Book of Nightmares

Shattering. Rapturous. Kinnell's often-baroque language belies one of the most frank and powerful reckonings with death I have ever come across. This ten-part poem also wrestles with what it means to build a family and live with tenderness in a world that runs on cruelty.  Recommended By Kai B., Powells.com

Galway Kinnell's poetry has always been marked by richness of language, devotion to the things and creatures of the world, and an effort to transform every understanding into the universality of art.

Galway Kinnell is a former MacArthur Fellow and has been state poet of Vermont. In 1982 his Selected Poems won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. For many years he was the Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Creative Writing at New York University. He is currently a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. For thirty-five years--from WHAT A KINGDOM IT WAS to THE BOOK OF NIGHTMARES to THREEE BOOKS--Galway Kinnell has been enriching American poetry, not only by his poems but also by his teaching and his powerful public readings.