The Government Lake: Last Poems

By James Tate

The stunning, startling collection that is also the last work from a major poet

A woman named Mildred starts laying eggs after feathers from wild poultry begin coming down the chimney. A man becomes friends with a bank robber who abducts him and eventually rues his captor’s death. A baby is born transparent.

James Tate’s work, filled with unexpected turns and deadpan exaggeration, “fanciful and grave, mundane and transcendent,” (New York Times) has been among the most defining and significant of our time. In his last collection before his death in 2015, Tate’s dark yet whimsical humor, his emotional acuity, and his keen ear for the absurd are on full display in prose poems that finely constructed and lyrical, surrealistic and provocative.

With The Government Lake, James Tate reminds us why he is one of the great poets of our age and one of the true masters of the form. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Jul 2, 2019
• ISBN: 9780062914736

James Tate

James Tate's poems have been awarded the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, the Wallace Stevens Award, the William Carlos Williams Award, the Yale Younger Poets Award, and the National Institute of Arts and Letters Award, and have been translated across the globe. Tate was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters; his many collections include The Lost Pilot, The Oblivion Ha-Ha, Absences, Distance from Loved Ones, Worshipful Company of Fletchers, and The Ghost Soldiers. Born in Kansas City, Missouri, he made his home in Pelham, Massachusetts.

Reviews for The Government Lake

[jphamilton-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

    It's not often that I go for poetry in hardcover, but when it's the last book of one of my favorite poets, there's no question, I'm going for it. He died back in the summer of 2015, and I hope that there will be more unpublished works to come. The humor and simple oddness of James Tate's later work was such a pleasure to read. I loved how his mind worked.