Catalog
Striking Surface
By Jason Schneiderman
Jason Schneiderman is a sly, dextrous, and in many ways existential poet. Intellect and feeling meet head-on in his work; their collision elicits arresting moments of clarity, of understanding. These poems seem to believe without believing, betraying the depths (always scary) beneath their surface veneer. Sometimes Schneiderman stands naked, as in the breathtaking elegies to his mother. I feel this book has taught me something new about mortality and human need.
Appetite for the Divine
By Christine Gelineau
In this series of long poems Christine Gelineau brings us the poetry of awakening, perception, birth, and seasons as well as loss, tragedy, and despair and shows that the whole universe beats with one heart (‘the systole-diastole of the cosmos’) as language somehow pursues truth (‘In the absence/ of answers meaning/ may yet find space/ to emerge’) where all things are a tale in themselves. Of the human reaching for understanding she asks questions which only the cosmos can answer: ‘What satiation would Eve have imagined/ as her teeth cleaved the apple?//What were we made for/ if not this appetite for the divine?’”
Resonance
By Richard Jackson
It's the combination of soulfulness, intellectual rigor, and a courtly, almost Petrarchian ardor for the beloved that has always fueled Richard Jackson's poetry. They are also poems of dazzling associative vigor--funny, elegic, and political by turns. I wish that more of our poets possessed his big heart and breadth, and RESONANCE is his best collection yet.
Vengeful Hymns
By Marc J. Sheehan
Marc Sheehan’s poems are reflective, wry, and humble. They are also quietly stubborn and assertive. The humor in these poems hurts a little with their recognition of our own foibles and pure flat-out goofiness. Sheehan celebrates the good, ordinary, imperfect life full of improvisations, going through life on hunches and goodwill. His poems would break your heart if they weren’t so warm and funny, wistful and accepting.
Light Thickens
By Elizabeth Biller Chapman
"Elizabeth...writes with vigor and soul -- her luminous poems shine like beacons.”
Now and Then: New and Selected Poems
By Robert Phillips
"Robert Phillips is about the only living U.S. poet who never bores me."
Shimming the Glass House
By Helen Pruitt Wallace
Bronze Medal Winner in the 2008 Poetry Category of the Florida Book Awards Like Robert Frost's, these poems have a lover's quarrel with the world. Their words and music throw light over dark places, and find meanings and leanings in the smallest details. Helen Wallace's first book is a remarkably wise and moving collection.
Permanent Address
By Lorna Knowles Blake
Lorna Knowles Blake is a poet who writes with elegance, wit and formal invention. Her subjects are love, marriage, family, and the kinds of commitment needed to sustain them. Reading her work, one sees again and again the contingencies of domestic life transformed by those rituals that give them place and permanence. Permanent Address is a wise and joyful collection by a poet of impressive accomplishment.
Joyful Dark, The
By Michael Miller
Very promising – in fact full of achievement. Michael Miller is able to express his experiences, his feelings, his longings, very sensuously and accurately.
Underwater Lengths in a Single Breath
By Benjamin S. Grossberg
Grossberg writes poems so well-fashioned they appear to have been wholly conceived. (“Artifice is our general burden,” quoth Amerigo Vespucci.) But radical too: in their erotic reveries, and with knowing sadness, the poems here take up classical matters anew and afresh. What a fine book, distinguished in these times for its historical reach and lyrical substance.
Crawlers
By Nathalie Anderson
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.
Secret Room in Fall, A
By Maria Terrone
Whether confronting heavy matters close to home and family, taking in gritty facets of the urban landscape, or bringing to sympathetic light anonymous, mainly female workers in the shadows and giving each her moment of perfectly articulated presence, Maria Terrone's poems are quietly insistent, recuperative acts of imagination. At times spiced by a wry humor, at times opening to small toughes of rapture ("I rise daily, a miracle"), A Secret Room in Fall suggests a world that is one "dense, resplendent cargo," of which the poet takes exacting, loving stock.
Remorseless Loyalty
By Christine Gelineau
One of poetry's tasks is to encounter pain. Not to resolve it, not even to console it. But to encounter it with a language that will let it be known, and in this knowing some transformation, however small, may happen. The poems in Remorseless Loyalty bristle with such hard-won transformations.
Calling in the Bones
By Carol Barrett
Carol Barrett's narratives document the suffering and fecundity of an ensemble cast: a mapmaker, a sleep technician, a man who would eat soap are only a few of the actors celebrated by this poet for their small acts of bravery in an all-too-human world.
