The Pushcart prize 1996 ; XX : best of the small presses [with an index to the series] / edited by Bill Henderson, with the Pushcart Prize editors ; poetry editors: Carol Muske, Dennis Schmitz ; essays editor: Anthony Brandt.

"An annual small press reader."

Pity / Avner Mandelman -- Anna Liffey / Eavan Boland -- Magic / Art Homer -- First day / Elizabeth Spires -- Wilma Bremer's funeral / Marie Sheppard Williams -- Something like happiness / Stephen Dunn -- Match / Maxine Kumin -- Theories of illusion / Maureen Seaton -- Last things / Debra Spark -- My friend / David St. John -- Super night / Charles Baxter -- Era of the Vari-Vue / Gary Fincke -- My father's Chinese wives / Sandra Tsing Loh -- Storm chasers / William Olsen -- End of the world / Michael Collins -- Solo, New Orleans / Diann Blakely Shoaf -- Sex / Irma Wallem -- Eighteenth-century medical illustration: the infant in its little room / Ann Townsend -- Nearness of the world / Steven Huff -- Film noir: train trip out of metropolis / Lynn Emanuel -- Videotape / Don DeLillo -- Seizure / Linda Bierds -- Bad / Frederick Busch -- Barbarians are coming / Marilyn Chin -- Swing of things / Jennifer C. Cornell -- History books / Thomas Lux -- The more I like flies / Reginald McKnight -- Anaconda / Dennis Sampson -- Undesirable table / Joyce Carol Oats -- Stillborn / Maribeth Fischer -- A history of paisley / Agha Shahid Ali -- Kingdom of the sun / Alice Schell -- Sung from a hospice / Cyrus Cassells -- Instinct for bliss / Melissa Pritchard -- Dante's Inferno, Canto XXXIV / Robert Pinsky -- Elizabeth Bishop / Frank Bidart -- Loss / Carl Dennis -- Closing out the visit / John Barth -- Will work for food / Stanley Plumly -- Mother-tongue / Nora Cobb Keller -- Conversations on the plurality of worlds / Molly Bendall -- When words became windows / Sven Birkerts -- Chinese food in the fifties / Alberto Rios -- Late style / James Robison -- Of royal issue / Brigit Pegeen Kelly -- Women come and go / Cornelia Nixon -- Sadness, an improvisation / Donald Justice -- Updike and I / John Updike -- Evolution: a science fiction / Melinda Mueller -- Milk / Eileen Pollack -- A little thing like that / A.R. Ammons -- False water society / Ben Marcus -- In the pasture of dead horses / Julia Wendell -- A happy vacancy / Stephen Dobyns -- Elizabeth, listening / Sabina Grogan -- Six days: some rememberings / Grace Paley -- Phlox Diffusa / Sandra McPherson -- Ring of brightest angels around heaven / Rick Moody -- Deconstruction of Emily Dickinson / Galway Kinnell -- Charles the obscure / Charles Simic.