Poetry

Adirondack by Roger Mitchell [Roger] Mitchell gives us a history of the Adirondacks, with the Indian languages, travelers' accounts, songs and dances, diaries, museum artifacts, and the poet's own deeply rooted personal experience. It is a book that scholars will respect, poets will admire, and general readers who care about our wild history will cherish.—Marion K. Stocking, Beloit Poetry Journal

Airs & Voices by Paula Bonnell Winner of the John Ciardi Prize for Poetry, selected by Mark Jarman This is an enchanting book.—Richard Wilbur Paula Bonnell has a magic touch.—X. J. Kennedy

The Almanac for Desire by Gary Fincke It’s almost impossible to find the one significant thing to say about Gary Fincke. This poet does so many things right, and these poems discover so many good places, that any review of the book will smack of reductionism.—The Kansas City Star

At the Dead Center of Day by Walter Bargen At the Dead Center of Day continues Walter Bargen's lifelong and intrepid journey into the dark heart of the 20th-century experience. Though the horrors of that journey accorded their place--from the Kristallnacht to the L.A. riots, from a flashback of the Western Front to bombers over Dresden--what sets this collection apart is its steadfast refusal to acquiesce, to give up that act of sympathy and compassion by which we will, if indeed we will, outlive this difficult century. —Sherod Santos

Before the Light by Ken Lauter Ken Lauter explores a dark world in three technically brilliant sequences: a "snuff" film, the murder of an adult with mental disabilities by his troubled father, and the making of the atomic bomb as perceived by the uninformed wives of secretive scientists.

Beyond the Reach by Deborah Cummins In her exhilarating debut collection Deborah Cummins captures "this luminosity, this voracious charity" that suffuses her keenly observed and richly imagined universe. With equal and abiding affection for the human and natural worlds, these poems confront regret, loss, and difficult revision, with blessing, grace, mercy, praise, and the promise of redemption.—Ronald Wallace

Black Tupelo Country by Doug Ramspeck Ultimately, this shimmering collection of poems gives wings to the spirit, teaching it not only to rise, but to stay centered and stand still in order to hear the individual cry in the midst of the din.—Vivian Shipley

Blue Beat Syncopation by Stanley E. Banks Along with his mentor Langston Hughes, [Stan] Banks is one of the few poets who can claim a true fusion of the spoken word with the blues-music form.—John Mark Eberhart, The Kansas City Star

Blue Spruce and Year of the Haiku by Irving C. Hall [Irving] Hall's terse and vivid poems provide insight into general confusion and do it in a way that is enduring. His wit answers the challenge of mortality. These are poems of a brave enthusiasm, a mature voice that has refused to atrophy...an astute student of nature. —John Mort, Forum

The Book of the Rotten Daughter by Alice Friman "These are astonishing poems which fearlessly jump into hell and out again, that resent or forgive, poems which wryly, exactly, and so richly honor the world of the living."—Marianne Boruch

Circe, After Hours by Marilyn Kallet Marilyn Kallet's Circe, After Hours shines with a high-intensity light into the underworld of ordinary lives, creating bridges between the North and the South, America and Europe, as well as a marriage between the brain's left and right hemispheres--reason and passion. In this marvelous collection, the process of art illuminates life's path. —Yusef Komunyakaa

Cleaning a Rainbow by Gary Gildner [Gildner] reminds me of Randall Jarrell’s praise for a language that even cats and dogs can read, the hardest thing in the world to write well. Gildner is as good as a clear night for seeing things.—Dave Smith

A Concise Biography of Original Sin by John Samuel Tieman Honor and gratitude to John Tieman, our guide through Inferno, from Ypres to Vietnam and beyond. Love mitigates hell's fury. The last page of A Concise Biography offers the modest refreshment of love, "in this dream." And we are grateful. Even so chancy and endangered, life prevails. Paradiso!—Daniel Berrigan

Counting Back by Sylvia Griffith Wheeler The poems in this book represent an important exhumation of regional oral history. The historical period they describe is full of violence and pain, involving the clash of alien cultures in a landscape which, despite its size and sweep, was still not big enough to tolerate the peculiarities of each.—Conger Beasley Jr.

