This volume assembles poems produced over the last thirty-five years by writer/scholar E. L. Risden. Samples re-surface from earlier books and chapbooks: On Shakespeare, In Sonnets (Cambridge Scholars Press), A Second City Street Prophet Sings the Blues and Through a Glass Darkly (Mellen Poetry Press), The Streets of Harmon Falls (The Troy Book Makers), Light on Stone (Cassandra Press), Among Dusty Shelves (East Coast Editions), and Songs of the City (Demosthenes Press). Several new poems, both in sequences and alone, appear here for the first time, including the "Book of Hours," the "Book of Days and Nights," and the "Women of Middle-earth."

Poems concentrate language and thought. While each poem aims to express its own integrity as an art object, collections offer a representative sample of how, over time, a writer thinks about and practices the craft of manipulating language for meaning and lyricality. These Selected Poems conjoin the discrete, vibrant, holistic experience of individual poems with the variegation permitted by compilation.