"I like Victoria Redel's poems because of their braveness and their lucidity....There is no flight here to incoherence; the poems speak plainly and, in some cases, beautifully. The music is lovely and the tone, distinctive...." --Gerald Stern

"Lisa Coffman is a major poet in the making. Imagine a voice that combines hear-of-American brooding like James Wright's with a shaded elegance like Elizabeth Bishop's. Imagine Whitman's spirit somewhere in the vicinity. Imagine a love of small towns ringed by mountains, a shrewd ear for lonely folks' dialogue, and a music that seems to pour out of your own life as you read these poems. Likely is a book brimming with surprises and beauty; some of the poems--'Rapture, ' 'The Products of Hog, ' 'The Graveyard'--left me breathless."--Alicia Suskin Ostriker, Judge

Winner of the 1996 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize "Many of the poems in Rosemary Willey's Intended Place are flawless meditations on possibility and denial. The voice in these poems is straightforward, and there isn't an emotional placebo behind the terse syntax and the believable imagery. "From the very first few pages, we realize that this voice embodies empathy and a to-the-point inquiry. Rosemary Willey cannot keep her mind off the real things of this world, touching life where it feels good and where it pains, always snapping the chanced wishbone, and we are more blessed and richer for...

Winner of the 1997 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize "The Apprentice of Fever is a brilliantly corporeal first book...rooted in the day-to-day life of a man implicated in the AIDS epidemic, living on the edge, crossing, transforming and transgressing boundaries, always, always paying an extreme and active attention, which is the apotheosis of compassion, which is an act of love..." "Tayson's voice is unmistakable: direct, witty, passionate and desperate, in poems with the crucial acid to etch themselves into the reader's consciousness." --from the Introduction by Marilyn Hacker, Judge

In Beyond the Velvet Curtain, Karen Kovacik illustrates Czeslaw Miloxz's dictum that "the purpose of poetry is to remind us how difficult it is to remain just one person." Peopled with such diverse characters as Richard Nixon, Nikita Khruschev, Kafka's father, Dorothea Lange, William Carlos Williams, Lawrence Welk, Robespierre, and a feisty Catholic saint, this original collection of poems takes us on an amusement-park ride through world history and art. Kovacik's poetry places us in the strange drama of cataclysmic events and ordinary life.

"Honoree Jeffers is an exciting and original new poet, and the Gospel of Barbecue is her aptly titled debut work. These poems are sweet and sassy, hot and biting, flavored in an exciting blend of precise language and sharp and surprising imagery that delights. They leave a taste in your mouth, these poems; they are true to themselves and to the world. They are gospel, indeed, and this young poet will be heard more and more spreading the true word. Good news " --Lucille Cliffton

Displaying a range of voices and subjects--from dramatic monologues in the voices of Judas Iscariot and John the Baptist to harrowing personal lyrics of family, time, memory, and loss--Creech's poems examine the difficulties of belief and the transcendent possibilities of common experience, pushing beyond mere surfaces to explore the "kingdom of desire."

Paper Cathedrals confronts the tensions between the here and hereafter, gravity and grace, and religious faith and an allegiance to the passing, sensual world.

Kate Northrop's Back Through Interruption is a deeply moving and thought-provoking collection of poetry. It takes the reader through a world that is at once beautiful and tragic, sacrosanct and profane.

"Kate Northrop's elegant, intelligent, wonderfully plotted first book, Back Through Interruption, has been born under the sign of the double helix and is governed by that shape. These are poems of being two: woman and man, daughter and mother, sister and sister. Like magnets they are held together by attraction or parted by force of opposition. In these poems, no...

"Rare in any age is work which incorporates a passion for experience, a commitment to truth, an ability to plumb the irrational, and a fluency in poetic language and music which can work through all these tangled thickets, but Eve Alexandra does just that. . . . This is true poetry; it immediately takes its place as a participant in the vast historical voice which composes poetry, a voice which contains ten-thousand tones, but which takes nothing unto itself which doesn't resonate, as do the poems of The Drowned Girl, with authenticity and fervor."--C. K. Williams, Judge...

Winner of the 2003 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize

"These poems are full of surprises: the gods talk; ancient authors talk; the dictionary talks; very memorably, the bridge over the Drina River, roughly between Bosnia and Serbia, speaks two haunting poems. The dead talk, wolves talk, a teacher talks, with a chorus. Sometimes I like to imagine this long poem being staged. What the music would be Who would do the sets What languages . . .
Lee Peterson's Rooms and Fields: Dramatic Monologues from the War in Bosnia doesn't have a single wasted breath; its sense of...