Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems
This collection hit the front page of the New York Times its  first time out of the blocks in 1999, as the University of  Pittsburgh Press, Collins's longtime publisher, denied Random  the rights to the poems as the poet tried to jump ship. The two  houses and Collins's agent, Chris Calhoun (Dan Menaker is  Collins's editor at Random), later worked out a deal that gave  Pitt a few more months to ride Picnic, Lightning (1998) and  Collins's other books without this culling treading on its  sales. As it now appears, the book includes 23 poems from  Picnic, more than from any of Collins's previous three books  included here. (Work from the early Video Poems and Pokerface is  absent.) Collins's poems are generally conveyed by a speaker  whose genial, highly literate analogue of earnestness perfectly  produces inchoate quotidian restlessness matched by fear-based  appreciation of the mundane. A typical Collins poem begins with  "How agreeable it is not to be touring Italy this summer," "The  way the dog trots out the front door" or the observation that  "It is possible to be struck by a meteor/ or a single-engine  plane/ while reading in a chair at home" and continues by  juxtaposing, say, close descriptions of "the instant hand of  Death" and "the rasp of the steel edge/ against a round stone,/  the small plants singing/ with lifted faces." It's a formula  that has worked well for Collins, and he does not abandon it in  the 20 new poems here. (On-sale date: Sept. 11) Forecast: A reading on NPR's A Prairie Home Companion was the  beginning of serious sales for Picnic, Lightning (40,000 copies  and counting), while The Art of Drowning has sold 26,000 since  1995, and Questions About Angels clocks in at 21,000 since 1991.  Collins's reading tours for this book should help reach even  more readers, and some browsers may remember the Times story.Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.