Like a Beggar

Ellen Bass

In her third collection of poetry, Like A Beggar, Ellen Bass deftly and piercingly explores life’s essential question: How do we go on? Her poems vividly inhabit sorrow and suffering yet are rich with praise, delighting in the irony and absurdity of our flawed human intelligence. Like a Beggar confronts the “the hard evidence of the earth” with grace, elegantly connecting the humble to the luminous.

ISBN: 9781556594649

Format: Paperback

About the Author

Ellen Bass’s newest book is Indigo (2020). Among her previous books are Like a Beggar (2014) which was a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize, the Publishing Triangle Award, the Milt Kessler Poetry Award, the Lambda Literary Award, and the Northern California Book Award, The Human Line (2007), and Mules of Love (2002), which won the Lambda Literary Award. She co-edited the first major anthology of women’s poetry, No More Masks! (1973). Among her other honors are three Pushcart Prizes, …

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Reviews

“Her words are nostalgic, vivid, and visceral… Bass arrives at the truth of human carnality rooted in the extraordinary need and promise of the individual. By the end of the collection… it becomes lucidly clear that Bass is not only a poet but also a philosopher and a storyteller.” —Booklist