Böcker utgivna av Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

These lush, rewarding reflections on a woman's passage into midlife are grounded in our intimacy with nature and mortality. Deborah Digges, now in her fifties, looks back in such poems as "Boat” to see younger mothers and their children, and ponders her own "brilliant, trivial unmooring.” As she wanders from the garden to the barn and into the woods, she finds her moods mirrored in the calendar of the seasons, making lush music of the materials at hand and accepting the seismic changes in her life with an appreciation for the incidental scraps of beauty she chances upon. Throughout these luminous poems-which touch movingly on the illness and loss of her husband-Digges marvels at the brio with which we fling ourselves daringly into the night:See how the first dark takes the city in its armsand carries it into what yesterday we called the future.O, the dying are such acrobats.Here you must take a boat from one day to the next,or clutch the girders of the bridge, hand over hand.But they are sailing like a pendulum between eternity and evening,diving, recovering, balancing the air.

In 1971, a man calling himself D.B. Cooper hijacked a flight, claimed his ransom without harming a soul, and vanished. Elwood Reid uses this true story as a starting point, imagining Cooper as Phil Fitch, a Vietnam vet with a failed marriage who decides the time has come to do something that will save him from a life of punching timecards and wondering what could have been. Fitch ends up in Mexico, where he drifts until a bad turn of luck forces him to return home.Meanwhile, newly retired FBI agent Frank Marshall is struggling with his new life of leisure-fishing, spending time with family, and drinking too much. Unable to let go of a few old cases, Marshall decides to help a young agent determined to solve the mystery of D. B. Cooper. As they close in and events bring Fitch back home, these two stories head for a moving climax in a smart, gripping, and frequently hilarious tale of one of America's modern folk heroes.

"Behold the door / the lock's alive,” warns Stan Rice in one of the commanding poems that make up this new volume of verse. From the streets of New Orleans during Mardi Gras to the private chambers of the imagination, Rice's work is at times sharp and minimalist and at times over the top in its vivid critique of life and in its regard for the sanctity that lurks in all experience. In these concise, memorable verses, he contemplates the stroller-pushing crowd in the American mall; he maps the complex traffic of a marriage; he speaks to the cat bristling in the closet: "—for you, / For your on-tiptoe hissing / Slit-pupiled arched-backed tail- / Stiffened terror, this song.” Throughout, Rice sings of the darkness that conflicts us and of the moments of pure consciousness that allow us to transcend darkness.

Stan Rice, who died in December 2002, was a poet of unique, uncompromising vision. Joy and brutality, faith and faithlessness, the beauty of truth and, at times, of untrut--these opposing forces come together one last time in his final book of poetry, a haunting collection of psalms. Beginning with his "Psalm 151"--that is, taking up where the Bible leaves off--Rice calls us to his own kind of prayer and contemplation. "Lord, hear me out," he begins. "At the point of our need / The storehouse shares its shambles." An elegant, passionate, tragic lament for our condition, Rice's homemade psalms exhort us indirectly to accept our fate--the world as it is. In the brave, unshrinking manner that has characterized his whole career, Rice has written a profound farewell.

Mary Jo Salter's sparkling new collection, Open Shutters, leads us into a world where things are often not what they seem. In the first poem, "Trompe l'Oeil,” the shadow-casting shutters on Genoese houses are made of paint only, an "open lie.” And yet "Who needs to be correct / more often than once a day? / Who needs real shadow more than play?”Open Shutters also calls to mind the lens of a camera—in the villanelle "School Pictures” or in the stirring sequence "In the Guesthouse,” which, inspired by photographs of a family across three generations, offers at once a social history of America and a love story.Darkness and light interact throughout the book—in poems about September 11; about a dog named Shadow; about a blind centenarian who still pretends to read the paper; about a woman shaken by the death of her therapist. A section of light verse highlights the wit and grace that have long distinguished Salter's most serious work.Fittingly, the volume fools the eye once more by closing with "An Open Book,” in which a Muslim family praying at a funeral seek consolation in the pages formed by their upturned palms.Open Shutters is the achievement of a remarkable poet, whose concerns and stylistic range continue to grow, encompassing ever larger themes, becoming ever more open.

Nepotism is one of those social habits we all claim to deplore in America; it offends our sense of fair play and our pride in living in a meritocracy. But somehow nepotism prevails; we all want to help our own and a quick glance around reveals any number of successful families whose sons and daughters have gone on to accomplish objectively great things, even if they got a little help from their parents.In this wide-ranging, surprising, and eloquently argued book, Adam Bellow takes a pragmatic and erudite look at the innate human inclination toward nepotism. From ancient Chinese clans to the papal lineages of the Renaissance, to American families like the Gores, Kennedys, and Bushes, Bellow explores how nepotism has produced both positive and negative effects throughout history. As he argues, nepotism practiced badly or haphazardly is an embarrassment to all (including the incompetent beneficiary), but nepotism practiced well can satisfy a deep biological urge to provide for our children and even benefit society as a whole. In Praise of Nepotism is a judicious look at a controversial but timeless subject that has never been explored with such depth or candor, and a fascinating natural history of how families work.