Ballistics by Billy Collins

Praise for
Ballistics
and Billy Collins
    “Wryly philosophical, caustically whimsical, disarmingly beautiful, Collins’s covertly powerful lyrics deftly snare all that is fine and ludicrous about us.”
    —Booklist
    “Accessible and high-spirited … [Collins] again shows the deft, self-mocking touch that has made him one of America’s bestselling poets.”
    —Publishers Weekly
    “[Collins] gives to ‘ordinary lives’ an eloquence that is far from ordinary but made from it nevertheless.”
    —The
Buffalo News
(Editor’s Choice)
    “Collins reveals the unexpected within the ordinary. He peels back the surface of the humdrum to make the moment new.”
    —
The Christian Science Monitor
    “By careful observation, Collins spins comic gold from the dross of quotidian suburban life.… Chipping away at the surface, he surprises you by scraping to the wood underneath, to some deeper truth.”
    —Entertainment Weekly
    “A poet of plentitude, irony, and Augustan grace.”
    —The New Yorker
    “It is difficult not to be charmed by Collins, and that in itself is a remarkable literary accomplishment.”
    —
The New York Review of Books
    “[Collins] moves you to laughter and tears, often during the course of one poem.… His insight into the human condition astonishes.”
    —Pages
    “Collins’s accessible and deeply human poetry would make a poetry lover out of anyone.”
    —Good Housekeeping
    “Collins uses ordinary words … and his sentences have the cadences of speech. They usually start with plain statements … then something strange happens. A rocket goes off, images burst out like fireworks, and life’s backyard becomes a magic kingdom.… Collins is often very funny—but more startling than the wit is the way his mind makes unexpected leaps and splices.”
    —
The Boston Globe
    “To begin with, Collins is absolutely charming. He deserves every rose he’s flung these days.… His poems are irresistible.”
    —Minneapolis
Star-Tribune
    “Collins has reached into so many unexplored corners that he has elevated the mundane, not out of proportion to the world, but to a place where it seems to have always belonged.”
    —The Miami Herald
    “Like a master jazz trumpeter, Collins takes quirky, imaginative leaps that are as stunning for their coherence as for their originality.… Collins’s popularity hinges on the accessibility of his poems and their mildly subversive quality.… So obviously a virtuoso, Billy Collins is sure to bring many new readers to poetry.”
    —The
Washington Post Book World

ALSO BY BILLY COLLINS
    The Trouble with Poetry and Other Poems
    Nine Horses
    Sailing Alone Around the Room
    Picnic, Lightning
    The Art of Drowning
    Questions About Angels
    The Apple That Astonished Paris
    Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry
(editor)
    180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day
(editor)



2010 Random House Trade Paperback Edition
    Copyright © 2008 by Billy Collins
    All rights reserved.
    Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
    R ANDOM H OUSE T RADE P APERBACKS and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
    Previous publication information about some of the poems contained within this work can be found beginning on this page .
    Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., in 2008.
    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Collins, Billy.
Ballistics : poems / Billy Collins.
    p. cm.
    eISBN: 978-1-58836-763-1
    I. Title.
    PS3553.O47478B35 2008
    811′.54–dc22
    www.atrandom.com
    v3.1

For Chris Calhoun
advocate and pal

Even as a cow she was lovely.
    —Ovid,
Metamorphoses

A Note to the Reader About this Poetry eBook
    The way a poem looks on the page is a vital aspect of its being. The length of its lines and the poet’s use of stanza breaks give the