A collection of poems by the author who is the recipient of a 1994 Whiting Writers' Award and also the author of Turtle, Swan and Bethlehem in Broad Daylight.

The Broken World, the powerful debut of a poet of great depth and maturity, begins with narratives of individuals caught up in circumstance - a distressed girl on a Detroit overpass, a boy shooting baskets at a crisis center. By the end of the slim volume, Marcus Cafagna had led us through the postwar New York of Jewish Holocaust survivors to his native Michigan, where his marriage ended tragically with his wife's suicide, a death that has come to symbolize for Cafagna the confusion and madness of the twentieth century.

Selected by Sandra McPherson for the 1996 National Poetry Series.

An astonishing new talent, Rigoberto Gonzalez writes with a clarity of the senses that pulls the reader into a marvelous and unfamiliar world. The sidewalk preacher, the umbrella salesman, the nurse on the graveyard shift, the professional mourner - all allow Gonzalez, a clandestine glimpse of their lives. Crackling with the dry electricity of the desert and flashing with the brilliant colors of Mexico, Gonzlez's poems are rooted in the fertile soil beneath poverty's dust, the border's violence, and longing's desolation.

Renunciation introduces a powerful new poet whose work, though it treads the ground of silence and loss, bears a redemptive grace. Disquieting and healing, Corey Marks's poems hold to a moment when possibility / bristles so close it holds a shape in the air. The sculptor, Gislebertus, Doubting Thomas, Theseus, and John Keats share space in the pages of Renunciation with a survivor of the bomb in Hiroshima, a blind girl in the South American jungle, and DeSoto's thirteen swine in the hold of a ship bound for America. Rich with almost palpable nuances of light and sound, Marks's lyric...

In The Manderley of Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier's forbidding haven of mocking ghosts and secrets that refuse to remain buried, nothing is as it seems. So in this stunning debut collection by Rebecca Wolff, cities, partners, mothers, sisters, friends, and perfect strangers all disguise their true faces, while they who seek connection are transported from one great gaping / hole in the fabric / of our knowledge to another. No passage is too dark, no garden too tangled for the troubled dreamer of Manderley. Wolff turns a quicksilver gaze on a fluid world where both the real and the imaginary are...

A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year; winner of the 1994 National Poetry Series.

Through myth, dream, and sensual detail, the poems in this remarkable first collection portray a hectic world plagued by a desire for psychic coherence, in their longing to define a set of terms for spiritual survival. Winner of the 1995 National Poetry Series.

"This collection of beguiling poems . . . takes as its avenue into experience the palpable, quotidian objects of the intimate environment. A barometer, an arrangement of flowers, a vase, a carpet, a pyramid of oranges in a city marketplace are seen and then entered as one might enter the action of a film. . . . There is something of the child's wondrous way of seeing the world that electrifies." Boston Globe "Jeanne Beaumont's poems are smart and full of feeling, heartbreakingly in love with the snares and clarities of the language she writes in, and lit throughout by a kind of wry wonder."...