by J. Barry Koops
Paperback: 201 pages
Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 0.8 inches

It started with a poem torn out of The New Yorker, says J. Barry Koops of this collection of poems. He notes that it was the voice of the poem that snagged his attention. In the 85 poems that Koops eventually chose he recognized the voices of real people: the math teacher across the hall; a colleague whose passing he mourns; a professor whose fingerprints are all over his life; a classmate remembered over decades; a joke or a jest like an arrow. Koops predicts that in the four sections of this anthology you will hear something like threads of conversations, voices responding to one another; objecting, refuting, reflecting. Through the words of luminaries we already know, like Billy Collins, Louise Erdrich, Seamus Heaney, Mary Karr, and Jane Kenyon, to outsider poets we'll want to know better, Final Exam lifts a glass to memorable teachers and mentors and toasts the schools we remember with nostalgia and regret. Koops offers this book as a tribute to teachers and professors who chose a life of significance, a life that made a difference--the teaching life.