This probing book of poetry is structured around one man's quest for healing and salvation. From his high school years in Texas during the early 1960s through his college teaching career 30 years later, the male persona of these poems searches for his lost father, for forgiveness and faith, for love and family.Throughout the collection, seven poems trace events from Saint Paul's quest for healing, proving a complement to the struggles of the contemporary man. The miracle that is life is chronicled here in terse and moving poems.The Vietnam Vet Looks for His Sons at Summer Basketball...

"In a time when so many poets are out to unload the dead weight of their pasts on the reader, it is refreshing to read the work of Cathryn Essinger who realizes that before it can do anything else, poetry must give pleasure. Smart, sweetly crafted, and open-voiced, her poems are propelled not only by memory but by thought and wit. She is a poet after my own heart - and she has it." Billy Collins"'One cannot help loving a mathematician, ' Cathryn Essinger writes, and these poems shine with generous, tough love for the stubbornly individual people and things of this world. Both keen and gentle,...

Twilight Innings is packed with sometimes painful, sometimes funny, but always insightfully drawn experiences that come from everyday life. Fink s essays have a beginning, middle, and an end. They have characters. They are stories that take you into the corners of his personal world, and it s a trip worth making. Ken Hammond In these essays Fink puts himself in the middle of the diamond as in the middle of things American, and readers are grateful to be witnesses to the informed heart, the discriminate sympathy, the keen yet modest intelligence, the deftness of his prose strokes. Bruce Smith...

Revolving around the deaths of the poet s parents and first wife, The Clearing is a sustained meditation on the nature of love and its transformations. Perpetually dissatisfied with memory and what one poem calls the falsehoods about death we tell ourselves, White s poems turn on emotional openness and probing inquiry. How moving it is to find a book so haunted by tragedy and death that is, in addition, soberly life-affirming. A clearing is an empty space, but it is also a habit of mind, an act of clarification. Philip White knows pain s truths, the most awful of which is that the dead don t...

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...

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 THE BOOK
"Friday Night"
and we're not perched at some neon-lit Manhattan bar,
not dancing in the ballroom of the San Francisco Ritz
but mixing martinis in our Michigan kitchen,
a pot of...

The redeeming power of love, amid the causes and casualties of violence.

This twenty-first winner of the Walt McDonald First-Book Prize in Poetry unravels the landscapes of childhood migrations and passages across oceans and continents, seasons and languages, mapping the geographies of longing, loss, grief, and conflict--Provided by publisher.

Skin is the 11th winner of the Walt McDonald First-Book Poetry Prize, awarded by Texas Tech University Press and named in honor of a former TTUP poetry editor. Lindner, who teaches English at St. Joseph's University, seems well-deserving. She has a sharp eye for detail: daylight, rationed by Venetian slats, the white moth of a kiss / blown from a boy's plump lips, burnt / sienna moustache, milky way of red freckles - these are picked at random from just two pages. She also has a well-nigh flawless ear for lyrical phrases graced by the uneven rhythm extolled by the French symbolist Paul...

In her first volume of poetry, novelist Sarah Strong celebrates silence and what can be learned when we wait and listen. In this stillness, she shows us, we may hear answers to questions we have learned not to ask. Exploring how our subtlest gestures speak our most passionate concerns, she maps the intricacies of body the fingers of a hand, the work of breathing with the same dexterity she investigates what inspires a mother to demolish a kitchen wall or a lover to change genders. Strong also examines spiritual experience in Buddhist practice, in re-imagined biblical narratives, and in the...