

Weave: New and Selected Poems showcases poems from Barker’s long career that includes selections from her seven previous full-length collections, as well as new work. The collection features a wide range of subjects and themes, notable among them the poet’s perspectives as an educator (especially in the very real-world concerns of the urban English classroom), surprises and wonders in her family’s past and present, and the hope, fear, and trenchant wit with which she sees the world around us.

New and selected poems by renowned poet Lloyd Schwartz.
 
For more than four decades, readers and critics have found Lloyd Schwartz’s poems unlike anyone else’s—a rare combination of the heartbreaking and the hilarious. With his ear for the poetry of the vernacular, Schwartz offers us a memorable cast of characters—both real and imagined, foolish and oracular. Readers experience his mother’s piercing flashes of memory, the perverse comic wisdom of Gracie Allen, the uninhibited yet loving exhibitionists of antique pornography, and eager travelers crossing America in a club-car or waiting in a Brazilian airport. Schwartz listens to these people without judging—understanding that they are all trying to live their lives, whenever possible, with tenderness, humor, and grace.

Who’s on First? brings together a selection of poems from all of Schwartz’s previous collections along with eagerly awaited new poems, highlighting his formal inventiveness in tangling and untangling the yarn of comedy and pathos. Underlying all of these poems is the question of what it takes and what it costs to make art.