Whale Day: And Other Poems (B&N Exclusive Edition)

by Billy Collins

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

What if Penn & Teller were poets instead of magicians? They approach their craft seriously but present it with humor. They present the wonder of the world by telling you they are going to pull a rabbit out of a hat—and yet, we’re still surprised when they do. The poems in Whale Day display this same kind of magic—simple language arranged creatively. Billy Collins’ sleight of hand isn’t there to trick us into reading poetry, instead, it’s to remind us of the beauty of living.

This edition includes five additional poems and a letter from the poet exclusively for Barnes & Noble.

A new collection from Billy Collins, former U.S. Poet Laureate and “America’s favorite poet” (The Wall Street Journal) 

Billy Collins’s new collection brings together more than fifty poems and showcases his deft mixing of the playful and the serious that has made him one of our country’s most celebrated and widely read poets. Here are poems that leap with whimsy and imagination, yet stay grounded in the familiar, common things of everyday experience. Collins takes us for a walk with an impossibly ancient dog, discovers the original way to eat a banana, meets an Irish spider, and even invites us to his own funeral. Sensitive to the wonders of being alive as well as the thrill of mortality, Whale Day builds on and amplifies Collins’s reputation as one of America’s most interesting and durable poets.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593241134
Publisher:	Random House Publishing Group
Publication date:	09/29/2020
Edition description:	B&N Exclusive Edition
Pages:	144
Sales rank:	428,194
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Billy Collins is the author of twelve collections of poetry including The Rain in Portugal, Aimless Love, Horoscopes for the Dead, Ballistics, The Trouble with Poetry, Nine Horses, Sailing Alone Around the Room, Questions About Angels, The Art of Drowning, and Picnic, Lightning. He is also the editor of Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry, 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day, and Bright Wings: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems About Birds. A former Distinguished Professor at Lehman College of the City University of New York, Collins served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003 and as New York State Poet from 2004 to 2006. In 2016 he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Florida with his wife Suzannah.

Hometown:

Somers, New York

Date of Birth:

March 22, 1941

Place of Birth:

New York, New York

Education:

B.A., Holy Cross College, 1963; Ph.D. in Romantic poetry, University of California at Riverside, 1971