What Goes On

Brilliant new poems and an expansive gathering from six collections by a Pulitzer Prize winner celebrated as "indispensable."

"Good poems are triumphs over the unlikely," Stephen Dunn says. "They make us pay attention in new ways." In his second new and selected collection, Dunn subtly enlarges our sense of possibility. His new poems, suffused with affection and rue for our world, occasionally address the metaphysical, as in these lines—

from “Talk to God”

Ease into your misgivings

Ask him if in his weakness

he was ever responsible

for a pettiness—some weather, say,

brought in to show who’s boss

when no one seemed sufficiently moved

by a sunset or the shape of an egg.

Ask him if when he gave us desire

he had underestimated its power.