Winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Practical Gods is the eighth collection by Carl Dennis, a critically acclaimed poet and recent winner of one of the most prestigious poetry awards, the Ruth Lilly Prize. Carl Dennis has won acclaim for "wise, original, and often deeply moving" poems that "ease the reader out of accustomed modes of seeing and perceiving" (The New York Times) . Many of the poems in this new book involve an attempt to enter into dialogue with pagan and biblical perspectives, to throw light on ordinary experience through metaphor borrowed from religious myth and to translate religious myth into secular terms. While making no claims to put us in touch with some ultimate reality, these clear, precise, sensitive poems help us to pay homage to the everyday household gods that are easy to ignore, the gods that sustain life and make it rewarding.

"A timely new collection that sounds themes about the fragility of life and our duty to respect the planet in a time of climate change, from the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet who work "begins in delight and ends in wisdom" (Carrie Fountain) The work of Carl Dennis has won praise for its "integrity, its substance, and its seemingly effortless craft; and for its embodiment of passionate inquiry" (Times Literary Supplement). The title of his new collection, Earthborn, helps to point the way to its two central concerns: how to find meaning, as creatures of the earth, in lives that are short and frail and destined to be forgotten; and how, as stewards of the earth, to address the need to protect our home from ourselves, from the menace to life posed by our own species. The book succeeds in braiding together a recognition of our limits and of our responsibilities in ways that are deeply moving and revealing"--

From the winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Ruth Lilly Prize The poems in Carl Dennis’s new collection Another Reason assume that our efforts to reason with ourselves and with others about what matters to us are necessary to escape the purely private point of view, to provide the houses we live in with doors and windows. These poems enact a drama of attempted persuasion, as the poet confers with himself, with intimates, and with strangers, if only in the hope that by defining differences more precisely one may be drawn into a genuine dialogue. As the poet asserts and questions his own authority, encountering a wide range of competing claims from other voices, we find ourselves included in a conversation that deepens our notion of the human community.

From the winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Ruth Lilly Prize Carl Dennis has become one of the most important American poets writing today. Unknown Friends , his tenth book, is about separation and connection, about actual friends we can never know fully and friends never met who are summoned into existence through the efforts of an imagination that insists on dialogue. While accepting our ignorance as inevitable, the poems work to expand the notion of what it means to be part of a community larger than any we can comprehend, both a community given to us by history and one outside of history through which the world of experience is nurtured and sustained.

In his seventh book, Carl Dennis explores the ways in which our wishes - those in our power to fulfill at any moment and those that have no chance of ever being realized - define who we are. While some of the poems view wishing as a failure to do justice to the world we have, others regard it as a recognition that no present, however rich, can satisfy the imagination, and suggest that one of the functions of poetry is to keep significant wishes alive. In showing with moving clarity how wishes are essential to giving shape and direction to the moment, these poems make use of a rich variety of genres: elegy, advice, meditation, warning, consolation, and prophecy.

"The poems in Carl Dennis's thirteenth collection are informed by an engagement with a world not fully accessible to the light of day, a world that can only be known with help from the imagination, whether we focus on ourselves, on people close at hand, or on the larger society. Only if we imagine alternatives to our present selves, Dennis suggests, can we begin to grasp who we are. Only if we imagine what is hidden from us about the lives of others can those lives begin to seem whole. Only if we can conceive of a social world different from the one we seem to inhabit can we begin to make sense of the country we call our own. To read these poems is to find ourselves invited into a dialogue between what is present and what is absent that proves surprising and enlarging"--

The Description for this book, Signs and Wonders: Poems by Carl Dennis, will be forthcoming.