Dancing Alone by Sylvia Griffith Wheeler [Sylvia Griffith] Wheeler comes by her knowledge of the Midwest and the prairie from a lifetime of experience, and her poetry reflects a very spare approach to describing and conveying what she has seen and heard. Wheeler provokes. She is neither typical nor predictable. —Laurel Speer, Remark

Dark Fire by Bruce Cutler A lively, imaginative and finely crafted tale of modern life. Such poetry can scintillate.—Judson Jerome, Writers Digest

The Darmstadt Orchids by Stuart Friebert Here language seems to be an emotional minefield, where the path not traveled, the words left unspoken, are as important as what is revealed. Moments, powerful and subtle at once, abound in this collection.—Joel Brouwer, Harvard Review

Days Like This Are Necessary by Walter Bargen His voice is not the rarified voice of the muse, nor is it the elusive voice of the academic.  It is the voice of the neighbor or the friend from the office, and in his poems one senses always a highly intelligent mind finding in the everyday—in the fields or streets, in the news of the world—a source of meaning and truth.—Kevin Prufer

Deliberate and Accidental Acts by Thomas Zvi Wilson This poet writes without claiming anything that isn't true, plain, and as honest as it gets. And--wonder of wonders in these days of self-indulgent wandering--he knows what a line is, its wonderful limitations. Thomas Zvi Wilson at his best is something to treasure. —Miller Williams

The Dissolving Island by David Rigsbee The Dissolving Island, a wonderful collection of new poems by David Rigsbee, is the work of a raconteur of the spirit, a splendid storyteller with just enough jaunty language to make you feel you’d want to hear almost anything he had to say. He is elegiac and disciplined, rapturous and suspicious, but more than anything else these are the sort of poems that James Wright once called “the poetry of a grown man.” I’d add the poems of a remarkable, felicitous intelligence. —Dave Smith

Driving the Milford Blacktop by Robert Tremmel This collection portrays unforgiving Midwestern images: bird hunters and waist deep snow, red dogs and all day winds. The poems speak about mysteries of time and loss, and of the enduring landscape.

The Dust Dancers by Jack Anderson Jack Anderson writes regularly for Dance Magazine, Ballet and The Dancing Times of London. Currently he is writing a history of ballet and modern dance. He teaches dance history at Lehman College and was appointed to Dance Advisory Panel of the National Endowment for the Arts.

Escape Artist by Terry Blackhawk Escape Artist always conveys the sense that limits and boundaries free us as they define us. It is a harvest of a book, mature work, and its voice carries the zesty suggestion of more poems to come. —Molly Peacock, 2002 Judge, John Ciardi Prize

Eye: Poems and Retina Prints by Elizabeth Goldring When artist and poet Elizabeth Goldring found a way to use technology for visual art, the images she captured on her damaged retinas became "frozen traces of seeing, the memory of words that move and flow into meaning." These exquisite prints are grounded on the image of her optic nerve, "individual as a thumbprint," to embody not only Goldring's remarkable vision but the very process of creation. As a poet, Elizabeth Goldring pushes through silence to speak. As a visual artist who is blind, she uses darkness to frame the world she allows, then compels us to see. Eye is a work of transformative and great, art.—Hilda Raz

Fall from Grace by Christopher Buckley He has an exquisite ear for language and a gutsy way of blending bravado with humility. Torrents of words hose down the reader, but no concept is overstated—it's all marvelously fresh.—Library Journal

Family of Mirrors by G. S. Sharat Chandra Cultural streams of India and England blend, with a startlingly American tinge to the waters. Here is one poet whose by-line always makes me sit up and pay attention.—X.J. Kennedy A flamboyant and sometimes surrealistic wit.—Biff Russ, Kansas City Star

The Feast by Walter Bargen ...This book is hugely ambitious, original, affecting, and at many points, extraordinarily powerful.—St. Louis Post-Dispatch I have trouble deciding which myth Bargen has more fun with: the mythical heroes or the myth of poetry and prose and where the line between them is drawn. The longer he dances on that line, the more the reader benefits.—Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics

