Cool Calm & Collected Poems 1960-2000

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.

from "Pro Femina"

From Sappho to myself, consider the fate of women.
How unwomanly to discuss it! Like a noose or an albatross necktie
The clinical sobriquet hangs us: cod-piece coveters.
Never mind these epithets; I myself have collected some honeys.
Juvenal set us apart in denouncing our vices
Which had grown, in part, from having been set apart:
Women abused their spouses, cuckolded them, even plotted
To poison them. Sensing, behind the violence of his manner—
"Think I’m crazy or drunk?"—his emotional stake in us,
As we forgive Strindberg and Nietzsche, we forgive all those
Who cannot forget us. We are hyenas. Yes, we admit it…

Carolyn Kizer was born in Spokane, Washington in 1925 and currently lives in Sonoma, California. She is the author of eight previous books of poetry, two collections of essays, and has edited several anthologies and volumes of translations. Her collection Yin won the 1984 Pulitzer Prize.

Also available by Carolyn Kizer
Harping On
PB $12.00, 1-55659-115-2 • CUSA
HC y $22.00, 1-55659-114-4 • CUSA
Mermaids in the Basement
PB $10.00, 0-914742-81-7 • CUSA
Proses: On Poems and Poets
PB $12.00, 1-55659-045-8 • CUSA
Yin
PB