"There is a sadness to McBride's poetry that only a deep thinker can recreate, someone who has been inside the beautiful dark hollows of disappointment. It is encouraging to read the powerfully rendered thoughts of a vulnerable mind in a cynical time--here is a poet unafraid to be hurt; here is a poet bleeding in his own glass crop. Encouraging? Yes, because McBride understands that defensive poetry has no value."
-- Larissa Szporluk

"Somehow simultaneously metaphysical and down-to-earth, Matt McBride's poems are a worthy read, reminding us of our hubris in assuming the rain...

"Jason Gray's How to Paint the Savior Dead rethinks the complex traditional connections among women's bodies, spirituality, and art. Gray is not afraid of hard work, hard thought, and big vision just because the subject of his fascination has been both exalted and besmirched by tradition, both enriched and impoverished by the hands of our predecessors. Gray throws himself into the mix of muses, amore, and immortality with more--much more--than common wit, passion, and intelligence. As he separates out mortal beauty from immortal, he ignores, as one of his poems says, 'what is...

"Jody Rambo's poems push and pull, travel and rest, occupy and set free. Her 'tether' both holds her fast to the facts and words that make up our world, but at the same time it liberates her to roam and travel, inclined as she says, 'to wander off into the green beyond recoverable limits.' What I admire most about this book is the way the wide arc of history and narrative and the smallest gesture of image and word come together--tethered--into something wondrous and new." --Jeffrey Thomson

"Jody Rambo's first book of poetry, Tethering...

"In the old story of love and loss, Lisa Ampleman's I've Been Collecting This to Tell You cuts to the core of the matter with concision and subtlety. Hearts are laid bare, dissected, even grown anew. Masterfully structured and alert to the most vital details, this collection has lots to tell us--and a voice at once authentic and lyrical with which to do it."
--Don Bogen

"In these poems, the beloved is a space the speaker moves through--at first with trepidation, then with gathering force-- emerging finally into a hard-won world ravishing in its clarity...