The 1997 Pushcart prize XXI: best of the small presses

Introduction / Bill Henderson

Proper gypsies / Bobbie Ann Mason

Love in the morning / Andre Dubus

The cry / J. Allyn Rosser

Crib / Kay Ryan

The slaughterhouse / Karen Halvorsen Schreck

Duke and Ellis / David Treuer

First sex / Richard Tayson

Bruce Springsteen and the story of us / Hope Edelman

One story / Dean Young

Daily affirmations / Erin McGraw

Japan / Billy Collins

Dark age : why Johnny can't dissent / Tom Frank

Two girls / Suzanne Gardinier

Venexia I / Charles Wright.

A man-to-be / Ha Jin

What comes from the ground / Wendy Dutton

Scorn / Carol Frost

The last white man in Brooklyn / Michael Stephens

Facing into it / Eleanor Wilner

Take it or leave it / Robert Dana

Fanatics / Alan Shapiro

Basic algebra / Richard Jackson

Camo, dope & videotape / Harold Jaffe

From Basra to Bethlehem / Tom Paine

Big Ruthie imagines sex without pain / S.L. Wisenberg

Descending / Dave Smith

Crabcake / James Alan McPherson

A rented house in the country / James Reiss

Uttar Pradesh / August Kleinzahler

Neanderthal tongues / Ranbir Sidhu

Jerry's kid / Robert Schirmer

Happiness : a manifesto / Marilyn Chin

Time and space / Ira Sadoff

The secret nature of the mechanical rabbit / Pinckney Benedict

The revisionist / Helen Schulman.

Lost / Peter Gordon

Spring snow / Arthur Sze

Cows, arrogance, the natures of things / Trudy Dittmar

Floor study / Martha Collins

Grievances and griefs by Robert Frost / Daniel Stern

Young man on Sixth Avenue / Mark Halliday

Winter in Los Angeles / Tom McNeal

Fetish / Loretta Collins

The Catskills remembered / Vivian Gornick

Stone flight / Eamon Grennan

The slip / Rachel Hadas

The weather in history / Daniel Meltzer

A relation of various accidents observable in some animals included in vacuo / William Monahan

Christmas tree / James Merrill

Looking in a deeper lair : a tribute to Wallace Stegner / Barry Lopez

Aliens / Kim Addonizio

Mercy / Sharon Solwitz

The dissolution of the world / Caroline A. Langston

Brown dog angel / Andrea Jeyaveeran

A wood near Athens / Thom Gunn.

Disorder and early sorrow / George Packer

The button box / Grace Schulman

The shortest night / W.S. Merwin

Mad / Jewel Mogan

The tale of a kite / Steve Stern

Baby maker / Karla J. Kuban

The bridge / Daniel Orozco

The news / Ruth Stone

Note folded thirteen ways / Richard Garcia

Love songs for the SS / Michael Kaniecki

A dog was crying to-night in Wicklow also / Seamus Heaney

One moment on top of the earth / Naomi Shihab Nye

The ghost of soul-making / Michael S. Harper

Below Fourteenth Street / Gerald Stern

Special mention

Contributors' notes

Presses featured in the Pushcart Prize sine 1976

Contributing small presses

Index.