“Tate refutes the idea of surrealism as something remote from daily experience, a hermetic art for a privileged few. For him, surrealism is something very like the air we breathe, the unconscious mind erupting in one-on-one engagements with the life we all live, every day.”—John Ashbery

James Tate’s poems are evocative, provocative, funny, subtle, eccentric, occasionally disturbing, and wildly outrageous. His surrealist style strikes its own utterly new and original note in American poetry, transforming our everyday world into what Publishers Weekly has called “sublime burlesque,” a world where women give birth to wolves, wild babies are found in gardens, and Saint Nick visits on a hot July day. Tate’s signature style draws on a marvelous variety of voices and characters, all of which sound vaguely familiar, but are each fantastically unique, brilliant, and eccentric, as Charles Simic has observed, "to