New Releases by Billy Collins

New York Times bestselling author and former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins captures the essence and mystery of dogs in this special collection of poems inspired by our beloved companions, with striking watercolor canine portraits by Pamela Sztybel. “Collins remains the most companionable of poetic companions.” —The New York Times Billy Collins’s Dog Show celebrates the joy of our canine best friends, honoring the love we feel for the animals who play such vital roles in our lives. In twenty-five poems, Collins distills the many ways dogs warm our hearts, from the happiness we experience as we watch a dog run unencumbered by our burdens, to the silliness of cradling a dog in our arms as we step on the scale together. Turning his inimitable eye and ear to the complexities of dog behavior, Collins ponders all that these winning creatures give us and what we learn from them about ourselves. For more than four decades Collins has delighted readers with his insight, wit, and clear poetic voice. In Dog Show, “America’s favorite poet” (The Wall Street Journal) illuminates America’s favorite pet (sorry, cat lovers). Accompanied by Pamela Sztybel’s watercolors, which effortlessly depict a dog’s humble grace, Dog Show reveals the profound role these majestic animals play in our lives and the meaning they give us.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the former Poet Laureate of the United States and New York Times bestselling author of Aimless Love comes a wondrous new collection of poems focused on the joys and mysteries of daily life. “Among the best poems that [Billy] Collins has ever written.”—Maureen Corrigan, NPR “Witty, wry and tender when it hurts, Water, Water is a pleasure to read and easy to give.”—The Washington Post “Collins remains the most companionable of poetic companions.”—The New York Times One of People’s Best New Books In this collection of sixty new poems, Billy Collins writes about the beauties and ironies of everyday experience. A poem is best, he feels, when it begins in clarity but ends with a whiff of mystery. In Water, Water, Collins combines his vigilant attention and respect for the peripheral to create moments of delight. Common and uncommon events are captured here with equal fascination, be it a cat leaning to drink from a swimming pool, a nurse calling a name in a waiting room, or an astronaut reciting Emily Dickinson from outer space. With his trademark lyrical informality, Collins asks us to slow down and glimpse the elevated in the ordinary, the odd in the familiar. It’s no surprise that The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal both call Collins one of America’s favorite poets. The Monet Conundrum Is every one of these poems different from the others he asked himself, as the rain quieted down, or are they all the same poem, haystack after haystack at different times of day, different shadows and shades of hay?

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the former United States Poet Laureate and New York Times bestselling author of Aimless Love, a collection of more than 135 small poems, eleven of them new to this edition, and each a thought or observation compressed to its emotional essence “Whenever I pick up a new book of poems, I flip through the pages looking for small ones. Just as I might have trust in an abstract painter more if I knew he or she could draw a credible chicken, I have faith in poets who can go short.”—Billy Collins You can spot a Billy Collins poem immediately. The amiable voice, the light touch, the sudden turn at the end. He "puts the ‘fun’ back in profundity,” says poet Alice Fulton. In his own words, his poems tend to “begin in Kansas and end in Oz.” Now “America’s favorite poet” (The Wall Street Journal) has found a new form for his unique poetic style: the small poem. Here Collins writes about his trademark themes of nature, animals, poetry, mortality, absurdity, and love—all in a handful of lines. Neither haiku nor limerick, the small poem pushes to an extreme poetry’s famed power to condense emotional and conceptual meaning. Inspired by the small poetry of writers as diverse as William Carlos Williams, W.S. Merwin, Kay Ryan, and Charles Simic, and written with Collins’s recognizable wit and wisdom, the poems of Musical Tables show one of our greatest poets channeling his unique voice into a new phase of his exceptional career. 3:00 AM Only my hand is asleep, but it’s a start.

This resource offers a print version of the poem to use for the analysis and exploration of Billy Collins'' ''Man Listening to Disc''.

A wondrous collection from Billy Collins, former U.S. Poet Laureate and New York Times bestselling author of The Rain in Portugal “The poems are marked by his characteristic humor and arise out of small, banal moments, unearthing the extraordinary or uncanny in the everyday.”—The Wall Street Journal Whale Day brings together more than fifty poems and showcases the deft mixing of the playful and the serious that has made Billy Collins one of our country’s most celebrated and widely read poets. Here are poems that leap with whimsy and imagination, yet stay grounded in the familiar, common things of everyday experience. Collins takes us for a walk with an impossibly ancient dog, discovers the original way to eat a banana, meets an Irish spider, and even invites us to his own funeral. Sensitive to the wonders of being alive as well as the thrill of mortality, Whale Day builds on and amplifies Collins’s reputation as one of America’s most interesting and durable poets.

