Taking its title from graffiti on a now landmark boulder in Newbury, New Hampshire, the book observes, in exhilarating language, that despite the failings and inscrutability of human nature, the possibility for transcendence abounds. From love to war, from history to pop culture, from the mundane to the famous, from the ineffable workings of society to the plaintive yearnings of the individual soul, poem after poem, Ayers delivers the craft of a mature poet.

What moves me most about Cinders of My Better Angels is how it illuminates our ordinary lives, how it depicts that illness makes us not less ourselves, but more so. In this incisive collection, direct, smart, darkly humorous poetry mines the gems of our fragile mortality with courageous, resolute spirit. Through Michael Magee's superb mastery of craft, the speaker of the poems and the readers become as one, all of us united under the same moon's watchful eye, afflicted yet determined, ailing yet healing, "hoping for rescue to come along / in the shape of a period." -Lana Hechtman Ayers,...

In the lava flows of Vesuvius and on the slopes of the volcanic range of Oregon, Chuck Carlise maps out the history of personal loss in such evocative detail and with such tender regard for the fragility of the present, that we, too, are caught unaware and overwhelmed by the 'nervous erasure' of grief. What does one unearth from such a Pompeii? Objects of beauty, shards of hope. Obsidian. Paintings on the brothel walls. A bouquet of lace. Reminders of the way in which memory endures. 'An unbroken field of blue.' -D. A. Powell, Kingsley Tuft Award Winner for Chronic: Poems

Victor David Sandiego's The strange and beautiful life of Daniel Raskovich, an imagined biography of an odd everyman character, is darkly funny and strangely poignant. Sandiego offers a frank take on contemporary society with verse that is clean, clear and direct, and tantalizing enough to keep us wanting more. Episode after bizarre episode leaves the reader feeling off-balance, hopping on one leg (the good one) like Daniel, but perhaps this is the precise vantage one needs to view our lives more candidly. The starkly lovely, sometimes mysterious, graphical images throughout from photographer...

In this moving collection, a childhood darkened by a harshly critical family follows the poet into his adult world, persisting like ..".winter hanging on/ into spring," its "small hail" stinging every surface. Characterized by a wry wisdom, these haunted, evocative poems collapse the distance between past and present. With a stark, transcending grace, Joseph Green chronicles "Ordinary lives./ Ambitions spilling. Plans failing./ Dreams seeping out through the cracks." Paulann Petersen, Oregon Poet Laureate

The poems in Where Good Swimmers Drown are love poems. But love poems that defy the divisions between emotion and intellect, private and public, life and art, writer and reader. To read Elbe's poems is to discover not only what it means to be in love, but what it means to be alive. Jesse Lee Kercheval, author of Cinema Muto and The Dog Angel

And Now This persuades me that we inhale the whole sensuous journey of growing up until the right words come to release it. These poems are a journey with roots in a hollow on Beautys Run Road that needs time and a poet's eye to discover its lessons. They worry that space between past and present, that "fine line between sky and ground," where it is so "easy... to get lost," until they find the "golden light" of "drawing the best out of everything memory] touches" and "everything it can't touch." These poems offer a painful journey, a man's journey, yet feelings, raw and true, defy gender....

Living on Orcas Island, Jill McCabe Johnson is a close neighbor to the sea. In her briny poems, she takes us even closer--letting us read the sea's diary. From sea ground to surface, we see the intimate, inside story. Careful observation, precise research, musical phrasing, and active imagining surge through these poems. Ninety-five percent of earth's oceans remain unexplored. What better metaphor for the vast mysteries of our existence--the constant change, the contamination, the resurgence, the essence of life and death. In these elegant poems, forces huge as magma shove up and forces...

In Lean House, Marci Ameluxen painstakingly reconstructs the shattered picture of a childhood pervaded by a mother's mental illness. Each poem a shard, fragmentary as shards are-voice and content meld creating a form that is all Ameluxen's own. These lyric poems are woven through with a subtle basting of narrative. Inquiring and without an ounce of self pity, Ameluxen's poems enact the ancient precept of living an examined life. And something more: the mix of anguish, love, and compassion one so near and so dear can provoke in any of us. -- Lorraine Healy, author of The Habit of Buenos Aires

"Matt Gano, whose swagger and soul and verbal dexterity have knocked out spoken-word audiences for years, brings his staggering inventiveness to the page-where he also, and absolutely, belongs. Here are irresistible scenes out of the sagebrush and empty lots of a charmed and timeless boyhood; love from all sides-wild-horse young, and 94 years old; and the moon: brilliant, unexpected, new, 'with ... lemon-meringue peaks/ and eating-contest complexion.' These are beautifully-crafted poems, alive with startling transitions, humor, and the wisdom that lets 'the rhythm in the ride be what I...