In Dark Horses prize-winning poet X.J. Kennedy gathers 42 new poems. From the lighthearted ballad Dancing with the Poets at Piggy’s to the darkly meditative lyric The Waterbury Cross , the poems show Kennedy’s wide range. There are intimate portraits of a woman veterinarian and a young man dying of AIDS, a song about the Sri Lankan festival of Buddha’s tooth, and a stark account of a confrontation with a homeless panhandler. Emily Dickinson Leaves a Message to the World on the newly installed answering machine in her Amherst homestead. Finding a Woodpile Skull - the severed head of a black ant makes the poet laugh at his own expense as he plays ham Hamlet to a formic Yorick . X.J. Kennedy’s first collection, Nude Descending a Staircase (1961) won the Lamont Award of the Academy of American Poets. His most recent collection, Cross Ties: Selected Poems (1985) received the Los Angeles Times Book Award for poetry.