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The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing (Paperback)

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Description


“Kevin Young has thoughtfully gathered many of these sorrowful perambulations and grievous plummets.” -Billy Collins

The Art of Losing
is the first anthology of its kind, delivering poetry with a purpose. Editor Kevin Young has introduced and selected 150 devastatingly beautiful poems that embrace the pain and heartbreak of mourning. Divided into five sections (Reckoning, Remembrance, Rituals, Recovery, and Redemption), with poems by some of our most beloved poets as well as the best of the current generation of poets, The Art of Losing is the ideal gift for a loved one in a time of need and for use by therapists, ministers, rabbis, and palliative care workers who tend to those who are experiencing loss.

Among the poets included: Elizabeth Alexander, W. H. Auden, Amy Clampitt, Billy Collins, Emily Dickinson, Louise Gluck, Ted Hughes, Galway Kinnell, Kenneth Koch, Philip Larkin, Li-Young Lee, Philip Levine, Marianne Moore, Sharon Olds, Mary Oliver, Robert Pinsky, Adrienne Rich, Theodore Roethke, Anne Sexton, Wallace Stevens, Dylan Thomas, Derek Walcott, and James Wright.

About the Author


Kevin Young is the author of six books of poetry, most recently For the Confederate Dead, winner of the Quill Award in Poetry and the Paterson Poetry Prize for Sustained Literary Achievement. He is also the author of Dear Darkness and Jelly Roll, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and won the Paterson Poetry Prize. He is the editor of four other volumes, including Everyman Pocket Poets Blues Poems and Jazz Poems, and the Library of America's John Berryman: Selected Poems. He is the Atticus Haygood Professor of English and Creative Writing and curator of the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at Emory University.

Praise For…


“Young offers an original and personal analysis of the modern elegy, and uses his own experience with the cycle of mourning to structure the book in sections titled 'Reckoning,' 'Regret,' 'Remembrance,' 'Ritual,' 'Recovery,' and 'Redemption.' And the poems are as diverse and universal as the emotions of loss.” —Donna Seaman, Booklist

“[Young's] latest anthology is his most topical, and, perhaps, his most useful, gathering poems about suffering and overcoming loss ... While these poems won't offer easy answers to grief, they will keep the kind of company that only poetry can, because only poetry can convincingly say, as Ruth Stone does in the last poem of this book, 'All things come to an end. / No, they go on forever.” —Publishers Weekly

“A book for easing the heart in pain. A chorus of poets (the first of its kind) brought together expressly to guide us through dark times when 'the eye begins to see.' Kevin Young is the right guy at the right time to do this. Brilliant.” —Mark Matousek, author of When You're Falling, Dive and Ethical Wisdom


Product Details
ISBN: 9781608194667
ISBN-10: 1608194663
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Publication Date: November 5th, 2013
Pages: 336
Language: English