Outsiders

This collection of poems by more than 150 authors is a powerful montage, a complex portrait of the ways in which a society is fractured. Written from beyond the pale by those who don't belong to a majority or dominant group, these poems enter the world of the homeless man on the street, the body of Joan of Arc, the mind of a man who lives between two countries. They sing of loneliness, celebrate the stranger, and name those things--language, religion, skin color, age, gender, disease, betrayal, or simple distance--that separate us.

In Outsiders, Lucille Clifton, Stephen Dobyns, Mark Doty, Joy Harjo, Denis Johnson, Galway Kinnell, Carolyn Kizer, Maxine Kumin, Stanley Kunitz, Philip Levine, Naomi Shihab Nye, Charles Simic, Gerald Stern, and more than 150 others address our aloneness in its many guises. Whatever separates us —language, religion, skin color, age, gender, disease, betrayal, or simple distance —you will find it addressed here. If you are curious about what's happening on the other side of the door, fence, or barbed wire, you're invited to sit at this feast. Come on outside.