Moving through the cycle of birth, growth, and death, the poems of Enid Shomer are informed by physical knowledge, transforming it into rare and often startling insight. This Close to the Earth celebrates the courage to live intensely in the body. Here are loves, lives, and losses, retold with the energy that bare emotion commands. Peopled by almost touchable characters - John James Audubon, for instance sketching his birds in a pre-dawn light, and the unnamed narrator of "Among the Cows", who learns to "breathe with the Holsteins / as a form of meditation" - these poems explore the natural...

-- The Pope Joan section, 1992 winner of the Eunice Tietjens Memorial Prize from Poetry Magazine

These poems give voice to the life of the first woman to fly faster than the speed of sound. While Jacqueline Cochran was alive, no man or woman in the world could match her records for speed, distance, and altitude flying. Founder and director of the Women's Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) during World War II, Cochran continued to fly competitively until she was sixty, owned and operated her own line of designer cosmetics for three decades, ran for Congress, and generally placed herself on the path of history. Having begun life as a foundling in the crushing poverty of a lumber company town...

Moving through us in waves of light and sound, the words and trappings of the material world brim here with spiritual force and resonate with the power of things poised on the brink of revelation.

The poems in distinguished poet Elton Glaseras sixth collection journey through the seasons, from spring to spring, a pilgrimage down to the South, over the Midwest of snow and roses, and across the Romance countries of Europe. If the poet often finds himself a[h]alfway between grief and longing,a that may be his natural condition, rooted in this world against the pull of the next, his faith in the apurple evidence of plums, the testimony of wild persimmona weathering the stormy preachers and the droughts of middle age. Within that tension, the range of tones is unlimited, sometimes in the...

This "mesmerizing new work of historical fiction" (The Miami Herald) imagines the deep friendship of Florence Nightingale and Gustave Flaubert as they travel up the Nile.

Before she became the nineteenth century's greatest heroine, before he had written a word of Madame Bovary, Florence Nightingale and Gustave Flaubert traveled down the Nile at the same time in 1850. But where history would have these two figures float right by each other, the award-winning writer Enid Shomer brings them together to ignite a passionate friendship that alters both their...