The Asking: New and Selected Poems

The Asking: New and Selected Poems - Paperback

$29.00
$29.00
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The Asking: New and Selected Poems
  • The Asking: New and Selected Poems
The Asking: New and Selected Poems - Paperback

The Asking: New and Selected Poems - Paperback

by Jane Hirshfield
$29.00
$29.00

Book Overview

Now in paperback, the long-awaited new and selected collection by the author of "some of the most important poetry in the world today" (The New York Times Magazine), assaying the ranges of our shared and borrowed lives

In an era of algorithm, assertion, silo, and induced distraction, Jane Hirshfield's poems bring a much-needed awakening response, actively countering narrowness. The Asking takes its title from the close of one of its thirty-one new poems: "don't despair of this falling world, not yet / didn't it give you the asking." Interrogating language and life, pondering beauty amid bewilderment and transcendence amid transience, Hirshfield offers a signature investigation of the conditions, contradictions, uncertainties, and astonishments that shape our existence. A leading advocate for the biosphere and the alliance of science and imagination, she brings to both inner and outer quandaries an abiding compass: the choice to embrace what is, to face with courage, curiosity, and a sense of kinship whatever comes.

In poems that consider the smallest ant and the vastness of time, hunger and bounty, physics, war, and love in myriad forms, this collection--drawing from nine previous books and five decades of writing--brings the insights and slant-lights that come to us only through poetry's arc, delve, and tact; through a vision both close and sweeping; through music-inflected thought and recombinant leap. With its quietly magnifying brushwork and numinous clarities, The Asking expands our awareness of both breakage's grief and the possibility for repair.
ISBN9781524712280
Author Jane Hirshfield
PublisherKnopf Doubleday Publishing Group
GenreLiterature
FormatPaperback
PublishedAugust 2025
LanguageENG- English
Pages368
Weight1.0 lb
Target AudienceAdults
Print SizeStandard Print

Related Subjects

Nonfiction Poetry

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About Jane Hirshfield

Jane Hirshfield is the author of six previous collections of poetry, a now-classic book of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry, and three books collecting the work of women poets from the past. Her awards include fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations, the Academy of American Poets, and the National Endowment for the Arts; three Pushcart Prizes; the California Book Award; The Poetry Center Book Award; and other honors. Her poems appear regularly in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Poetry and have been included in six editions of The Best American Poetry. Her collection Given Sugar, Given Salt was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and After was named a "Best Book of 2006" by The Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the United Kingdom's Financial Times. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

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