Gordon Weaver is known well throughout the world of American letters. Since the publication in 1968 of his first novel, Count a Lonely Cadence (produced as a feature film entitled Cadence), Weaver has gone on to publish seven collections of short fiction and three other novels and to edit or co-edit four critical works. His fiction has won O. Henry and Pushcart awards and appeared in many prestigious anthologies, such as Best American Short Stories and Best of the West. Weaver is also a poet of accomplishment, a fact known only by a few editors and by his former students, many of them now...

The poetry of "Simple Gestures" shifts the landscape beneath the reader's feet. The planet is the poet's terrain. Kuntz introduces the redolent smell of a Saigon market, then guides us to a Japanese hot bath. The lined hands of an old woman in Brooklyn give way to a class mouthing familiar vowels in a Philippine refugee camp. From the exotic to the everyday, survival- physical and emotional- is the filament that binds disparate worlds to each other. Personal and cultural ties are slashed and refastened, giving readers poetry of the heart and spirit.