"If Rumi is the most--read poet in America today, Coleman Barks is in good part responsible. His ear for the truly divine madness in Rumi's poetry is truly remarkable." -- Huston Smith, author of The World's Religions "Perhaps the world's greatest spiritual poet--the gold of Rumi down through Coleman's words. The words leap off the page and dance!" -- Jack Kornfield, author of A Pathless Heart "In Coleman Barks's able hands, Rumi leaps across the centuries to join us as a contemporary. The humor, the beauty, and the wisdom in this collection are a timeless gift." -- Jay Kinney, editor-in-chief, Gnosis Magazine "Through Coleman Barks's inspired renderings, we tired, modern people have come not only to love Rumi, but even--a little--to love who and what Rumi himself loved." -- Jacob Needleman, author of The Big Heart Philosophy "Coleman Barks is a pioneer and renowned scholar on Rumi, the great Sufi. In his elegant and exquisite way, Coleman has made Rumi as popular as Shakespeare to the world and continues to inspire us with Rumi's ecstatic poetry." -- Deepak Chopra, author of The Shadow Effect and Muhammad "Coleman Barks's Rumi translations...scratch our spiritual itch better than others do, getting under the skin of our longing by making Rumi's raptures accessible in language at once ordinary and lyrical." -- Yoga Journal "Colemans exquisite sensitivity to the flavor and turns of ordinary American speech has produced marvelous lines, full of flavor and Sufi humor, as well as the intimacy that is carried inside American speech at its best." -- Robert Bly, National Book Award-winning poet and translator "No translator could do greater justice to the gorgeous simplicity of Rumi's poetry than Coleman Barks has done here... while remaining faithful to the images, tone, and spiritual message of the originals." -- Booklist "Brings something of the spiritual fragrance of Rumi into the contemporary American poetic medium and can serve as a foretaste of the inner paradise of mystical poetry produced by that colossal figure of Sufi literature, Jelaluddin Rumi." -- Seyyed Hossein Nasr, author of The Heart of Islam "At the end of our wanderings there is only the soul's yearning to return to God. No one speaks that yearning better than Rumi. No one, these days, does Rumi better than Coleman Barks." -- Ram Dass, author of Be Here Now

Coleman Barksis a renowned poet and the bestselling author of The Essential Rumi, The Soul of Rumi, Rumi: The Book of Love, and The Drowned Book. He was prominently featured in both of Bill Moyers's PBS television series on poetry, The Language of Life and Fooling with Words. He taught English and poetry at the University of Georgia for thirty years, and he now focuses on writing, readings, and performances. This book is the culmination of over thirty years of Barks's work on Rumi's seminal classic.