Linda Bierds is the author of six volumes of poetry, most recently The Profile Makers, for which she won the PEN West Poetry Prize and was awarded a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. Her work has appeared widely, including in The Atlantic Monthly, Field, The New Yorker, and Parnassus. Among her other awards are two National Endowment for the Arts grants, as well as fellowships from the Ingram Merrill, John Simon Guggenheim, and Wolfers—O'Neill foundations. She lives on Bainbridge Island, Washington.

From this critically acclaimed and award-winning poet, a stunning volume of new and selected works that display her signature intelligence, depth, and vigorous originality.

Hailed as “visionary” by The New Yorker and “radiant” by The New York Times Book Review, Linda Bierds returns with a collection that gives us the best of her astonishing work, and then gives us more: the gift of fifteen new poems. As a poet, she has always shied away from the easy indulgences of confessional poetry, turning her attention instead to the things that unite us in our common humanity— art, science, music, history—and bringing alive people (some famous, some little-known) who have made contributions to these spheres. The new poems are no less vital, transporting the reader from medieval to modern-day Venice to the moon; from anatomical sketches to primitive mapping and early naturalism— returning always to the empathy that guides her work.

These tightly woven poems are linked organically through repeating imagery, reflected and refracted through the prism of Bierds’s singularly rich imagination. Her language itself communicates just as much as this visuality; as Stanley Plumly has said, “The autobiography of her imagination would only be half as intense were the writing itself less beautiful and clear, less perfect to pitch.”