Collected Shorter Poems presents hundreds of lyric, short narrative, comic, meditative, erotic, and nature poems that Hayden Carruth wrote over a forty-five year period. Noted for the breadth of his linguistic and formal resources, influenced by jazz and the blues, Carruth gives his poems a philosophical resonance. His explorations of rural poverty and hardship—sometimes grim, sometimes funny—are deeply informed by political radicalism and cultural responsibility.