Nouns & Verbs

A major new collection from one of our best loved, most celebrated, and most original poets

Deeply personal but also expansive in its imaginative scope, Nouns & Verbs brings together thirty-five years of writing from Campbell McGrath, one of America's most highly lauded poets. Offering a hint of where he's headed while charting the territory already explored, McGrath gives us startlingly inventive new poems while surveying his previous work--lyric poems, prose poems, and a searing episodic personal epic, "An Odyssey of Appetite," exploring America's limitless material and spiritual hungers.

Nothing is too large or small to remain untouched by McGrath's voracious intellect and deep empathy--everything from Japanese eggplant to a can of Schaefer beer to the smokestacks of Chicago comes in for a close and perceptive look even as McGrath crosses borders and boundaries, investigating the enduring human experiences of love and loss.

A book that stands on its own solid foundation, Nouns & Verbs captures the voice and vision of a truly singular poet.

Campbell McGrath is the author of nine previous books, eight of them available from Ecco Press. He has received numerous prestigious awards for his poetry, including a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant," and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has been published in the New York Times, Harper's Magazine, the Paris Review, the New Yorker, Poetry, and Ploughshares, among other prominent publications, and his poetry is represented in dozens of anthologies. He teaches in the MFA program at Florida International University, and lives with his family in Miami Beach.