Night Picnic

The Pulitzer Prize–winning poet “illuminates the shadow side of life in poems as perfectly formed and directed as the beam of a flashlight” ( Booklist ). The poems in Charles Simic’s new collection evoke a variety of settings and images, from New York City to small New England towns; from crowds spilling onto the sidewalk on a hot summer night to an abandoned wooden church and a car graveyard overgrown with weeds. His subjects range from a bakery early in the morning to the fingerprints on a str