In Donald Revell s poems, the present is often little more than an instant caught between the sadness of memory and the need to face the future s blank expanse. Even the best dreams recall happiness that cannot be retrieved, while the worst memories bend past love into a crazy line through darkness: "Anything can turn furious. The crazy / line through wreckage that wears my face and all / the faces seems not to end. And on the way, / even the most damaged things have one / surface glazed, a sudden distorting mirror / that I can t help finding. There, I look as I did / stalled in hours or...

This is a poetry of excursions: into maps of lost territories, into the thoughts of a man with no legs, into the life of a town marked by disasters.

Patrick Lawler moves into the slender lines of shattered glass, the spaces between lyric and narrative, between metamorphosis and mutation. From the artful surface of a Russian novel, rich with symbolism and white bears, to a survivor's unwillingness to immerse himself in life or leave it, the poems in "A Drowning Man Is Never Tall Enough" hunger for a language beyond the solid, for the fragmentation that makes a scene complete.

"Desire in L.A." confronts limitless longing in a city that is itself without limits. In these poems, the object of desire is decidedly missing, whether that object be love or beauty or the past.

Shifting even within a single poem, and certainly from section to section, the objects of desire in Martha Ronk's poetry become as elusive as the unnamed Marilyn Monroe--"that image of another's skirts"--of the title poem, or the moment captured in "A photograph as good as a picture"

"He leans forward with such / fervor, yet isn't young and something / decidedly is happening, even / to the...

Focusing with equal energy at the imposing sky and at our own home planet, Albert Goldbarth moves from hosannah-choiring angels to a single peach pit glistening on the tongue of Madame Renoir, from the sweep of the earth's ecocycles to the particles of quantum physics.

In these poems surgeons, lovers, astronauts, psychiatrists, and priests embark on the same far journey, traveling into the universe of what it means to be human, exploring "how the world works." Here, the ancient Egyptian afterlife and the atrocities of the 10 o'clock news, the realm of guacamole chip dip and the life of...

Driven by an endless matrix of poetic forms, the poems of "Assembling the Shepherd" create a world where allusions to Plato and the Dead Sea scrolls intermingle with car culture and terrorism, where modern skylines are framed within the history of alchemy and architecture. Tessa Rumsey uses words in ways that defy summary and synonym in poetry that challenges the boundaries of common dualities--city and desert, heaven and earth, waking and dreaming, violence and harmony, destruction and regeneration, recollecting and forecasting. She attempts to move beyond these natural contrasts in her...

The painting Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? by Paul Gauguin, intended as the painter's final artistic testimony, is the inspiration and framework for this book. In one way, "The Gauguin Answer Sheet" focuses on the intricate details of the painting and offers its lush Tahitian landscape and characters--a black dog, a pair of conspirators, a shy woman, a pleading goddess, and a crouching mummy, among many others. In another sense, Dennis Finnell deeply probes the underlying implications--and personal associations--the painting offers.

The poem's own questions,...