This retrospective collection by the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet contains "some of the strangest, most opalescent poems of the past half century" (Boston Globe).

Over the course of his long career, former United States Poet Laureate Charles Simic has been celebrated for his brilliant and innovative imagery, his sardonic wit, and a voice all his own. In this new volume, he distills his life's work, combining for the first time the best of his early poems with his later works—including nearly three dozen revisions—along with seventeen new, never-before-published poems.

Simic's body of work draws inspiration from a range of topics, from the inscrutability of ordinary life to American blues; from folktales to marriage and war. Consistently exciting and unexpected, the nearly four hundred poems in this volume represent the best of one of America's most distinguished and original poets.