Former New York State Poet Jane Cooper brings together work from four earlier books, along with eighteen previously unpublished poems. In a voice of unusual integrity Jane Cooper traces the arc of a life, from poems written out of the shadow of World War II, to haunting personal elegies, to poems that, with no loss of intimacy, engage history with passion and subtlety. Here are poems of love, loss, friendship, concern for the lives of women, the humor and "complex shame" of a white Southern heritage, the mysteries of art. "[A] beautifully assembled life’s work. Jane Cooper has been engaged in a long, patient act of making, a consideration of self-in-the-world vigorous, humble, and fierce all at once. It isn’t quite accurate to say The Flashboat is full of life; instead, in its way, it is a life."—Mark Doty "[A] splendid book."—Publishers Weekly