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John Hollander's first book of poems, A Crackling of Thorns, was chosen by W. H. Auden as the 1958 volume in the Yale Series of Younger Poets. Since then he has published sixteen additional books of poems including this one. He is the author of eight critical works, the most recent The Poetry of Everyday Life (1998), and a number of anthologies, among them Poems of Our Moment and Committed to Memory: 100 Best Poems to Memorize. He was a co-editor of The Oxford Anthology of English Literature and a co-editor (with Anthony Hecht, with whom he shared the Bollingen Prize in Poetry in 1983) of Jiggery-Pokery: A Compendium of Double Dactyls. He attended Columbia and Indiana Universities, was a junior fellow of the Society of Fellows at Harvard University, taught at Connecticut College and Yale, and was Professor of English at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY. He is currently Sterling Professor of English at Yale. In 1990 he was made a Fellow of the MacArthur Foundation.