Poignant poems about moments of grace, light beaming through darkness, and beauty found in unexpected places. Sullivan employs a consistently investigative approach that immediately draws readers in. His curiosity and humility are disarming, and readers will willingly follow his path of discovery, without fear of getting lost, becoming overpowered, or feeling emotionally spent. Sullivan's deftly written poems have a wonderful and appealing balance of emotion and intellect. Lyrical, elegant, and polished, his poetry resonates with distinctive imagery and music. . . . A strong new poetic voice...

2005 Poets' Prize * Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist * Booklist Editors' Choice 2004 For formalists, this author comes as a gift, a poet fully in charge of her forms, subtle and controlled. She embraces the villanele, Petrarchan and Shakespearean sonnets, the measured quatrain, rhymed couplets. . . . What excites the reader is watching Tufariello use the limits of these traditions to stretch her creativity. ForeWord. In immaculate, subtly musical meter and rhyme, Tufariello conjures scenes of the city, modern history, marriage and family, love in the Italian Renaissance, and the women of...

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...

We've read elegies before, but not like this. A lush and unsparing first book, Lena asks readers to understand love - crucially, a first love, an erotic love - in the context not of a love lost but instead of an identity gained: we must consider not only "was she worth it?", but also "who has she made me?"