As Ever : Selected Poems

This collection of Joanne Kyger's work reveals her as one of the major experimenters, hybridizers, and visionaries of poetry. Kyger is a poet of place, with a strong voice-delicate, graceful, and never wasteful; her poems explore themes of friendship, love, community, and morality and draw on Native American myth as well as Asian religion and philosophy. Kyger's love for poetry manifests itself in a grander scheme of consciousness-expansion and lesson, but always in the realm of the everyday. Edited with a foreword by Michael Rothenberg, and with an introduction by poet David Meltzer, this book is a marvelous overview of a wonderfully challenging and important poet.

Joanne Kyger comes out of a West Coast School of writers that included Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Jack Spicer, and Richard Brautigan. She has traveled extensively in Japan and India and has maintained a lifelong interest in Buddhism. She is the author of more than twenty-five books and broadsides.