Cool, calm & collected

Sexual politics, social awareness, literary irreverence-Carolyn Kizer is the indisputable grande dame of American letters. Never afraid to say what is on her mind, in her poetry Kizer has always done so with both grace and flair. For four decades she has been one of the most influential, controversial, and recognizable figures in American poetry: as an early feminist, a Pulitzer Prize-winner, as a Roethke student, as the first director of the National Endowment for the Arts's literary program, as a member of the board of The Academy of American Poets (from which she resigned, in protest, in 1999), and as the founding editor of the influential Poetry Northwest. Cool, Calm & Collected is a new and collected volume by one of Copper Canyon Press's all-time bestselling poets. It gathers new poems together with work from all of Kizer's eight previous volumes, several of which have been unavailable for many years.