In the bone-dry land of mesquites and drought, Janice Whittington has found images that allow her to explore woman s place in West Texas and the world from the perspectives of daughter, wife, friend, and mother. Filled with fear and fire, joy and sorrow, dust and water; the poems risk stepping into air, striving to glide like hawks on thermals. Into a Thousand Mouths is the account of Eve after the fall, after she follows her husband out of the garden and of tilling yield.... It is the account of one woman, of all women that female secret of wombs, / the ache that folds into the chest / and...

Miriam Vermilya was a retired grade school teacher and a well known painter and writer in Greenville, Ohio, where she lived. When she died unexpectedly in January of 1999, the Greenville Writers Group, of which she was a founding member, collected these poems into what became the winning manuscript of the 1999 Walt McDonald First-Book Competition in Poetry. The poems sum up Vermilya s reflections on her life, love, and marriage; the deaths of friends and family members; and, most poignantly, her own aging and death. Her voice is calm, practical, even humorous; never morbid, always generous....

Rick Campbell s journey from the banks of the Ohio to the beaches of Florida is a rhapsody, and the music he makes in ordering his world takes us with him, to the headwaters of a new river."Rick Campbell s poems leave some sweet dirt under your fingernails proof of hard, honest work when the longing of small-town America is not enough. Setting the World in Order eloquently plots our geographically impossible trajectories. On the way, Campbell can lay down a narrative as spacious as the range of a blues harmonica, every gritty riff dissolving into compassion." Dionisio D. Martinez"Rick...