Charles Simic is widely recognized as one of the most visceral and unique poets writing today. Simic's work has won numerous awards, among them the 1990 Pulitzer Prize, the MacArthur Foundation "genius grant," the Griffin International Poetry Prize, and, simultaneously, the Wallace Stevens Award and appointment as U.S. Poet Laureate.

He taught English and creative writing for over thirty years at the University of New Hampshire. Although he emigrated to the U.S. from Yugoslavia as a teenager, Simic writes in English, drawing upon his own experiences of war-torn Belgrade to compose poems about the physical and spiritual poverty of modern life. Liam Rector, writing for the Hudson Review, has noted that the author's work "has about it a purity, an originality unmatched by many of his contemporaries."

Though Simic's popularity and profile may have increased dramatically over the two decades, his work has always enjoyed critical praise. In the Chicago Review, Victor Contoski characterized Simic's work as "some of the most strikingly original poetry of our time, a poetry shockingly stark in its concepts, imagery, and language." Georgia Review correspondent Peter Stitt wrote: "The fact that [Simic] spent his first eleven years surviving World War II as a resident of Eastern Europe makes him a going-away-from-home writer in an especially profound way...He is one of the wisest poets of his generation, and one of the best."

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