Winner of the 1997 National Poetry Series, judged and selected by Eavan Boland. Of the collection, Eavan Boland wrote: "The deft language and lyric intent of these poems serve one purpose: slowly and exactly they expose the dark, silvery images of a lost world. Here is Pittsburgh at twilight, in the old dusk of the steel mills. Here is a drug store, the Monongahela river, the trolleys and the carbarns. And here is memory at its most scalding, intense, and rigorous. This world is never regretted, never mourned for. There is no elegy here because not a single detail in this remarkable landscape...

"Heartbreaking, overstuffed, seeping with history, lonelier than imaginable and truly in-the-face of American culture, Climbing Back's debris-field of prose poems tries with all its heart to outrun cultural paradigms and ends up refining our spiritual ignorance till it's our most gorgeous attribute." from Jorie Graham's citation for the National Poetry Series. "Dionisio D. Martinez's Climbing Back is an epic-poetic-cinematic response to culture, a one-book shorthand to the 20th century and beyond, a series of responses to the world that are imaginative rather than reductive." Susan Hussey,...

Selected by Margaret Atwood as a winner in the 1987 Open Competition of the National Poetry Series, this unique collection was the first sounding of a deeply authentic voice. Ms. Howe's early writings concern relationship, attachment, and loss, in a highly original search for personal transcendence. Many of the thirty-four poems in The Good Thief appeared in such prestigious journals and periodicals as The Atlantic, The American Poetry Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, The Agni Review, and The Partisan Review.

Probing the local genius as expressed in history and customs, Swenson absorbs the anguish of colonization and dictatorship to reveal ordinary people and events with a sardonic humor, pathos and hope. Her travels arrive at moral ambiguities where cultures clash and where the human population devastates the natural environment. With remarkable technical dexterity, she searches beneath the surface of politics and philosophy to find essential human character.