"Mary Ann Samyn's Rooms by the Sea introduces us to an exciting new voice. These poems are haunting, delicate, and full of care and wonder at life's exigencies. 'If there is music here, it is deep-throated, ' one poem says. Reading this book, one responds, 'Yes, the music is here, embodying the richness and anguish of being alive.'"--Tom Andrews

"Under and out from under the shadow of death Joanne Lehman writes 'in the emptiness between one breath and the next.' Her rural Ohio land-scape is animated with rough and mild weather, red wing blackbirds, hayfields, woodlands, and the sweet and sometimes too-tight lips and rhythms of sectarian life. These poems speak simply, and their mourning, memory, and healing are a balm for times when a little bit of quiet would do us all a world of good. This is a fine first book--as meditative, wise, and joyful as it is bound to local life on our turning earth."--Julia Kasdorf

"Tornado is a book of ravishing and precise beauty. Death, said Wallace Stevens, is the mother of beauty, and so it is here; around the loss of a beloved sister in childhood, Ted Lardner has spun a radiant web of language by which he reveals what does not and cannot die, in the scale of nature above and underground, in the movements of time, and in the ongoing reach of human tenderness that 'glides through our skins like a wave, lighting it up from inside.'"--Alicia Ostriker

"Ted Lardner enlarges our range of wonder. For him, the task is to bring the jolt...