Salon compared the poems in Kay Ryan's last collection to "Fabergé eggs, tiny, ingenious devices that inevitably conceal some hidden wonder." The Niagara River contains similarly hidden gems. Intense and relaxed, buoy­ant and rueful, the singular music of this poetry appeals to many people. Her poems, products of an immaculately off-kilter mind, have appeared everywhere from the Sunday funnies to New York subways to the pages of The New Yorker to...

A witty and formally versatile collection of poetry exploring life, faith, and history by the Witter Bynner Prize-winning poet. With Dead Men's Praise, Jacqueline Osherow gives us her fourth and most ambitious collection of poetry to date. Her hybrid inspiration ranges from Dante's terza rima, to free verse, to biblical psalms, all delivered in a casually conversational voice. Combining the self-mocking inflections of Yiddish jokes with the pure...

The prize-winning poet and author of Partial Eclipse continues his investigation of urban metaphysical pathos in this collection. Transit Authority is made up of three sequences that mark the early and late junctures of the twentieth century: the first, a series of poems that investigate the early part of the century; the second, meditations based on the 1930s photographs by Berenice Abbott; and the third, "Reckoning," in which, with spare lyricism,...

In With a Moon in Transit, Jacqueline Osherow has given us her most accomplished poetry to date. Integrating the strengths of her earlier work-humor, honesty, artifice, testimony-into compelling poems of great vigor and charm, she combines the often antithetical impulses of lyric and narrative verse. The result is an aesthetic largely her own, one that permits Osherow to treat emotionally charged events and elaborate ideas with remarkable control. Osherow's...