Fence Line by Curtis Bauer Winner of the John Ciardi Prize for Poetry, Selected by Christopher Buckley These poems vivify the landscapes that remain with the one who leaves--and returns, changed.—Robin Becker Fence Line is a terrific book by a young poet with a unique voice and burgeoning powers.—Thomas Lux

Fields, Turfs, Pitches, Arenas by Richard Kostelanetz What I do know is that the book makes me more than a spectator. I drop into a language process, a game circumstance of a special kind.—Dan Jaffe I step back and try to see the heaven whole, the words (poems) reinformings (reinforcing) each other and us. They tell us how to read them and how to respond to language. The single poems combine wiht others into a galaxy of potentiality. The space between words and poems is space to find meaning and feeling in... —Richard Kostelanetz, excerpt from the introduction

Forever Is Easy by Lynne Burris Butler Butler has a wicked eye for the outrageous and uproarious. —Colette Inez When I read Lynne Butler's work I feel good about the state of lyric poetry in the land. With the publication of Forever is Easy, those who've known her work, a poem at a time, will be grateful. —Miller Williams A storytelling poet who will not look away, who sees the cottonmouth under the pier and the weeds in the garden. —Edward Hirsch

Fugues in the Plumbing by George Gurley Jr. Poems in this book previously appeared in such publications as Poetry Northwest, Seattle Review, Nimrod, Kansas Quarterly, and Cottonwood.

Geographies: Snapshots, Portraits, and Cameos by Myron Ernst This chapbook launched the Roy Fox Memorial Chapbook Series. Myron Ernst's poems have appeared in Chicago Review, Kansas Quarterly, Poetry East, Southern Humanities Review, and elsewhere. Ernst holds a bachelor's of arts degree from Brooklyn College of the City of New York and a master's degree in French Language and Literature from the University of Iowa. He and his wife are owners/directors of a Montessori preschool in Vestal, New York. Geographies is Ernst's first book.

Hanging Out with the Crows by David Allan Evans  Irresistible, down to earth amusing, bluff, insightful, unpretentious and extremely readable. Evans is a close observer of animals in their natural environment--and those include humans.—Laurel Speer, Remark There aren't too many poets we can count on to deliver, collection after collection. It's no surprise to find poems in this new book as strong and sure as those in his earlier. But there's something very new: a broader range and some real risk taking. I've read the poems--and taught them--for years, and I'm not about to stop.—Lucien Stryk Evans has published two poetry collections, including Real and False Alarms (BkMk Press), and one book of essays. After earning master's degrees at the University of Iowa and the University of Arkansas, he teaches college.

Hard Freeze by Philip Miller My fingertips are still tingling from Miller's chilly collection. But Miller tells us that with the clarity of vision in winter that we should be able to see at last our difficulties and move towards resolving them.—Brian Daldorph Given the poet's unwillingness to wax sentimental, Miller's achievement is all the more remarkable. His skill with subtle sound and lavish detail allow him to engage our interest and sympathy throughout this rewarding and troubling collection.—Small Press Review Miller has also published another book of poetry as well as three chapbooks. He directs the Kansas City's River Front Reading Series and has taught English at Kansas City, Kansas Community College since 1976.

Honeymoon by William Kloefkorn It has been said that Kloefkorn "speaks for the Midwest." His poems have appeared in Southeast, Dacotah Territory, Kansas Quarterly, and many other newspapers and periodicals. Kloefkorn has been the champion hog caller of Nebraska. He teaches at Nebraska Wesleyan University in Lincoln.

In the Knees of the Gods: Poems by Trish Reeves Compressed as these spare lyrics are, they open to an unmistakable amplitude: the life of feeling honored, observed, sung. "...luck could sing from every word on this page," Trish Reeves writes; these moving and genuine poems are the readers' good fortune.—Mark Doty

In the Middle Sylvia Griffith Wheeler (editor) This anthology not only takes readers into the landscape of the American Midwest, but also into the hearts and minds of talented women poets living there. It verifies how specific regional images and experiences can be transformed into universalities and never confuses tenderness with weakness. —Rane Arroyo, Poet News Wheeler has written four books of poetry, Dancing Alone, Counting Back: Voices of the Lakota and Pioneer Settlers, This Can't Go On Forever and City Limits. She has also co-edited an anthology, For Kids, By Kids, and she has taught at the University of South Dakota.

