What Goes On: Selected and New Poems, 1995-2009

Brilliant new poems and an expansive gathering from six collections by a Pulitzer Prize winner celebrated as "indispensable." "Good poems are triumphs over the unlikely," Stephen Dunn says. "They make us pay attention in new ways." In his second new and selected collection, Dunn subtly enlarges our sense of possibility. His new poems, suffused with affection and rue for our world, occasionally address the metaphysical, as in these lines― from “Talk to God” Ease into your misgivings Ask him if in his weakness he was ever responsible for a pettiness―some weather, say, brought in to show who’s boss when no one seemed sufficiently moved by a sunset or the shape of an egg. Ask him if when he gave us desire he had underestimated its power.