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Sailing Alone Around the Room
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Sailing Alone Around the Room

New and Selected Poems

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August 10, 2011 | ISBN 9780307431745

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About the Book

Sailing Alone Around the Room, by America’s Poet Laureate, Billy Collins, contains both new poems and a generous gathering from his earlier collections The Apple That Astonished Paris, Questions About Angels, The Art of Drowning, and Picnic, Lightning. These poems show Collins at his best, performing the kinds of distinctive poetic maneuvers that have delighted and fascinated so many readers. They may begin in curiosity and end in grief; they may start with irony and end with lyric transformation; they may, and often do, begin with the everyday and end in the infinite. Possessed of a unique voice that is at once plain and melodic, Billy Collins has managed to enrich American poetry while greatly widening the circle of its audience.
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Praise for Sailing Alone Around the Room

Praise for Billy Collins

"Billy Collins writes lovely poems--lovely in a way almost nobody's since Roethke's are. Limpid, gently and consistently startling, more serious than they seem, they describe all the worlds that are and were and some others besides."
--John Updike

"Luring his readers into the poem with humor, Mr. Collins leads them unwittingly into deeper, more serious places, a kind of journey from the familiar or quirky to unexpected territory, sometimes tender, often profound."
--The New York Times

"What Collins does best is turn an apparently simple phrase into a numinous moment. . . . A poet of plenitude, irony, and Augustan grace."
--The New Yorker
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Excerpt

Sailing Alone Around the Room

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About the Author

Billy Collins
Billy Collins is the author of fifteen collections of poetry, including Sailing Alone Around the Room, Aimless Love and, most recently, Water, Water. He served two terms as United State Poet Laureate and is a former Distinguished Professor of English at Lehman College and New York State Poet. He is a New York Public Library Literary Lion and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is currently “between dogs,” his most recent an Australian Shepherd mix named Jeannine. He lives in Winter Park, Florida, with his wife Suzannah. More by Billy Collins
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