An experienced and highly respected poet, Ira Sadoff crafts hard-edged scenes, honed on the stuff of real life. From the unblinking honesty of My Mother's Funeral to the cultural worship of At the Movies, Sadoff carves out, with each remarkable line, an unforgettable sensuousness.

Ira Sadoff's new volume of poems opens with a quotation from Rilke: But because truly being here is so much; because everything here / apparently needs us, the fleeting world, which in some strange way / keeps calling us... The poetry collected here is a response to this call. Rooted firmly in the fleeting world, Sadoff's poems find epiphanies of meaning in unexpected and even unpleasant experiences and emotions. The poems in Barter delve deeply into the past, the personal past of regret, travel, love, divorce, and bereavement, as well as the global past of Beethoven, Vietnam, and the fall of...

"Despite the rapids these poems navigate, each poem has an internal cohesiveness that cannot have been easy to achieve."--Dana Wilde, Bangor Daily News

"The human voice is captured beautifully as one can almost hear the fist pounding the podium--or kitchen table--at the end of each line."--Gently Read Literature

"Nowhere else in American poetry do I come across a passion, a cunning, and a joy greater than his. And a deadly accuracy. I see him as one of the supreme poets of his generation."-Gerald Stern

The poems in True Faith are earthy, lyrical,...

Sadoff's subject, as Jon Anderson once remarked, is sadness . . . rendered with intelligence, accuracy, and poignancy.