Most Popular Books by Ted Kooser

Built on a treeless yard by a family who cleared away all the sprouting trees on the property, a house is eventually abandoned and left to deteriorate on a lot that is gradually overrun by wild trees, in a poignant tale of loss, change and nature''s quiet triumph by the Pulitzer Prize-winning former U.S. Poet Laureate and author of Delights & Shadows.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry Ted Kooser, who served as United States Poet Laureate (2004-2006), is a poet who works toward clarity and accessibility, so that each distinctive poem appears to be as fresh and bright and spontaneous as a good watercolor painting. He is a haiku-like imagist who imbues his poems with "tender wisdom," and draws inspiration from the overlooked details of daily life. Praise for Delights and Shadows: "Ted Kooser...has a genius for making the ordinary sacred."--The New York Times "A sense of wonder and compassion runs through this Pulitzer Prize winning volume... Kooser''''s poetry is understated yet manages to skillfully illuminate the small moments of life."--Christian Science Monitor "[Kooser] brushes poems over ordinary objects, revealing metaphysical themes that way an investigator dusts for fingerprints. His language is so controlled and convincing that one can''''t help but feel significant truths behind his lines."--The Philadelphia Inquirer "There is a sense of quiet amazement at the core of all Kooser''''s work, but it especially seems to animate his new collection of poems, Delights & Shadows. Every delight is shadowed by darkness in this book of small wonders and hard dualisms."--Edward Hirsch, The Washington Post "Delights and Shadows is a book with a deep stillness at its center, perfectly self-contained."--Carol Muske-Dukes, Los Angeles Times "Kooser''''s ninth collection of poems reflects the simple and remarkable things of everyday life. That he often sees things we do not would be delight enough, but more amazing is exactly what he sees. Nothing escapes him; everything is illuminated....Highly recommended."--Library Journal "Few poets depict the Midwest so accurately or with such tender regard... Kooser excels at the brief, imagistic poem."--The Kansas City Star "Delights and Shadows raises the voice of the poet above everything else. Each short, vivid poem on the page reads as if it were being spoken aloud. Details about cemeteries, dictionaries, a doctor''''s waiting room, and a jar of buttons bristle with sound and awareness. Kooser''''s ability to use brief lyrics to compose a music of discovery and regeneration makes his work radiant and consuming... This is not an extended, complex or experimental kind of writing, but poetry that rings true, allowing the human sound of being to exist on the page."--Bloomsbury Review "Here is the gift and fragility of life."--The Wichita Eagle "Kooser is a master of the subjective description. Empathetic without sentimentality, his eye ranges over all sorts of everyday subjects and finds material everywhere... wherever the unpredictable particularity of the world can be glimpsed... Perhaps Kooser''''s success lies in his determination to see the... things of this world with such clarity and passion that their underlying mysteries, delights, and shadows also become clear, if only for a moment."--The Georgia Review "You can almost see Kooser behind the poems, watching the world like a sketch artist... Kooser displays the same kind of fluid strokes Degas used in his ballet pictures...He is an exquisite miniaturist of daily life."--The Hartford Courant "The poet finds magic in activities and objects typically considered mundane... Metaphors are the treasure of these short, imagistic poems, emphasizing the wonder and delight latent in what is often merely taken for granted."--Harvard Review "Kooser has written more perfect poems than any poet of his generation." --Dana Gioia "Kooser is straightforward, possesses an American essence, is humble, gritty, ironic and has a gift for detail and a deceptive simplicity."--Seattle Post-Intelligencer As Poet Laureate of the United States, Ted Kooser launched the weekly poetry column "American Life in Poetry," which appears in over 100 newspapers nationwide. He is the author of ten books of poems, including the collaboration with Jim Harrison, Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry (isbn 9781556591877).

