I Am Flying into Myself: Selected Poems, 1960-2014

A selection of Bill Knott’s life work—testimony of his enduring, “thorny genius” (Robert Pinsky)

Going to sleep, I cross my hands on my chest.
They will place my hands like this.
It will look as though I am flying into myself.

For half a century, Bill Knott’s brilliant, vaudevillian verse electrified the poetic form. Over his long career, he studiously avoided joining any one school of poetry, preferring instead to freewheel from French surrealism to the avant-garde and back again—experimenting...