Susanna Childress writes with an earnest desire to understand things physical and things spiritual. What results is a first collection of provocative, honest poetry that explores various human predicaments: a cancer-ridden wife, an explosive father, an infertile couple, various sexual aggressors, a missing girl. Such careful portraiture provokes the reader to consider the complexity of human love: how selfishness, fear, lust and even brutality might coincide with tenderness and loyalty. Ms. Childress's writing is refreshingly naive and clear, her voice essentially inquisitive. She is brave...

Susanna Childress writes with an earnest desire to understand things physical and things spiritual. What results is a first collection of provocative, honest poetry that explores various human predicaments: a cancer-ridden wife, an explosive father, an infertile couple, various sexual aggressors, a missing girl. Such careful portraiture provokes the reader to consider the complexity of human love: how selfishness, fear, lust and even brutality might coincide with tenderness and loyalty. Ms. Childress' writing is refreshingly naive and clear, her voice essentially inquisitive. She is brave...

Betsy Andrews s sweeping, energetic, book-length poem pounds the pavement of the New Jersey Turnpike, driving through America past landfills and wetlands and weapons labs under the towering shadows of engines, oil, and war. With a disarmingly unique voice that evokes the tradition of Pound and Eliot, Whitman and Williams and Ginsberg, Andrews creates a pastiche of landscape, consciousness, history, and politics in this American age."

Betsy Andrews's sweeping, energetic, book-length poem pounds the pavement of the New Jersey Turnpike, driving through America--past landfills and wetlands and weapons labs--under the towering shadows of engines, oil, and war. With a disarmingly unique voice that evokes the tradition of Pound and Eliot, Whitman and Williams and Ginsberg, Andrews creates a pastiche of landscape, consciousness, history, and politics in this American age.

"Bird Skin Coat "is brimming with startling moments of beauty found within a rusty and decayed landscape. With wild lyrical images of ascent and descent--doves and dives, sparrows and slugs, attics and cellars--this collection reflects Sorby's keen eye for blending images

Bird Skin Coat is brimming with startling moments of beauty found within a rusty and decayed landscape. With wild lyrical images of ascent and descent doves and dives, sparrows and slugs, attics and cellars this collection reflects Sorby s keen eye for blending images. As they shuttle between the Upper Midwest and the Pacific Northwest, these poems explore how the radical instability of the world is also the source of its energy.Honorable Mention, Posner Book-Length Poetry Award, Council for Wisconsin WritersWinner, Best Book of Poetry, Midwest Book AwardsWinner, Lorine Niedecker...

The Mouths of Grazing Things is an unflinching, lyrical meditation on nature's forced exodus from the human, and the forms of longing, estrangement, magnetism, and self-otherness that ensue. Arrestingly tender and fiercely protective of where nature lurks in and out of us still, Boyden translates for a new landscape where a brain in a jar is anchored by an apple, a fly-tying fisherman finds love songs to fish scattered among the barber's sweepings, and the players at "the most dangerous playground in the world" prepare for anything with one fist clenched and the other full of sugar. In...

In a small town under a spell, a child bride prays for the sheriff s gun. Iron under a bed stops a nightmare. The carousel artist can carve only birds. Part fairy tale and part gothic ballad, Wait spans a single year: the year before a young woman s marriage. Someone is always watching from the warehouse, from the woods. And on the outskirts of town, someone new is waiting.

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In the aftermath of her mother's suicide, one young woman recognizes the malleability of her reality. From her adolescence in the flat, hot Floridian landscape to a tectonic Missouri adulthood, a girl shaped by grief is compelled to create and manipulate her image of the world. As her dreams become indistinguishable from daily life, she begins to question memory, identity, and the function of love. Employing photography as its central metaphor, "Darkroom" tackles the tangled relationship between memory and mourning by exploring an artist's impossible attempt to re-create the object of loss.

Greg Wrenn's debut collection opens with a long poem in which a man undergoes surgery to become a centaur. Other poems speak in voices as varied as those of Robert Mapplethorpe, Hercules, and a Wise Man at the birth of Jesus. "Centaur" skitters along the blurred lines between compulsivity and following one's heart, stasis and self-realization, human and animal. Here, suffering and transcendence are restlessly conjoined.