Delightfully universal, Raft by Pulitzer Prize-winner Ted Kooser travels the Midwest landscape, attuned to life’s shared experiences and emotions—illness, aging, beauty, and love. Raft is our fourth collection of poetry from Pulitzer Prize-winner and former U.S. Poet Laureate, Ted Kooser. Open in his desire to write for the everyday reader, these poems maintain the open-handed and accessible style that thousands have come to love. Yet, deeply imagistic and metaphorically rich, Raft shows us that even the simplest of objects, the simplest of actions, can become a portal. A boy feeding a goldfish becomes a meditation on loneliness. Scraps of gauze open the door to a study on happiness. Both local and delightfully universal, Raft travels the Midwest landscape, attuned to the shared experiences and emotions of life—illness and aging, beauty and love. Some poems, nostalgia-wrapped, cradle elegies for lost family and friends. Adrift on life rafts of language, this book is a lesson in intentional observation, a celebration of the small, quiet wonders of life.

A collection of poems written from the voices of survivors of the January 1888 Nebraska blizzard.

A tribute to the Pulitzer Prize-winning former poet laureate''s Iowa family is an evocative collection of tales that center around his beloved uncle Elvy, a victim of cerebral palsy who the author remembers for his love of fishing, pinochle, and drinking soda from an ice chest at the family gas station. Original.

The publication of Ted Kooser’s Sure Signs: New and Selected Poems is a literary event of major importance. Long admired and praised by other poets, Kooser is also accesible to the reader not familiar with contemporary poetry.

Red Stilts finds Pulitzer Prize-winner and former U. S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser at the top of his imaginative and storytelling powers. Here are the richly metaphorical, imagistically masterful, clear and accessible poems for which he has become widely known. Kooser writes for an audience of everyday readers and believes poets “need to write poetry that doesn’t make people feel stupid.” Each poem in Red Stilts strives to reveal the complex beauties of the ordinary, of the world that’s right under our noses. Right under Kooser’s nose is rural America, most specifically the Great Plains, with its isolated villages, struggling economy, hard-working people and multiple beauties that surpass everything wrecked, wrong, or in error.

In the "quietest magnificent book IUve ever read" (Jim Harrison, author of "Legends of the Fall") Ted Kooser describes with exquisite detail and humor the place he calls home in the rolling hills of southeastern Nebraska--an area known as the Bohemian Alps--where nothing is too big or too small for his attention.

Provides instructions on writing and revising poems.

For Valentine?s Day 1986, Ted Kooser wrote ?Pocket Poem? and sent the tender, thoughtful composition to fifty women friends, starting an annual tradition that would persist for the next twenty-one years. Printed on postcards, the poems were mailed to a list of recipients that eventually grew to more than 2,500 women all over the United States. Valentines collects Kooser?s twenty-two years of Valentine?s Day poems, complemented with illustrations by Robert Hanna and a new poem appearing for the first time. ø Kooser?s valentine poems encompass all the facets of the holiday: the traditional hearts and candy, the brilliance and purity of love, the quiet beauty of friendship, and the bittersweetness of longing. Some of the poems use the word valentine, others do not, but there is never any doubt as to the purpose of Kooser?s creations.

Named U.S. Poet Laureate for 2004-2006, Ted Kooser is one of America''s masters of the short metaphorical poem. Dana Gioia has remarked that Kooser has written more perfect poems than any poet of his generation.In Flying at Night: Poems 1965-1985, Kooser has selected poems from two of his earlier works, Sure Signs (1980) and One World at a Time (1985). Taken together or read one at a time, these poems clearly show why William Cole, writing in the Saturday Review, called Ted Kooser "a wonderful poet," and why Peter Stitt, writing in the Georgia Review, proclaimed him "a skilled and cunning writer. . . . An authentic ''poet of the American people.''"

"Kooser’s picturesque poetry vividly shapes his living sky metaphors. . . A lofty concept and radiant illustrations will leave readers on cloud nine." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) The skies are hanging their freshly washed—and sweepingly illustrated—clouds out to dry in Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Ted Kooser’s celestial ode to an approaching rainstorm. One sky unpins damp sheets of cirrus. Another wads cirrocumulus into a basket woven of sunbeams. Still others carry away armloads of altocumulus and drag moth-eaten gray blankets of stratus past. At last, a colossal cumulonimbus sweeps in, squeezing out the light to herald . . . rain! What emerges is a sky like a great green laundry basket with a rainbow for a handle. Full of wit and brilliant linguistic surprises, this poetic romp by former United States Poet Laureate Ted Kooser is as playfully theatrical as it is evocative. Matt Myers’s dynamic artwork stages the weather with aplomb, capturing the distinct mood of each show-stopping sky and crafting a meteorological drama of epic proportions. Like a good, rousing rainstorm, Seven Skies All at Once calls eloquently on our senses, inviting us to pause and reflect on the ever-changing wonders all around.

