The poems in Peg Boyers's "Hard Bread" are "spoken" in the imagined voice of the Italian writer, Natalia Ginzburg (1916-91). While much of the book is based on Ginzburg's life her upbringing in Turin; her brief marriage to the resistance activist, Leone Ginzburg; her experience of Fascism and war; her work as novelist, playwright, editor, and newspaper columnist; her embattled friendships with writers like Primo Levi, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ernest Hemingway, and Cesare Pavese much is invented. The result is a book by turns melancholy and acerbic, mournful and satiric, contemplative and...

"Poem to Fire"
Fast transparency that explodes the fuel and air
in the cylinder and shuts the intake valves and thrusts
down on the piston so the crankshaft spins and spins
you cut through all material that blocks your way
so fast that driving now past rushes and billboards
this pull to her could be your own impersonal presence
cloaked in the day to day of the malls and condos
all those wired sensors keeping on guard for you
except you flicker even inside the wet wall
where papillary muscle makes that sweet pulsation
in whatever room she's moving through...

"With my eyes closed, I might have guessed a collaboration between William Empson and Noel Coward. But of course no one could have made up Turner Cassity but himself. The man is a wizard. In these new poems, each as clear and mysterious as crystal, he has conjured all sorts of miniature wonders and nasty home truths. It is the devil's own sorcery and pure enchantment." J. D. McClatchy"

Both intensely personal and deeply rooted in recognizable events of personal, familial, or national significance, "The Afterlife of Objects" is a kind of dreamed autobiography. With poise and skill, Dan Chiasson divulges the enigmas of the mind of not just one individual but of an entire social world through a beautifully constructed poetic voice that issues from a kind of mythic childhood of our collective, tortured humanity. This sophisticated debut collection offers deceptively simple poems that evoke highly complex states of mind with a voice that has long been listening to the discordant...

The poems in "The Weave Room "reveal the life of a textile mill as it weathers a decisive social and human moment. Whether speaking in the voice of a weaver trying to quell a crowd about to turn violent over unionization or in his own voice as one of the mill's employees, Chitwood brings together many social and historical threads to show the pattern of a people and a place that has received little treatment in American poetry.

At the heart of this unusually accomplished and affecting first book of poetry is the idea of the hinge the point of connection, of openings and closings. Maggie Dietz situates herself in the liminal present, bringing together past and future, dream and waking, death and life. Formally exact, rigorous, and tough, these poems accept no easy answers or equations.
Dietz creates a world alive with detail and populated with the everyday and strange: amusement-park horses named Virgil and Sisyphus, squirrels hanging over tree branches like fish. By turns humorous and pained, direct and...

"David Ferry must have had something up his sleeve when he called his book "Strangers," because his is a poetry of intimacy and familiarity. More than that, Mr. Ferry's short, sparse lyrics are as perfectly and simply composed as Japanese haiku a rare accomplishment in poetry written in English." Andy Brumer, "New York Times Book Review"
""Strangers" is a remarkably good book for a reader sufficiently attentive to hear its quiet power, to let it work in its distinctive way." "Boston Globe"
"The poems of David Ferry's "Strangers" are in fact one book, and it is a splendid one. There is...

Hailed as one of the best contemporary poets writing in the English language, David Ferry meditates unsentimentally, in many of these powerful and often wrenching poems, on the dispossession of people afflicted by madness, homelessness, or other forms of "wildness." The voices in all the poems in this book demonstrate how, for each of us, there is no certain dwelling place.
"David Ferry's "Dwelling Places" is a marvelous, extremely moving book, distinguished by Ferry's characteristic formal virtuosity, extraordinarily fresh and 'inner' translations, and a kind of driven anguished rage at...

David Ferry's "Of No Country I Know: New and Selected Poems and Translations" provides a wonderful gathering of the work of one of the great American poetic voices of the twentieth century. It brings together his new poems and translations, collected here for the first time; his books "Strangers" and "Dwelling Places" in their entirety; selections from his first book, "On the Way to the Island"; and selections from his celebrated translations of the Babylonian epic "Gilgamesh," the "Odes of Horace," and of Virgil's "Eclogues." This is Ferry's fullest and most resonant book, demonstrating the...

With a half-dozen books of poetry published to date, Kenneth Fields distills some forty years of teaching and writing about poetry into" Classic Rough News," a collection of fresh sonnets and sonnet-like lyrics that attests to both Fields's skills as a writer and the inexhaustible possibilities of the form.
"Classic Rough News" follows a skeptical, cosmopolitan, intelligent, poetic presence aware that its carefully constructed veneer could crumble at any moment. In poems that mine interior dialogue for the discovery of great truths, Fields conveys feelings of awkwardness, incompleteness,...