"Kevin Young has thoughtfully gathered many of these sorrowful perambulations and grievous plummets." - Billy Collins

Young offers an original and personal analysis of the modern elegy, and uses his own experience with the cycle of mourning to structure the book in sections titled 'Reckoning,' 'Regret,' 'Remembrance,' 'Ritual,' 'Recovery,' and 'Redemption.' And the poems are as diverse and universal as the emotions of loss. -- Donna Seaman Booklist [Young's] latest anthology is his most topical, and, perhaps, his most useful, gathering poems about suffering and overcoming loss ... While these poems won't offer easy answers to grief, they will keep the kind of company that only poetry can, because only poetry can convincingly say, as Ruth Stone does in the last poem of this book, 'All things come to an end. / No, they go on forever. Publishers Weekly A book for easing the heart in pain. A chorus of poets (the first of its kind) brought together expressly to guide us through dark times when 'the eye begins to see.' Kevin Young is the right guy at the right time to do this. Brilliant. -- Mark Matousek, author of When You're Falling, Dive and Ethical Wisdom

Kevin Young is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Ardency and Dear Darkness. His collection For the Confederate Dead won the Paterson Poetry Prize for Sustained Literary Achievement, and Jelly Roll was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He is also the editor of six previous anthologies, including The Best American Poetry 2011 and The Hungry Ear, a collection of food poetry. His first work of prose, The Grey Album, won the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize. Young is currently the Atticus Haygood Professor of English and Creative Writing and curator of Literary Collections and the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at Emory University in Atlanta.