Birthday Poems

. Thunder's Mouth Press, $15.95 (320pp) ISBN 978-1-56025-345-7

Everyone has a birthday which they meet with varying levels of joy and ambivalence each year. Birthday Poems, edited by Jason Shinder (Tales from the Couch: Writers on Therapy), underscores this fact with a century's worth of poems by a variety of prominent U.S. writers (from e.e. cummings to John Hollander to June Jordan to Denis Cooper), who celebrate, lament and mull over the meaning of a birthday. A subject index will help readers find poems specific to certain family members or to the age being celebrated.

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