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An Incomplete Encyclopedia of Happiness and Unhappiness
Amy Newman

An Incomplete Encyclopedia of Happiness and Unhappiness catalogs our daily disappointments and our nighty dreams of perfection. Entry by entry, in poems that shift under the weight of their formal properties, Amy Newman describes a physical world stuffed with maddening beauty, trifling joys, and the will to persevere, even though all of it might come to a spectacular nothing.

These poems narrate the comings and goings in the natural world where animals and people move silently, warily, some by instinct, others by faith, all of us burdened yet somehow redeemed by the perfect imperfections around us. Unfinished, Newman’s encyclopedia hasn’t yet exhausted the knowledge of existing in a world that’s both violent and beautiful. Yet it continues to try.

Amy Newman is the author of five previous books of poetry, including On This Day in Poetry History; Dear Editor; fall; Camera Lyrica; and Order, Disorder. She lives in DeKalb, where she is Distingushed Research Professor and NIU Board of Trustees Professor at Northern Illinois University.

Paperback / $15.95 (Can $21.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-602-1 / 64 pages / Poetry