Billy Collins

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...

"Billy Collins's thirteenth collection, and first in four years, contains more than fifty new poems that showcase the playfulness, wit, and wisdom that have made him one of our most celebrated and widely read poets. This collection covers many themes, including Collins's profound insights on aging and mortality."--

""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 limmerick, and certainly not a gimmick, the small poem pushes to an extreme poetry's famed power to condense emotional and conceptual content into small spaces. Taken together the...

"Voyage is an illustrated poem of fantasy, imagination, and magical transformations. A young boy searching the beach for treasure comes across a sailboat and pushes out to sea. Magically the boat becomes a book, and the little boy finds himself living out its adventure, pirate ship and all, far away in the fantastic world of words...until at last, as evening calms the winds, he returns to shore, pulling the boat behind him onto the sand."--Publisher's...

A collection of poems offers insights into common and unusual life events and the human condition.

Billy Collins, former U.S. Poet Laureate, shares 24 of his poems and also spends some time in question and answer session where he reflects on what makes good poetry, his own process of reaching his audience as a poet, the success of his Poetry 180 programs in schools nationwide, and an amusing sidebar on his memories of growing up as an only child.