Centered on the experience of raising a special child and the cruelty we inflict on difference, this collection of poems will break and heal your heart.

"Mom's Canoe" is a chapbook of 24 poems rooted in the author's memories of growing up in the Allegheny Mountains in western Pennsylvania, an area of rich farmland and thickly wooded hills and valleys that was also the site of heavy coal mining and rail-roading activity in the last century. The eventual decline of those industries and the environmental and economic devastation left in their wake are important themes in this book, which also pays tribute to the enduring natural beauty of the region and to the strength, suffering, and joy of the people who have made their lives there.

In Rebecca Fousts splendid book-length sonnet sequence, Paradise Drive, we come upon a Pilgrim contemplating the deadly sins while hiding out in the bathrooms at some of Marin County, Californias swankiest parties. As the Pilgrim swaggers into an idiosyncratic, believable, frail spirituality, her unmediated, un-medicated new life emerges. The sonnets of this new life are jagged, fresh, and formed in only the way a stunningly skilled poet can craft them. Foust drives her Keatsian sensibility straight into the 21st century of terrorism and autism, divorce and yoga, soldiers and syringes, booze...