Stephen Dunn

"Beauty isn't nice. Beauty isn't fair;" So, in part, states an epigraph for this stunning new collection, his thirteenth, by the Pulitzer Prize winner for Poetry (2000). First traversing betrayal and loss, Stephen Dunn then moves to speak of new love, with its attendant pleasures and questioning. The title poem, perhaps emblematic of the book as a whole, is evocative of beauty's often surprising manifestations even in the light of tragedy; as on that terrible day "when those silver planes came out of the perfect blue." Because beauty jars us, makes us look twice, it is as startling as a good poem, and as insistent. Fortunately, it is never too late to search for the right words for what we've seen, felt, endured. With quiet authority Dunn enacts what it feels like to be a particular man at a particular juncture of his life; struggling not to deny, but to name, then rename.

In his twelfth collection, his first since winning the Pulitzer Prize, Stephen Dunn turns his keen gaze on Sisyphus, our contemporary Everyman. Free, for the time being, from the power of the gods and the ceaseless weight of the rock, he struggles to navigate twenty-first-century America. In language by turns mordant and tender, often elegiac, Dunn illuminates the quotidian burdens of his all-too-human hero, as well as the abrasions of ambivalence and choice, finally concluding that "here / and there, though mostly here, even fate is reversible / with struggle or luck." In a second sequence of poems, nineteenth-century novelists become "local visitors" to the author's South Jersey towns. "Chekhov in Port Republic," "Jane Austen in Egg Harbor," "Dostoyevsky in Wildwood": these inventions and others give Dunn provocative new latitudes. As in his previous books, "he balances the casual and the vivid as he plumbs the ambiguity and mystery of human relations" (New York Times Book Review).

Crystal Bacon's poems have appeared in a variety of publications in the US and Canada, including the Ontario Review, Tampa Review, Massachusetts Review, Marlboro Review, and Antigonish Review as well as the anthology, Urban Nature: Poems about Wildlife in the City. She is eager to promote this book. The book was selected by Pulitzer-Prize-winning poet Stephen Dunn and includes a Foreword by him.

A wise and graceful new collection by one of our "major, indispensable poets" (Sidney Lea). The mysteries of Eros and Thanatos, the stubborn endurance of mind and body in the face of diminishment--these are the undercurrents of Stephen Dunn's eleventh volume. "I am interested in exploring the 'different' hours," he says, "not only of one's life, but also of the larger historical and philosophical life beyond the personal."

Committed to exploring the role of poetry and poets in our culture, Stephen Dunn provides new, expanded versions of the essays originally published by W. W. Norton in 1993, now out of print. In Walking Light, Dunn discusses the relationship between art and sport, the role of imagination in writing poetry, and the necessity for surprise and discovery when writing a poem. Humorous, intelligent and accessible, Walking Light is a book that will appeal to writers, readers, and teachers of poetry. Stephen Dunn is the author of eleven collection of poetry. He teaches writing and literature at the Richard Stockton College in Pomona, New Jersey, and lives in Port Republic, New Jersey.

Stephen Dunn experiments with short, related pieces that play off each other in the manner of jazz improvisations. The resulting pairs cover such subjects as "Scruples/Saints," "Hypocrisy/Precision," and "Anger/Generosity." The wisdom and startling turns we've come to expect from Dunn are everywhere in the ninety miniatures (forty-five pairs) that comprise this volume.

In this tenth collection, Stephen Dunn turns his "wise, well-practiced eye" (Library Journal) on an America growing ever more stringent with its daily mercies. Not content merely to observe the world, Dunn's stance is always dual, complicit. And as he navigates through each paradox of his moral and aesthetic and erotic selves, this poet, described by Sydney Lea as one "who remains open to contradictions," travels to a place of exact and complicated vision.

Justly celebrated as one of our strongest poets, Stephen Dunn selects from his eight collections and presents sixteen new poems marked by the haunting "Snowmass Cycle."

"Here is the mature work of a poet who has always managed to delight—but who now demands something more of us. He asks us to enter the twenty-first century with open eyes: attentive to the past, eager for the future, naming what we love."—Judith Kitchen, Georgia Review

Poems deal with mortality, travel, kindness, strangers, fate, guilt, love, religion, friendship, terrorism and sadness.