Reissued with an introduction by W. S. Mervin, this book stands as a perfect representation of Berryman’s originality and technical brilliance—for instance his understanding of the nature and limits of the American epic poem.

"Just as art has impelled the poet through the remaking of his self, so Bidart has remade the tradition of poetry in English. Star Dust is not merely 'about' the desire to create: It exists as a superb embodiment of that urge . . . No living poet writes with Bidart's fusion of emotional ferocity and formal exactitude, of grand ambition and creaturely attentiveness. This is his strongest book."—Peter Campion, The Boston Globe

“Full of rage even when most melancholy or sweet, [Bidart’s] voice leaps off the page toward his subjects, and toward the reader . . . Grand poetic ambition, at its best, can make us feel that that which challenges the glory-seeking poet also challenges the ordinary life. In lucid moments of this wonderful book, Bidart accomplishes this feat.”—Katie Peterson, Chicago Tribune

"You are living in a world created by Elizabeth Bishop . . . she left behind a body of work that teaches us, as Italo Calvino once said of literature generally, 'a method subtle and flexible enough to be the same thing as an absence of any method whatever.' The publication of Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box, which gathers for the first time Bishop's unpublished material, isn't just a significant event in our poetry; it's part of a continuing alteration in the scale of American life . . . Quinn's notes throughout are superb . . . This is the devoted editing this material needed and deserved."—David Orr, The New York Times Book Review

"Their surviving 459 letters, some surprisingly long (Bishop might elaborate hers over weeks, at times swearing she had written Lowell in her imagination), give us the closest view of these wounded creatures—his muscular, bull-in-a-china-shop intellect; her pained shyness and abject modesty, and a gaze like the gleam off a knife . . . The pleasures of this remarkable correspondence lie in the untiring way these poets entertained each other with the comic inadequacies of the world."—William Logan, The New York Times