Susan Stewart is professor of English at Princeton University and a MacArthur Fellow. She is the author of three previous books of poetry, most recently The Forest, published by the University of Chicago Press, and winner of the Literary Award of the Philadelphia Atheneum in 1995. She has also written several award-winning books of literary and art criticism, including Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

"Susan Stewart's most fiercely intelligent and ambitious [book] to date.... Readers of Columbarium will be rewarded throughout by the poet's remarkable acumen and edifying sense of purpose." - Nadia Herman Colburn, Boston Review "Wonderfully imaginative.... Each of the poems takes a radically different form, and no two are alike. It's as if the endless mutability and metamorphic power of nature find an echo in a series of malleable poetic forms." - Edward Hirsch, "Poet's Choice," Washington Post "It is a privilege and joy to share the workings of a beautiful mind.... To feel the physical and intellectual command of the mercurial shiftings of tone; the rippling reticulations of stanza, line, phrase, and phoneme; the Roman candles of a comic spirit; and the silences - silences 'like breathing moonlight.'" - Marion Stocking, Beloit Poetry Journal "Within American poetry, Stewart's Columbarium is, to my mind, the finest book of the last five years, in its technical brilliance, philosophical questioning, and lyrical beauty.... Most of Stewart's poems are rich in classical and philosophical allusion.... The pastoral, the bucolic lyric has been pressured and transformed." - John Kinsella, Sydney Morning Herald "A profoundly imagined book, this is one of the most impressive and serious volumes of poetry to come out in the last five years. This is a book worth owning and returning to over many years....An essential poetry, a poetry of essences and elements, coupled with an awareness of existential transience." - Maureen L. McLane, Chicago Tribune