Ninety-fifth Street

the long version

In his eighth book of poems, John Koethe offers readers the reflections of a poet in midlife, an "aging child of sixty-two," passionately engaged with the world yet drawn to meditate on memory, time, and the mysteries of human existence. In Ninety-fifth Street, Koethe retraces narratives from his life and moves across various landscapes he once inhabited; in his hands these stories and places become poems of beauty, feeling, and poignant candor. Disarmingly conversational and always accessible, these new poems offer the pleasures of a lucid intelligence and a distinctive poetic voice, by turns contemplative and worldly, lyrical, witty, and elegiac.