"Kathy Fagan's long awaited second collection keeps revealing new strengths, new powers. Its words are of unsparing rigor; its intelligence and vision continually spring forward in changed ways. These are poems both revealing and resistant: deeply felt, deeply communicative, yet avoiding any easy lyricism. Again and again the reader pauses, astonished by some fresh turn of language, of insight, of terrain. "Moving & ST Rage" offers extraordinary pleasures, clarities, and depth."

In this stunning fourth collection, Kathy Fagan expands her ongoing engagement of voice and persona across the borders of both traditional and experimental poetic lines. A book of monologues, portraits, and arias, Lip directs our attention to the sometimes literal ropes and pulleys of the human stage, those operating just out of sight and earshot: the understructure and the undervoice. Fagan's speakers--historical, anonymous, and often subversively female--hold forth, hold back, enfold and unleash in forms as multiply textured as their experience. Always, hovering at the mouth of the vessel,...

"Kathy Fagan's "The Charm" works the true spells of childhood, the superstitions of romance, the bewitching alchemies of words themselves and casts us sun-struck in our lives - doomed, yes, but 'dovewinged.' Fact, speculation, nostalgia, and mystery are wielded with equal power and stunning craft. Fagan is writing some of the wisest and alluring poems of our day." (Beckian Fritz Goldberg). "There is something both very old and very new - archaic and postmodern - in Kathy Fagan's wise-cracking charms to assuage rage and despair, to ward off misfortune and heartbreak. "The Charm" dissolves the...

Meditative and richly written, this collection of poems by Kathy Fagan takes the sycamore as its inspirationand delivers precise, luminous insights on lost love, nature, and the process of recovery.
It is the season of separation & falling / Away, Fagan writes. And solike the abundance of summer diminishing to winter, and like the bark of the sycamore, which sheds to allow the tree s expansionthe speaker of these poems documents a painful loss and tenuous rebirth, which take shape against a forested landscape. Black walnuts fall where no one can eat or smell them. Cottonwood sends out...