Housing, The
By A.V. Christie
In beautiful and mysterious poems, many-layered and intricate like the anatomical drawings of Vesalius, A.V. Christie creates the housing for a metaphysical realm pulled back from some far-off dream. But looking closely, we can see it's our familiar world, exquisitely delineated: the shelter of marriage, family, dwelling, not to forget the body, our first and primary housing.
Moment's Equation, The
By Vern Rutsala
This wonderful book of poetry, which was a 2005 National Book Award finalist, is filled with scintillating visions of life, home, work, and family expressed in accessible language through which the poet magnifies daily events into art. "The Moment's Equation" takes us through decades of America. There are evocative settings, memorable events; there are many roads to regard, many lives to consider. Each poem journeys to a destination. With a remarkable deftness and an unerring sense of direction, Vern Rutsala gets us there.
Gatherings
By Jerry Harp
How wonderful, after so many theme-driven books of poetry, to read a real collection, a book in which every poem casts its own shadow. Jerry Harp is a poet of astonishing range, and the obsessions of Gatherings emerge quietly in poems through wistful, unsettling images, in lines that are tautly metrical or spun far across the page, as if to see what they might gather.
Unauthorized Autobiography: New and Selected Poems
By Richard Jackson
In its range of control, in its rich, ruminating prosody, in its capacity to contain all that it imagines, and especially in its power to place the corruptions of the world against those of the heart, it represents a poetry of scale, in fine yet compelling excess, informed "indeed exalted" by intelligence, irony, vision.
Arson and Prophets
By Scott Withiam
In these poems a man, an ordinary citizen, stumbles and plows through the days but doesn't come up empty-handed - he finds the irresistible, that electric spark of living nerve that doesn't stop glowing, even when it is found - as it often is - at the very heart of doubt and confusion. If you are in search of it, read on.
Air Into Breath
By Kathryn Winograd
Kathryn Winograd's richly lyrical, beautifully descriptive first book of poems charts the passage of a woman caught in the very heart of life, participating in the rhythms of nature, eagerly holding onto what is passing and is past, desperately holding fast to what she most cherishes. Air into Breath is a splendid collection.
Mad Flights
By Robert Lunday
In Robert Lunday's sharply rhythmic poems, the otherness of other people haunts the poet. Others, especially others of the opposite gender, are mysteries, and mystery is always rich with its allures and sorrows in these superb poems. In the dangerous and confusing world where "Whatever last night's love was/burns off like haze," the poet pronounces this benediction: "Blessed is he or she who runs the fastest."
Separate Escapes
By Corrinne Clegg Hales
Corrinne Clegg Hales' poems are biography of the most luminous kind. As we read them, we're in the presence of events and their inexhaustible implications, described in terms somehow both wickedly accurate and surpassingly generous. Separate Escapes works through lives as flawed and ravaged as they come, transforming knowledge to forgiveness. It is, quite simply, a beautiful book.
Instructions for Walking on Water
By Jan Lee Ande
Jan Ande's well-crafted poems are like a fresh mountain stream that springs from ancient sources. They are animated by a deep reverence for the world, by a sense of mystic awe, by a feeling of transcendental plenitude. They put us in the presence of great mysteries.
Fool: Selected Poems
By Robert McGovern
Three words run through my mind repeatedly as I read Robert McGovern's Fool: Selected Poems - intelligence, sensitivity, compassion. This work withstands the tests of craft and life.
Weal
By Philip Brady
Brady offers a sojourner's panoramas and outstanding depth of field. The poems present themselves as majestic, audible, dangerous rivers with live banks... Weal, a word of contradictory geographies, ranging from common good to whiplash scar, rings here around a hundred years of world migrations. This is an unpredictable, demanding, strong book, each poem an exploration.
Demons in the Diner
By David Ray
David Ray's poetry has always been radiant even though personal tragedy has suffused it.
Little Apocalypse
By Wendy Battin
Wendy Battin's poems are the waking dreams of a physicist: elegant, pure, accurate as light. But hers is a human physics, in which the emotional dimension is as present as the intellectual. The language of Little Apocalypse is meditative and playful, while never abandoning the rigor of reason. Wendy Battin is a brilliant poet.
Scarecrow Poetry: The Muse in Post-Middle Age
By Stephen Haven and Robert McGovern, Editors
Anthology
