"Dear Reader"
from Billy Collins's
The Art of Drowning

Billy Collins

is professor of English at Lehman College of the City University of New York. His poems have been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, American Poetry Review, The American Scholar, Harper's, and many other magazines, and he is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, among others. Questions About Angels was a winner of the National Poetry Series publication prize. The Art of Drowning is his fifth book of poetry. He lives in Somers, New York. (Photograph of Billy Collins by Joanne Carney)

Praise for Billy Collins's Poetry...

"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

"Billy Collins is an American original — a metaphysical poet with a funny bone and a sly, questioning intelligence. He is an ironist of the void, and his poems — witty, playful and beautifully formed — bump up against the deepest human mysteries.
— Edward Hirsch

"Billy Collins's poems are graceful, ironic, smart, and full of feeling. Sometimes wrongfully described as a defense against feeling, irony is, in fact, a deeply mixed feeling. In poems as good as Collins's, it is a mirror in which we see ourselves not by reflecting in lazy categories, but perhaps as experience sees us, and certainly as we imagine ourselves."
— William Matthews

"Nobody else today writes quite like Collins, and few indeed write any better."
— X. J. Kennedy

"Mr. Collins is funny without being silly, moving without being silly, and brainy without being silly. If only he were silly, we should know how to 'place' him. But he is merely — merely! — funny, moving, brainy. That will have to do."
— Richard Howard

The Art of Drowning
by Billy Collins
University of Pittsburgh Press
127 N. Bellefield Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15260

Author bio and book description are Copyright © 1995 by the University of Pittsburgh Press.
Reproduced by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press. All rights reserved.

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Poetry Daily / Amazon Online Bookstore

Books available by Billy Collins:
Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems — Hardcover
Picnic, Lightning (Pitt Poetry Series) — Paperback
Picnic, Lightning (Pitt Poetry Series) — Hardcover
The Art of Drowning — Paperback
The Art of Drowning — Hardcover
Questions About Angels — Paperback
The Apple That Astonished Paris — Hardcover

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