“Imagine a love of small towns ringed by mountains, a shrewd ear for lonely folks’ dialogue, and a music that seems to pour out of your own life as you read these poems. Likely is a book brimming with surprises and beauty; it left me breathless.” —Alicia Suskin Ostriker

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.

The Next of Us Is About to Be Born is an anthology of fifty-five poets published in the Wick Poetry Series celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University. Designed to be an eclectic grouping, the anthology illustrates the exciting new directions poets have been taking from the early 1990s to the present, in keeping with the Wick Poetry Center’s mission of encouraging new voices.

More than 300 poets from around the nation gathered at Kent State University in May 1990 to remember the four students slain and nine others wounded by the Ohio National Guard on May 4, 1970, and the two students shot 10 days later at Jackson State College in Mississippi. A Gathering of Poets presents 147 of their poems, some written especially for the commemoration and published here for the first time, and others selected because of their historical resonance.

“Rare in any age is work which incorporates a passion for experience, a commitment to truth, an ability to plumb the irrational, and a fluency in poetic language and music which can work through all these tangled thickets, but Eve Alexandra does just that. . . . This is true poetry; it immediately takes its place as a participant in the vast historical voice which composes poetry, a voice which contains ten-thousand tones, but which takes nothing unto itself which doesn’t resonate, as do the poems of The Drowned Girl, with authenticity and fervor.”—C. K. Williams, Judge