“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

“There are poems which carry us clean away, transporting us into worlds as specific as the pink purse the author of Visible Heavens helps a little boy buy for his teacher, Miss Stone. Melancholy and loss, the missing of a gone mother, passion and solitude—stirringly well mixed in one potent brew of a book. Readers will feel at home here, but they’ll also feel ignited with new presences, keenly visible and invisible perceptions—‘It is a gift, this light we carry in our lungs.…’ Cheers to Joanna Solfrian for a fine first book, the stunning deep breath of her voice.” —Naomi Shihab Nye, judge

“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

Judy Schaefer has compiled this anthology of contemporary nurse-poets’ work, which is accompanied by their commentaries about their poetry, their work, and their lives. She has gathered contributions from some of the best-known nurse-poets as well as from those who deserve to be. The Poetry of Nursing will add significantly to the ever-growing body of literature that connects medicine, nursing, and the humanities.

“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

This collection of personal and autobiographical poems is written by Helga Sandburg, daughter of the poet, Carl Sandburg. It contains a quartet of poems written after the death of her husband, as well as work inspired by the themes of motherhood, music, nature, and travel.

“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

“The voice [in Anele Rubin’s poems] is so new, and yet the movement is so artful, subtle, and modest—there are never any theatrics in these poems. They never yowl, Pay attention to me! . . . Rubin is on the same wave-length with Tomas Tranströmer and Yehuda Amichai. . . . The emotional range of her poems, like theirs, is enormous, as is the range of locales, many of which I know well, and yet in Trying to Speak, they appear with a clarity that had eluded me.”— Philip Levine, Judge

“I like Victoria Redel’s poems because of their braveness and their lucidity….There is no flight here to incoherence; the poems speak plainly and, in some cases, beautifully. The music is lovely and the tone, distinctive….” —Gerald Stern