A poetry collection about place, the environment, colonialism and its current path, and family. Atlas of Our Birth is a map of an ongoing journey beginning in Trinidad and Tobago and includes Kansas.

"Finding the Edge appeals with a wry, powerful combination of narrative and lyrical poems. The narratives are small novels, chiseled studies of human folly and vulnerability: You won't soon forget the reckless, highway-obsessed Wally or the hapless woman in "Copperhead." In his lyrical mode, Ortolani is beautifully expansive ("In the surrounding air, /the night spreads from my fingertips..."). Cinematic images abound to present a wondrous but never-sentimentalized world of nature. After reading Ortolani, you'll not look at coyotes, back roads, or your lover's face in the old, expected ways...

No-Fail Poetry Writing I call this no-fail poetry writing, as I developed this sense that the workshops I do lead are filled with people who want to write poetry, who want to share their emotions and experiences, but are also hesitant because they do not know if they can write a poem. My response is, "Go ahead and write whatever you want. Write what you feel is a poem." This is the success: that everyone has an idea of what a poem is. This is what I love, to see people writing a poem for the first time or the first since elementary school. This was going to be a large book project, one that I...

More than 30 Heartland poets-including two former Kansas Poet Laureates-speak out against bullying, a pervasive evil. These poems range from illustrating bullying, not only during childhood and adolescence, but illustrate bullying in the workplace, in culture, in politics, in facing the -isms (sexism, racism, ageism, able-ism, etc.), religion, marital status, military service status, animals, and, even in scientific labs for humanity's "greater good." And bullies can be diseases (such as cancer). And voices inside our heads may bully us, too. Some poems also reveal a bully's point-of-view.