Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? -Mary Oliver, from "The Summer Day" Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mary Oliver presents a personal selection of her best work in this definitive collection spanning more than five decades of her esteemed literary career. “No matter where one starts reading, Devotions offers much to love.” — The Washington Post Throughout her celebrated career, Mary Oliver has touched countless readers with her brilliantly crafted verse, expounding on her love for the physical world and the powerful bonds between all living things. Identified as "far and away, this country's best selling poet" by Dwight Garner, she now returns with a stunning and definitive collection of her writing from the last fifty years. Carefully curated, these 200 plus poems feature Oliver's work from her very first book of poetry, No Voyage and Other Poems , published in 1963 at the age of 28, through her most recent collection, Felicity , published in 2015. This timeless volume, arranged by Oliver herself, showcases the beloved poet at her edifying best. Within these pages, she provides us with an extraordinary and invaluable collection of her passionate, perceptive, and much-treasured observations of the natural world.

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The Rural Power Behind Trump’s Assault on Blue Cities

President Trump’s deployment of the National Guard from red states into blue cities isn’t just a partisan attack; it’s also a geographic one. In the 2024 election, Donald Trump won rural areas by 40 percentage points. And you could see what’s been happening in Washington, D.C., and Chicago as a rural political coalition militarily occupying urban centers. The rural-urban divide in America has become so big it’s dangerous — for our politics, and for democracy. And yet, just a few decades ago, this divide didn’t exist. Urban and rural areas voted pretty much in lockstep. And for Democrats to gain power again, they’ll need to figure out how to win some of those voters back. So how did the Democratic Party lose rural voters? And what could they do to win their votes back? Suzanne Mettler is a political scientist at Cornell University and the co-author with Trevor E. Brown of the new book “Rural Versus Urban: The Growing Divide That Threatens Democracy.”

Books recommended:

• 📕  Demon Copperhead: A Pulitzer Prize Winner by Barbara Kingsolver
• 📘  The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker (Chicago Studies in American Politics) by Katherine J. Cramer
• 📗  Devotions: A Read with Jenna Pick: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver by Mary Oliver

Suzanne Mettler , Trevor E. Brown Oct. 21, 2025 3 books recommended

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