The winning volume in the 1989 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition is Hermit with Landscape by Daniel Hall. As James Merrill, distinguished poet and judge of the competition, has said: "Daniel Hall is a patient craftsman, a weigher of each word. Smaller and more lucid than their model, his imitations of life place no burden upon us; rather, their deftness lightens our step. Here mind once again outdances the monumental."

Whiting Award-winning poet Paul Guest was twelve years old, racing down a hill on a too-big, ancient bicycle when he discovered he had no brakes. Trying to steer into anything that would slow him down, he hit a ditch, was thrown over the handlebars, and broke his neck. One More Theory About Happiness follows a boy into manhood, his path marked by a hard-earned acceptance and a biting sense of humor. In incisive and lyrical prose, Guest shows us that a body irrevocably changed can lead to a life fiercely cherished.

My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge is a fierce and original collection—its generosity of voice and emotional range announce the arrival of a major new poet. At the age of twelve, Paul Guest suffered a bicycle accident that left him paralyzed for life. But out of sudden disaster evolved a fierce poetic sensibility—one that blossomed into a refuge for all the grief, fury, and wonder at life forever altered. Although its legacy lies in tragedy, the voice of these brilliant poems cuts a broad swath of emotions: whether he is lamenting the potentiality of physical experience or imagining the electric temptations of sexuality, Guest offers us a worldview that is unshakable in its humanity.

Snake venom that digests human flesh. A building cleared of every living thing by a band of tiny spiders. An infant insect eating its living prey from within, saving the vital organs for last. These are among the deadly feats of natural engineering you'll witness in The Red Hourglass, prize-winning author Gordon Grice's masterful, poetic, often dryly funny exploration of predators he has encountered around his rural Oklahoma home. Grice is a witty and intrepid guide through a world where mating ends in cannibalism, where killers possess toxins so lethal as to defy our ideas of a benevolent God, where spider remains, scattered like "the cast-off coats of untidy children," tell a quiet story of violent self-extermination. It's a world you'll recognize despite its exotic strangeness—the world in which we live. Unabashedly stepping into the mix, Grice abandons his role as objective observer with beguiling dark humor—collecting spiders and other vermin, decorating a tarantula's terrarium with dollhouse furniture, or forcing a battle between captive insects because he deems one "too stupid to live."

Kill. Eat. Mate. Die. Charting the simple brutality of the lives of these predators, Grice's starkly graceful essays guide us toward startling truths about our own predatory nature. The Red Hourglass brings us face to fanged face with the inadequacy of our distinctions between normal and abnormal, dead and alive, innocent and evil.

Whether at a zoo, on a camping trip, or under our bedsheets, we are surrounded by animals. While most are perfectly harmless, it's the magnificent exceptions that populate The Book of Deadly Animals. Award-winning writer Gordon Grice takes readers on a tour of the animal kingdom—from grizzly bears to great white sharks, big cats to crocodiles. Every page overflows with astonishing facts about Earth's great predators and unforgettable stories of their encounters with humans, all delivered in Grice's signature dark comic style. Illustrated with awe-inspiring photographs of beasts and bugs, this wondrous work will horrify, delight, and amaze.

Throughout Things and Flesh, there is a wonderful sense of song, a kind of ringing up and down the scales of being. Here, Linda Gregg engages with the searches and findings of both the intellect and the body. This is poetry beautiful in its attention to the things and flesh of this world, to a life of passionate maturity and substance and the mysteries found within. Loss is a constant companion in Things and Flesh as the poet explores what lesson can be found in "the way this new silence lasts." What all the poems accomplish is to carry the grief we must all by nature endure. They carry our grief across boundaries, over time, and perhaps even beyond, into what used to be called "salvation"—but which Gregg now indicates is instead the place where poetry is made. The consolations are hard won, but no less triumphant. Things and Flesh is a collection that again demonstrates how, as Joseph Brodsky said of her earlier work, "The blinding intensity of Ms. Gregg's lines stain the reader's psyche the way lightning or heartbreak do."

Linda Gregg’s abiding presence in American poetry for more than thirty years is a testament to the longevity of art and the spirit. All of It Singing: New and Selected Poems for the first time collects the ongoing work of Gregg’s career in one book, including poetry from her six previous volumes and thirty remarkable new poems.

"Elana Greenfield and the English language use each other beautifully. She makes little plays, stories long and short. The short ones, on another day, might have been poems. She is a lovely, lively writer." —Grace Paley

This new collection of dramatic short tales is a remarkable first work by dramatist Elana Greenfield. In these stories, the author peers into the supernatural with passion, humor, irony and a remarkable matter-of-fact voice. In "Possessed by a Demon," the devil reveals himself through two women who are both the narrators and the central characters. In "Talent," Greenfield tells the story of a woman trying to transcend the elusiveness of love. And in "The Premonitions," she lyrically predicts the life of Jesus. Together these pieces work toward self-discovery and awareness, while relinquishing the need to explain the inexplicable.

At age nine, Lucy Grealy was diagnosed with a potentially terminal cancer. When she returned to school with a third of her jaw removed, she faced the cruel taunts of classmates. In this strikingly candid memoir, Grealy tells her story of great suffering and remarkable strength without sentimentality and with considerable wit. Vividly portraying the pain of peer rejection and the guilty pleasures of wanting to be special, Grealy captures with unique insight what it is like as a child and young adult to be torn between two warring impulses: to feel that more than anything else we want to be loved for who we are, while wishing desperately and secretly to be perfect.

From the author of the unforgettable Autobiography of A Face comes a collection of wonderfully unexpected essays on life, love, sex, God and politics. Whether she is contemplating promiscuity or The New Testament, lamenting about what she should have said to Oprah, or learning to tango, Grealy seduces and surprises the reader at every turn. With the sheer brilliance of her imagination, Grealy leads us on delightful journeys with her wit, unflinching honesty and peerless intelligence. As Seen On TV breaks the mould of the essay, and is destined, like the memoir that preceded it, to become a modern classic.