“His best work is characterized by thoughtfulness, strong descriptive skills flavored with vivid turns of phrase, and emotional complexities in both the poems themselves and the effects they evoke.” —Boston Book Review

“These ‘stone’ poems by Karen Craigo are reminiscent of W. S. Merwin’s deep image poems or Vasko Popa’s surrealist ‘pebble’ poems. But Craigo does Merwin and Popa one better. She manages to create and sustain a complex and shifting personal mythos without sacrificing the mystery and evocative force of the focusing image. Popa’s ‘pebbles’ chanted a mean, gutteral, one-syllable song, but Craigo’s ‘stones’ belt out whole operas. A brilliant debut.”—George Looney

Articulating the search for a cohesive American identity, Matthew Cooperman’s poetry attends to the slippery question of place: its history in personal and cultural memory and its tenuous constitution as family, nature, love, and community. Cooperman uses the metaphor of travel to invoke the necessary motion and distance required to look back at one’s past.

Sleepwalking with Mayakovsky is a collection of poems that explores the relationship between chaos and order. “Robert Brown extends a tradition that unites reasons and passion, form and wit, history and memory. These often wry and always thoughtful poems are less acts than dances of the mind, as elegant as they are intelligent.”—William Greenway

“Something spiritual, as well as actual, is broken in the world Joe Bonomo offers us, in this his first sustained collection. His response to what he is left with is to remake what he can in figures of comprehension and compassion. The size of his world is local and familiar, but that hardly prevents him from reaching into the silence or achieving, in finely-tuned language, his epiphanies. This is honest and lovely writing.”—Stanley Plumly

“Kat Snider Blackbird gives us all these in her intense and passionate poems. She is a woman—and Woman—in love, in lust, and deeply in life. In her work, women will see themselves on all levels of being and men will at last be allowed to penetrate the mysteries of the women they love.”—Grace Butcher

Nin Andrews draws upon her childhood experiences of being raised on a farm in Virginia and her haunting dreams of her father in this Southern-flavored collection of poems.