Through his five poetry collections starting with Home in 1983 and ending with American Children in 2006, Jim Simmerman built a reputation as one of America's foremost poets. His poems were evocative and intimate, conversational and deceptively penetrating. He wrote about isolation, loneliness and regret in ways that rose above self pity. He brought a tenderness to pain, a delicacy to hard-fought truths. His final, unpublished poems were devastating and wise. Now, ten years after his death, editors James Jay and Miles Waggener have collected the best of Simmerman's career, some of the greatest hits that earned Simmerman nominations for the Pulitzer and National Book Award, and new, previously unpublished works, into a single volume. The Blood and the Bone and the Flesh of It All resurrects a unique and vital voice in American letters.