Although C. S. Lewis is best known for his prose and for his clear, lucid literary criticism, Christian apologetics, and imaginative Ransom and Narnia stories, he considered himself a poet for the first two and a half decades of his life. Owen Barfield recalls that anyone who met Lewis as a young man in the early 1920s at Oxford University quickly learned he was one “whose ruling passion was to become a great poet. At that time if you thought of Lewis you automatically thought of poetry.”

“These nineteen supple poems have both a strong sense of unity and a wide spectrum of forms, themes, and moods. Virtuosic writing combines with jagged feeling, and the end result is engaging, dramatic, and unpredictable.”—Henri Cole

“These poems have a strong voice and a bold reach: they turn outwards, finding big subjects and solid narratives. They seek to make a world: and then they persuade the reader to live in it.”—Eavan Boland

“When the wire man in love with the boiled wool woman imagines himself making love with her under the emerald tree and then making her a mouth, is he desiring to make for her a mouth, or to make of her a mouth? Such questions charge Karen Schubert’s off-kilter worlds with a force less like gravity than like Brownian movement: the poems in I Left My Wings on a Chair don’t orbit, they careen.”—H. L. Hix

“Karen Schubert’s latest collection, I Left My Wings on a Chair, reminds me why I love prose poetry. These are beautiful prose poems; each one is a gem; each one is sublime, witty, and surprising. It’s as if she has taken the world that we see and experience every day and given it back again, refreshed, alive, and shimmering. Reading her poems reminds me of reading William Stafford and Naomi Shihab Nye, poets who let you see the mystical and the absurd in the everyday, who make you feel a little better about being alive.” —Nin Andrews

“This book is a document of a particular world, real, wrenched from the poet’s life, as if written with a gun to his head or a spike through his heart. Reading it is like opening a damp newspaper wrapped around a big fish just caught, fins glistening, scales shining, one rhymed eye open and looking right at you, daring you to eat the whole thing.”—Dorianne Laux, author of The Book of Men

Daniel Carter’s Here Both Sweeter is a book in which you “have a seedling in each pocket,” a “body bodies,” and words are something you “carve out” so as to make a home. The poems are stories, are seeds, are secret messages cast and sent across the natural world to a reader, where they blossom in the imagination. The plot is “scatter-wild,” the lyrics “all willful and fallow.” Carter’s language serves as a garden, rich and strange, full of acorns and ink and ash, and in it the green world (of nature, of the heart and body, of words and ideas) is overturned, recycled, and remade.

Spanning oceans and continents, language and the imagination, the unfathomable distances between people and their desires, Allison Davis’s Poppy Seeds creates an “immaculate atlas.” Here language is “broken. . . against the margin of the sea,” and a word is a thing that can be “wash[ed] away.” Here the body is both a lesson and a place with an edge you can drive to. The book “longs[s] for as long as Ohio rivers.” Tangled between worlds and languages both old and new, our deepest emotions search for their roots, hoping to find a place to call home.

“Traveling from her pastoral America to Neruda’s Chile and the Ireland of St. Kevin, Elizabeth Breese sings the lonely-wild lyric of ditch flowers and raw honey, tornados and radios, broken birds and sailors lost at sea. Her ars poetica: ‘little bee hand in pocket editions, the rough- / cut paper combs, dancing for the things it loves.’” —Harryette Mullen

“Jody Rambo’s first book of poetry, Tethering World, is lyrical, tactile, and transcendent—in a word, enthralling. The very texture embodies a personal way of seeing and saying, as does the extraordinary range of circumstances. There is a beguiling strangeness to the writing, and philosophical smarts to boot. ‘I am weatherly,’ says the speaker in Tethering World, and she truly is, singularly so. This book is poetry top to bottom.” —Marvin Bell

“These poems are like yen the color and the size of dollars.  They are American poems, they are English, but they almost seem like versions of the Japanese.  The music is lovely and the form is graceful.  They are a delight to read.”—Gerald Stern

Those who teach the literature of medicine have questioned why there is a lack of rich materials that connects nursing and the humanities. Author and poet Jeanne Bryner has gathered biographical sketches of remarkable nurses, each accompanied by poetry and photographs, and has created the multigenre presentation that is the compassionate and complex Tenderly Lift Me. This is the first book in the Literature and Medicine Series that concentrates on nurses’ voices and their experiences with providing health care. It enhances and extends perspectives on how health care is understood and delivered by recognizing nurses as the primary care givers.