Billy Collins is the author of twelve prior collections of poetry including The Rain in Portugal, Aimless Love, Horoscopes for the Dead, Ballistics, and The Trouble with Poetry. He is also the editor of Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry, 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day, and Bright Wings: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems About Birds. Collins served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003 and as New York State Poet from 2004 to 2006. Billy Collins’s new collection, Whale Day And Other Poems (Random House), brings together more than fifty poems and showcases his deft mixing of the playful and the serious. Here are poems that leap with whimsy and imagination, yet stay grounded in the familiar, common things of everyday experience. He takes us for a walk with an impossibly ancient dog, discovers the original way to eat a banana, meets an Irish spider, and even invites us to his own funeral. Whale Day is both sensitive to the wonders of being alive and the thrill of mortality.