“Alison Stine’s best poems here are confessional and meditative sequences, but are shadowed by the tradition of dramatic narrative; they propose types of redemptive performance….Their white spaces are crucial to this ironic self appraisal, in which a lost, outcast belated family is assembled by invocation.”—Robert Hill Long

“Tight and purposeful as a fable, The List of Dangers gives us sorrows and warnings from a world imbalanced by beasts and little beauties. The images are precise as a child’s playroom—keyholes, miniature candelabra, the ‘trebly notes’ of wrens and gypsies— but perilous in their tender transformations. Maggie Smith’s rich lyric gifts produce here a poetry of balancing composure in the face of peril and pretty chance.” —David Baker, author of Midwest Eclogue

“Inspired by the story of Secundus the Silent Philosopher and the twenty vital questions posed to him by Emperor Hadrian, J. Gabriel Scala’s Twenty Questions for Robbie Dunkle moves swiftly and deftly into the essence of human existence—memory. Imbued with that ancient consideration, Robbie Dunkle emerges as a chance metaphor for the poet’s own past, the dead past, which becomes our past, with all of its wonders and wastes, which only brilliant poetry can revive this powerfully.”—Larissa Szporluk

“Mary Ann Samyn’s Rooms by the Sea introduces us to an exciting new voice. These poems are haunting, delicate, and full of care and wonder at life’s exigencies. ‘If there is music here, it is deep-throated,’ one poem says. Reading this book, one responds, ‘Yes, the music is here, embodying the richness and anguish of being alive.’”—Tom Andrews

“F. Daniel Rzicznek’s Cloud Tablets presents to us prose poems as they’re meant to be—chock full of surprising images and compelling music. Where else would we find sheep in a library and a seraphim at a nightclub other than in a prose poem? Rzicznek presents these moments and others with the right mix of narrative and lyricism. There’s a gasp of surprise in each of these poems, exclamation points of existential joy waiting in the marginalia.”—Gary LaFemina

“If I didn’t know the poet personally, I’d think the name Catherine Pierce was a pseudonym, for these poems are not merely edgy, they are razor-sharp—they disembowel. What an extraordinary command of structure, persona, and humor this poet has! In one fell swoop, she has re-invented the ‘love’ poem and eschewed both pretentiousness and the anti-intellectual by being always smart and entertaining.”—Kathy Fagan

“Like Cole Porter, Sarah Perrier turns a world-weary and tender gaze toward the unruly carnival we call love. Perrier shrugs off the post-modern shrugs. In these elegant, wise-cracking, and subversive poems, the inherent estrangement, deception, and screwball comedy of romance is revealed and savored. With the smarts and prescience of Lear’s fool, with the mischief of both Ariel and Caliban, she gene-slices the comic into the tragic, the tragic into the comic, to make a new and radiantly original poetry.” –Eric Pankey

“Maureen Passmore’s poetry I can only liken to cut-and-polished jewels: structurally simple, innately priceless, sharp-edged, and brilliant. . . . With the jeweler’s touch, she brings out just enough edge, elegant and lean, to intrigue us before offering the next edge, then the next. What makes her poetry more than just admirable is the genuine vision behind it: she is determined to recreate emotional experience through a vehicle other than herself. . . . In a time of highly decorative and self-serving artistry, here comes a poet with the strength of the ground.” — Larissa Szporluk

“No star-struck lover or dark mistress inhabits these lively sonnets but a flesh-and-blood, poker-playing Texan with a cell phone, an agent, an anxious mother, and a load of her own worries as she tries to make it in the music business. From the Star Spangled Banner at a racetrack to the warm-up for B. B. King, Spotlit Girl is a nimble character study that captures both the craziness of a performer’s life and the time-stopping intimacy between a vocalist and her audience. The singer’s in the spotlight, and Kevin Oberlin has the focus and the dazzle to make her shine.”—Don Bogen

“Everywhere we have been since beginning/Is Mapped in the memory somewhere,’ writes Susan Neale at the outset of this ambitiously conceived and enormously satisfying collection of poems. Here is a poet who wants nothing less than to know the past. Her fields of study are the history of light and darkness, of language and other ways of saying, of reality and dream, and, especially, of women and men as they move toward one another and away in their seismic, often cataclysmic dancing, a continental rift and drift originating in a long-ago state of innocence and wholeness Neal calls ‘the heart’s Pangaea.’ In this debut collection sure to attract wide attention, Susan Neale gives us richly detailed maps leading to discoveries about where we human beings have been, where we are, and where in the world, together and apart, we’re bound.”—David Citino