By Nathalie Anderson

Crawlers is the co-winner of the 2005 Robert McGovern Publication Prize.

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• Listed as a Best Book for Fall 2006 by The Montserrat Review Book Review Editor Grace Cavalieri

The poems in Nathalie Anderson's Crawlers explore family, in its traditional sense and as a metaphor for the relationships of the world at large, mining dark and complicated truths. Anderson's imagery is densely beautiful, disarmingly rich. Hers is an expansive and generous poetry - desperately moving, meticulously crafted.

- Denise Duhamel

"Don't write about this," says a character in Crawlers - and Nathalie Anderson answers with a devastating poem... Crawlers is like a brocade tapestry: Move in to see the beautiful precision stitchery, stand back to perceive the splendid overall design.  All darkness and light, nerviness and yearning, wit and skill, Anderson's macro and micro are matters of both moral integrity and linguistic dazzle; the emotional charge that emanates from these terrific poems comes out of a sophisticated melding of the two.  This is a book of big stories and subtle music.

- Daisy Fried

Nathalie Anderson's subjects range from the small specific pests of our skins - mosquito, thunderfly, gnat - to such abstractions as her lyric meditation on the power of what we don't see even when we believe we're looking.  There's gore and there's sublimity; there's plenitude heaped upon plenitude.  Her lines display the precise attentions of darning, while the scale can be multigenerational, mythological.  Her language is sensuous, scientific, and intimate, impasto with etymological love.  Finally I can't describe this book, but you can enter it on your own, get lost inside its riches, and return with admiring eyes - having discovered, as Anderson says "what words - her words - might do."

- Albert Goldbarth

Nathalie Anderson's poems combine great strength with great delicacy.  They rise from courage and candor, and they attain - reverberant, many layered, richly musical - a beauty that both contains and transcends their accounts of pain and kinship, wonder and sorrow, isolation and mystery.  I admire this powerful book tremendously.

- David Young

About the Author

Nathalie Anderson, co-winner of The 2005 Robert McGovern Publications Prize, is also the winner of the 1998 Washington Prize from The Word Words for her first book, Following Fred Astair.  She published a chapbook, My Hand, My Only Map, in 1978 with House of Keys Press; her poems have appeared in APR's Philly Edition, Cimmaron Review, Natural Bridge, Paris Review, Prairie Schooner, Southern Poetry Review, and other journals. She has authored libretti for the operas The Black Swan and Sukey in the Dark.  A 1993 Pew Fellow, she serves currently as Poet in Residence at the Rosenbach Museum and Library, and she teaches at Swarthmore College, where she is a Professor in the Department of English Literature and directs the Program in Creative Writing.