Book review: Conversations with Billy Collins, Ted Kooser

J. KEMPER CAMPBELL For the Journal Star

“Conversations with Billy Collins,” Edited by John Cusatis, University Press of Mississippi, 234 pages, $23.42 (paperback).

“Conversations with Ted Kooser,” Edited by John Cusatis, University Press of Mississippi, 274 pages, $25 (paperback).

Aficionados of modern poetry will be intrigued by comparing editor, John Cusatis’s, two books of “Conversations” with Billy Collins and Ted Kooser. Cusatis, who has a PhD in English and teaches at Charleston County School of the Arts, has edited two complementary books on, arguably, the two most popular American poets of the twenty-first century.

The two books use exactly the same format to demonstrate the numerous similarities and the subtle differences between these poetic icons. Each book contains twenty-o