"The poems in Cotton Candy were written during Ted Kooser''s daily routine of getting up long before dawn and writing down whatever drifts into his mind"--

Ted Kooser sees a writerOCOs workbooks as the stepping-stones on which a poet makes his way across the stream of experience toward a poem. Because those wobbly stones are only inches above the quotidian rush, whatOCOs jotted there has an immediacy that is intimate and close to life. Kooser, winner of the Pultizer Prize and a former U.S. poet laureate, has filled scores of workbooks. "The Wheeling Year" offers a sequence of contemplative prose observations about nature, place, and time arranged according to the calendar year. Written by one of AmericaOCOs most beloved poets, this book is published in the year in which Kooser turns seventy-five, with sixty years of workbooks stretching behind him. a"

Ted Kooser’s third book in the Pitt Poetry Series is a selection of poems published in literary journals over a ten year period by a writer whose work has been praised for its clarity and accessiblity, its mastery of figurative language, and its warmth and charm.

Poems portray nature, the past, death, memories, the night, space exploration, the poor, city life, and health.

fourteen poems hand set letterpress limited editions

In her loving Foreword to this expanded anniversary edition, Naomi Shihab Nye writes “Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry is one of the dearest, most appealing books ever published. These poems are tiny delicious American haiku affectionately exchanged between two friends… This slim volume acts as a palate-cleanser, a spirit-booster, a little rocket-ship of wonders.” While Ted Kooser and Jim Harrison were an unlikely pair to become friends, they shared an intimate correspondence of handwritten letters that often included new poems. After Kooser was diagnosed with cancer, Harrison sensed his friend’s poetry becoming “overwhelmingly vivid,” and their friendship deepened through the exchange of brief poems that captured “the essence of what [they] wanted to say to each other.” After hundreds of poems were sent back and forth through the mail, they found this volume hidden within the stacks of envelopes and postcards. In her loving Foreword to this expanded anniversary edition, Naomi Shihab Nye writes “Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry is one of the dearest, most appealing books ever published. These poems are tiny delicious American haiku affectionately exchanged between two friends… This slim volume acts as a palate-cleanser, a spirit-booster, a little rocket-ship of wonders.” Wise, wry, and penetrating, these epigrammatic, aphoristic poems explore love and friendship, pausing to celebrate the natural world, aging, everyday things and scenes, and poetry itself. This expanded edition includes a dozen new poems, and when asked why none of the poems have attributions, one of the co-authors replied, “This book is an assertion in favor of poetry and against credentials.”

A collection of poetry by Ted Kooser.

“Kooser . . . must be the most accessible and enjoyable major poet in America. His lines are so clear and simple.” —Michael Dirda, The Washington Post “Nothing escapes him; everything is illuminated.” —Library Journal “Will one day rank alongside of Edgar Lee Masters, Robert Frost, and William Carlos Williams.” —Minneapolis Tribune “Kooser’s ability to discover the smallest detail and render it remarkable is a rare gift.” —The Bloomsbury Review Four decades of poetry—and a generous selection of new work—make up this extraordinary collection by Pulitzer Prize winner Ted Kooser. Firmly rooted in the landscapes of the Midwest, Kooser’s poetry succeeds in finding the emotional resonances within the ordinary. Kooser’s language of quiet intensity trains itself on the intricacies of human relationships, as well as the animals and objects that make up our days. As Poetry magazine said of his work, “Kooser documents the dignities, habits, and small griefs of daily life, our hunger for connection, our struggle to find balance.” From “March 2”: Patchy clouds and windy. All morning our house has been flashing in and out of shade like a signal, and far across the waves of grass a neighbor’s house has answered, offering help. Ted Kooser is the author of eleven collections of poetry, including Delights & Shadows, which won the Pulitzer Prize. He served as the Poet Laureate of the United States, and is a visiting professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.