James Tate

An award-winning gathering of exquisite poems by a celebrated poet.

An essential collection of James Tate's extraordinary poems that will captivate today's readers, with a foreword by Terrance Hayes. Celebrating James Tate's work as it transcends convention, time, and everything that tells us, "No, you can't do that," Hell, I Love Everybody gives us the poet at his best, his most intimate, hopeful, inventive, and brilliant. John Ashbery called Tate the "poet of possibilities," and this collection records forays into...

"A rat climbs onto the desk of a bored office worker. A family dog never stops coming back to life. Every prisoner on earth is freed. A man becomes friends with a bank robber who abducts him. A baby is born transparent. James Tate's work, filled with unexpected turns and deadpan exaggeration, 'fanciful and grave, mundane and transcendent' (New York Times), has been among the most defining and significant of our time. In his last collection, written...

"In his fourteenth collection of poetry, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner James Tate continues exploring his own peculiar brand of poetry, transforming our everyday world into one where women give birth to wolves, wild babies are found in gardens, and Saint Nick visits on a hot July day."--Jacket.

Speakers in James Tate's poems are not like those we know: a man's meditation on gardening renders him witless, another traps theories and then lets them loose in a city park, a nun confides that "it was her / cowboy pride that got her through", a gnome's friend inhabits a world where "a great eschatological ferment is at work." Shroud of the Gnome is a bravura performance in Tate's signature style: playful, wicked, deliriously sober, charming, and...