Lee Child''s street corner. Gary Shteyngart''s bed. Joyce Carol Oates''s classroom. Roxane Gay''s dream house. Billy Collins''s New York City. Aimee Mann and Jonathan Coulton''s kitchen. Valeria Luiselli''s writing desk. Sloane Crosley''s conference call. Alain Mabanckou''s Department of Human Resources. Jonathan Ames''s shrink''s office. Jonathan Safran Foer''s Genius Bar. Joshua Ferris''s America.What do these places have in common? More than might initially meet the eye. They''re the spaces¿real or imagined¿where thirteen remarkably talented and original voices do their work. These writers, poets, and singer-songwriters come together to give us a guided tour through the places that inspire them. There''s mystery here. Dark confessions. Office crushes. Tales of deals made, careers built and broken, and the love and dread and hope of being at work.Everyone works someplace. This group of authors has created a place that is by turns hilarious, illuminating, shocking, wonderful. It might make you cry. It will certainly make you laugh. And you might never see your own office in the same (fluorescent?) light again.

"Billy Collin''s first new book in three years contains more than forty new poems that showcase [his] generosity, playfulness, and wisdom"--

"Study in Blue, Khaki and Milky-Green" is a bilingual edition of selected poems by Billy Collins, translated into Bulgarian by Hristina Keranova. The poet was named U.S. Poet Laureate in 2001, held the title until 2003, and from 2004 to 2006 he serves as Poet Laureate for the State of New York.

Presents a volume of more than fifty new poems accompanied by a generous gathering from the author''s collections of the past decade, lending insight into his overall poetic achievements and his use of playful, ironic, and melodic language.

‘Billy Collins is one of my favourite poets in the world’ Carol Ann Duffy Readers will only have to open this book at random to realize the privation a life without Billy Collins has been. A writer of immense grace and humanity, Billy Collins shows how the great forces of history and nature converge on the tiniest details of our lives - and in doing so presents them in a new radiance. He is also unbelievably funny. ‘The most popular poet in America’ New York Times ‘Billy Collins writes lovely poems . . . Limpid, gently and consistently startling, more serious than they seem, they describe all the worlds that are and were and some others besides’ John Updike ‘Billy Collins’ medium is a rare amalgam of accessibility and intelligence. I’d follow this man’s mind anywhere. Expect to be surprised’ Michael Donaghy ‘Smart, his strings tuned and resonant, his wonderful eye looping over the things, events and ideas of the world, rueful, playful, warm voiced, easy to love’ E. Annie Proulx

Billy Collins is one of the world’s most popular poets. While his poems often begin in the everyday and domestic, fans know that they might end anywhere – and that they will lift their heads from the book to a world startlingly different from the one they had left moments before. Billy Collins’ previous collection, Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes, was an extraordinary success, introducing thousands of readers to his exhilarating poetry for the first time. By turns wildly funny and intensely moving, Nine Horses has won Billy Collins even more admirers.

WINNER—BEST POETRY—GOODREADS CHOICE AWARDS NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NEWSWEEK/THE DAILY BEAST NATIONAL BESTSELLER Billy Collins is widely acknowledged as a prominent player at the table of modern American poetry. And in this smart, lyrical, and mischievous collection of poetry, which covers the everlasting themes of love and loss, youth and aging, solitude and union, Collins’s verbal gifts are on full display.

In this moving and playful collection, Billy Collins touches on an array of subjects—love, death, solitude, youth, and aging—delving deeper than ever before into the intricate folds of life.

Sailing Alone Around the Room, by America’s Poet Laureate, Billy Collins, contains both new poems and a generous gathering from his earlier collections The Apple That Astonished Paris, Questions About Angels, The Art of Drowning, and Picnic, Lightning. These poems show Collins at his best, performing the kinds of distinctive poetic maneuvers that have delighted and fascinated so many readers. They may begin in curiosity and end in grief; they may start with irony and end with lyric transformation; they may, and often do, begin with the everyday and end in the infinite. Possessed of a unique voice that is at once plain and melodic, Billy Collins has managed to enrich American poetry while greatly widening the circle of its audience.

Kun je je gelukkig lezen? Kees van Kooten vindt van wel en weet ook hoe. Enkele jaren geleden raakte hij in de ban van de humoristische dichter Billy Collins (New York, 1941), recentelijk Poet Laureate van de Verenigde Staten. Collins publiceerde acht dichtbundels, waarvan meer dan 250.000 exemplaren werden verkocht. Zijn poëzie werd niet eerder in het Nederlands vertaald. Kees van Kooten vertaalde en voorzag zesentwintig gedichten van uitgebreid en geestig commentaar, waarin hij niet alleen laat weten waarom de gedichten hem zo inspireerden, maar ook bepaalde vertaalkeuzes verklaart.

Special issue featuring self-portraits in poems and art.