The English author's lively, witty style and morbid and macabre themes are revealed in a complete collection illustrated with her unusual drawings.

Celebrating her seventieth birthday, Anne Stevenson's new collection, a Poetry Book Society Recommended title, crosses many borders. While her title poem mocks borders dividing rich nations from poor, its subtext undermines the public language of political self-justification, suggesting that the true dimensions of morality can be approached best through literature. Many of these poems balance youth and age, life and death, love and friendship, science...

In Self-Interrogation, she wrote: "The evening passes fast away, / Tis almost time to rest; / What thoughts has left the vanished day, / What feelings, in thy breast? / The vanished day? It leaves a sense / Of labour hardly done; / Of little, gained with vast expense, / A sense of grief alone!"

Stories by lesbian writers from around the world. They range from Egyptian writer Alifa Rifaat's story on a relationship between a lesbian and a snake, to a piece by France's Mireille Best on a relationship of a woman with her son's teacher.