Probably the best book to come out this year. Not only is this the most beautifully bound book of poetry I think I ve ever seen, but Thom Satterlee is obviously a master at his craft. Suite101.com Thom Satterlee has fashioned a new genre, a contemporary hagiography in verse, primarily narrative but seasoned with lyric occasion. Burning Wyclif offers a deeply personal, word-savoring vision of a word-afflicted man, with the paradox and mystery one would expect of the life of a heretic and saint. Scott Cairns, author of Compass of Affection: New & Selected Poems For its lyrical but authoritative...

Soaring across extensive terrain, from the working world of Detroit to American suburbia and pop culture; from the European landscape of World War II to the current war in Iraq, Christine Rhein opens her personal world to the world at large. In poems that explore the historical, social, and scientific, as well as the poignant and humorous, Rhein relishes life s juxtapositions.
from Tuning
I try to tune out the boom boom boom
from the shooting range two miles from my house,
and think of the people who live next door
to the targets, or in the din of London and Berlin
...

On a soft summer Virginia evening Shelly Wagner was pushing her five-year-old son in a tire swing in the backyard, idling away the hours between dinner and bedtime. She left him only for a moment, but when she returned Andrew had disappeared. He was found later that night, drowned in the river behind their home. From the depths of grief that followed, Wagner began to write poems not as therapy, she says, but to see if she could express the range of her experience more fully than the published books she d read. What emerged from Wagner s quest is a volume of verse that has comforted and...

Leap is a book about not looking away. These poems focus on the hard subjects: a child s life-threatening illness, a mother s struggle with the serious illnesses of all her children, the ends of marriages, the deaths of lovers, the slow demise of parents, one s own mortality, humanity s physical and emotional frailties. But the poems in Leap are not grim. They resonate with life and survival, with richness of rhythm and language. They reach backward to embrace Primo Levi, Poe, and Berryman, and forward to anticipate a generation yet unborn. There is a keen eye observing the living and a keen...