In this new selection of poems by Karl Shapiro, master literary craftsman John Updike provides a long-overdue reassessment of the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet who first rose to prominence with his poems about war. Updike’s great personal respect and affection for Shapiro’s work resonate throughout the essay he wrote to introduce the volume: “Karl Shapiro’s tone is breezy, surly, rapturous as the mood rapidly shifts. The last lines often stub our toes and invite us to reread. The concreteness can seem defiant. . . . His feet planted on the substantive, he could be modest and casual but also bold, with the boldness of truth personally verified.” In the poems he’s assembled, Updike selected broadly from the entire span of Shapiro’s writing life, and his introduction establishes an enduring place in American literature for the poet whose pungency and vast range of subjects have helped define American poetry of the postwar period. About the American Poets Project Elegantly designed in compact editions, printed on acid-free paper, and textually authoritative, the American Poets Project makes available the full range of the American poetic accomplishment, selected and introduced by today’s most discerning poets and critics.

The Wild Card is that gem among books: a selection of those enduring works that will definitively represent the poet as one of the major artists of our time. Karl Shapiro, who won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1945 for his second collection, V-Letter and Other Poems, is an American poetic treasure and an acknowledged master of lyrical poetry whose subjects have ranged from commonplace objects and occurrences to biting political commentary to open celebrations of the "necessary contradictions" in humanity's moral nature.

"Karl Shapiro was one of the twentieth-century's major poets. He published more than twenty books of poetry, two autobiographies, including poetry, seven collections of essays, and a novel. Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress (the position now known as the U.S. Poet Laureate), he was the winner of numerous prizes and awards, including the Contemporary Poetry prize, two Guggenheim Foundation fellowships, the Pulitzer Prize in poetry, the Shelley Memorial Prize, and the Bollingen Prize. He was also a member of the Academy of Arts and Letters and a faculty member at several universities. Active in his craft well into his late seventies, in 2000 Shapiro died at the age of 86. This collection is compiled from the unpublished poems of Karl Shapiro at the University of Texas in Austin and elsewhere. They are largely as Shapiro left them, in a desk drawer in his apartment in uptown Manhattan"--