Kooser's book The Poetry Home Repair Manual: Practical Advice for Beginning Poets (2005) outlines his philosophy of poetry for students and the theories by which he lives.

Kooser has published his postcards to his friend Jim Harrison in Winter Morning Walks: One Hundred Postcards to Jim Harrison (2001), written while undergoing treatment for cancer.

Kooser cowrote with Jim Harrison Braided Creek (2003), about his diagnosis with cancer.

Jim Harrison's novella Tracking is a long, twisting, semi-autobiographical account of his own life. It is included in the collection The Summer He Didn't Die (2005).

Many of the poems in The Cancer Poetry Project: Poems by Cancer Patients and Those Who Love Them (2001), edited by Karin B. Miller, are by nonprofessional poets, people drawn together by a similar life experience, but they resemble Kooser's work in their emotional focus.

The fiction writer Ron Hansen has a...