99 Poems: New & Selected - Paperback

by Dana Gioia (Author)

Now in paperback, a major career retrospective by the California Poet Laureate, Dana Gioia

So much of what we live goes on inside--
The diaries of grief, the tongue-tied aches
Of unacknowledged love are no less real
For having passed unsaid. What we conceal
Is always more than what we dare confide.
Think of the letters that we write our dead.

--from "Unsaid"

Dana Gioia has long been celebrated as a poet of sharp intelligence and brooding emotion with an ingenious command of his craft. 99 Poems: New & Selected gathers for the first time work from across his career, including many remarkable new poems. Gioia has not arranged this selection chronologically but instead has organized it by theme in seven sections: Mystery, Place, Remembrance, Imagination, Stories, Songs, and Love. The result is a book that reveals and renews the pleasures, consolations, and sense of wonder that poetry bestows.

Author Biography

Dana Gioia is an award-winning poet, critic, and librettist. From 2003 to 2009, he served as the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, and he currently lectures at the University of Southern California.