“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

Rooms and Fields is history not simply documented and explored but also deeply felt. A poetic inquiry, its concerns are uniquely and fundamentally intimate. Compassion drives this collection of spare and gracious poems.

“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

Kate Northrop’s Back Through Interruption is a deeply moving and thought-provoking collection of poetry. It takes the reader through a world that is at once beautiful and tragic, sacrosanct and profane.

“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

This collection represents an engagement with American history, technology, and cultures. Murphy’s poetry ranges from fairly straightforward narrations of events to experimental pieces using a variety of American-speaking subjects and several angles of vision on cultural creations—Elvis Presley, Holly Golightly, and Elmore James, to name just a few. Formal choices include the interlocking movements of the sestina and the rondau, the ebb and flow of loose blank verse, and the syncopated variety of free verse.

“What continues to affect me in Robert Miltner’s Against the Simple is the silence that haunts the edges of experience and meaning. Like the lonely streetscapes of Giorgia De Chirico, Miltner’s poems, often cast in brief sentences surrounded by an eerie quiet, haunt us with the unseen and the unheard which seem to lurk just around the corners of language and consciousness. Often his images ‘tease us out of thought.’ In poems like ‘Eating Alone’ the uncanny strangeness is almost hallucinatory. ‘How true is the algebra of emptiness?’ House Noises at Night asks. These dreamingly attentive, watching and listening poems are kind of answer.” –Richard Hague

“Edward Micus won’t write the kind of poem whose language leads only to charming confusions, whose music is machine-pressed, a tin ornament. His poems instead speak directly, and their quiet, searing imagery burns down the fence between visible and invisible world. That music you hear—it’s the rhythm of affection, for places, lovers, friends. It’s the rhythm of the blood ‘taking in what it can, making its laps, / leading us on.’” —Richard Robbins