History, Passion, Freedom, Death, and Hope: Prose About Poetry

Award-winning poet Kelly Cherry is also an advocate of serious thinking about poetry. Collected here are the results of thirty years of her thinking, including some pieces published for the first time. She tackles such large questions as: Why poetry? What is a poem? What is the relationship of poetry to history? Is the poem an aesthetic object or a form of communication? Her answers are enlightening, broadly applicable, persuasive, and sometimes personally revealing. She writes with sympathy and understanding and, always, a willingness to be surprised and educated. In these pages, insights abound, ideas provoke, wit shines, and the prose has the grace and power of poetry.