And so you've reached that time in life when you're starting to pick investments over adventure, clean over scenic, comfortable over intense; when, even though in your heart of hearts you're only seventeen, the rest of you is (how did it happen?) forty. The wise and witty lady of It's Hard to Be Hip Over Thirty is here to get you through those forty-ish years with poems that reflect our common shared experience. So let her help you take a look at that decade of sagging kneecaps and college reunions and fantasies of love in the afternoon; at Maoist kids, cholesterol counts, adult-education courses and other atrocities - which somehow just don't hurt so much when you laugh. A marvelous book filled with insight and warmth, How Did I Get to Be 40 ... & Other Atrocities is Judith Viorst at her best.

Just before her death in 2007 at the age of eighty-four, Grace Paley completed this wise and poignant book of poems. Full of memories of friends and family and incisive observations of life in both her beloved hometown, New York City, and rural Vermont, the poems are sober and playful, experimenting with form while remaining eminently readable. They explore the beginnings and ends of relationships, the ties that bind siblings, the workings of dreams, the surreal strangeness of the aging body—all imbued with her unique perspective and voice. Mournful and nostalgic, but also ruefully funny and full of love, Fidelity is Grace Paley's passionate and haunting elegy for the life she was leaving behind.

Raconteur, poet, and NPR commentator Andrei Codrescu delivers in his inimitable, irreverent style a collection that traverses subjects from aging to consumerism and religion to mass media. Brilliantly funny yet deeply insightful, these poems illuminate Codrescu's acerbic tone and outsized personality and capture the best of his oeuvre. Andrei Codrescu was born in Sibiu, Romania in 1946, and immigrated to the United States in 1966. The author of more than thirty-five books, Codrescu has edited the literary magazine Exquisite Corpse , and his provocative commentary is featured regularly on National Public Radio's All Things Considered . Codrescu currently resides in Arkansas.

Poetry. Jewish Studies. "Marc Kaminsky's A CLEFT IN THE ROCK is a monumental achievement. At home in no world, Kaminsky has an uncanny gift for walking between worlds, traveling like a courier from the personal to the archetypal. I know of no poet whose work, passionate and visceral, inscribes itself so readily in typological time, the perpetual present of Biblical story, psalm, and creation myth. Meticulously grounded--in Yiddishkeit, the maelstrom of the family, wholehearted married love, the struggles of the aging body--these poems open onto absolutes. The chords they strike have extraordinary resonance: a dying father and Moses' encounter with God, a hospital procedure and an interrogation site. Kaminsky visits the depths to find how to 'live / with catastrophe in the world / of signs and wonders.' His book is itself a cleft in the rock, a site of hard-won emotional possibility in a stone-hearted age. These are poems of naked vulnerability and contingency; they remind us what it means to be whole and human."--D. Nurkse

Presents a collection of poems that focus on the themes of aging, loss, and death.

Imperfect Paradise , published in 1988, is Linda Pastan's 4th collection and was a nominee for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Poems deal with birds, the past, children, beauty, rituals, myths, the moon, vacations, aging, death, family life, and hope.