Inverted Fire Alice Friman Almost no one is good at both short and long poems, but Alice Friman is. Her poems 'Turnip' and 'Cherries' have sharp language, imagination and alert observation. Inverted Fire is good, a must.—Leo Connellan

Jerusalem As She Is by Shlomo Vinner Shlomo Vinner was born and raised in Jerusalem, where he now teaches mathematics and science education at the Hebrew University. He has lived in Canada and the U.S., and has taught at Concordia University in Montreal, the University of Missouri-St. Louis, the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, and Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey.

Journey Cake by Tam Lin Neville [Neville] draws from folk literature a particular love of the humble, the singular, the lonely, as if they speak more accurately of the soul. Her poems span time and culture, taking in ancient and modern China and pioneer America. But in whatever setting, her characters, and especially her women, quietly insist on their dignity and independence. The poems in Journey Cake are profoundly original in their way of being moral, mysterious and intimate all at once.—Betsy Sholl Gravity and Grace might be another title for this, Tam Lin Neville's first full-length collection of poems, as it has Simone Weil's fierce attention to the way the spirit moves and accrues. Journey Cake is wide awake, darkened by time and experience, and finally triumphant. I for one am grateful for the journey.—Tom Andrews Journey Cake is Tam Lin Neville's first full book of poetry. She is the recipient of a Master Artist Fellowship from the Indiana Arts Commission.

Kansas City Outloud II by Dan Jaffe Nearly a decade and a half ago, BkMk Press published the first Kansas City Outloud. Since that time, the Kansas City literary scene has changed considerably. A number of writers are gone from the city and from the land of the living. A number of potential talents have grown into artistic maturity. Kansas City Outloud II includes the work of poets who now live or work in the Kansas City metropolitan area. Despite the limitation and the decision to include only writers who have published a book or who have a publishable volume in hand, Kansas City Outloud II includes thirty-two poets, a remarkable number.—Dan Jaffe

Keeping the Lady at Bay by Irving C. Hall He regularly debunks society's view of how he should live his life.—Kansas City Star After nearly eight decades, Hall writes with enormous enthusiasm. Hall published his first book of poems, Blue Spruce & Year of the Haiku, with BkMk Press in 1991. His poems have appeared in such publications as New Letters, Forum and the Kansas City Star.

Kentucky Swami by Tim Skeen Tim Skeen's John Ciardi Prize-winning collection reveals a distanced compassion so keen it might draw blood from his readers. He retells our hard histories, men and women at work in dangerous and impossible circumstances--labor wars, poverty, early death, disease, and violence--to cry out to his beloved, "How can you want children/in spite of the ossuaries of this world?" Kentucky Swami answers the question by moving in close, the poems a vibrant celebration of our continuing lives. This book is marvelous!—Hilda Raz

Kisses in the Raw Night

Victoria Garton
64 pages, $8.95 cloth
ISBN 0-933532-69-5

Poems as decorative antique boxes within boxes: "The Music Box," "Pandora's Box," "The Story Box," and "The Souvenir Box" of foil and hearts, kept tucked away on some high shelf.

She perfects whimsy. These short poems are accessible, and each conveys an original twist on the classic subject of love. The poems, however eccentric, fit together like jigsaw pieces to create a clear, balanced picture of love's follies. --Kansas City Star

Garton's poetry have appeared in journals and literary magazines such as Kansas Quarterly, Southern Poetry Review and Prairie Schooner. She serves as a supervisor with the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.

Lake Erie Blue by Susan Grimm In Lake Erie Blue, Susan Grimm has created a vibrant and haunted city of desire lying along a great lake that ripples with mystery. She sings of the one place we know more and less about than any other: home. —David Citino

Last Lambs: Poems of Vietnam Bill Bauer Last Lambs was crafted to give voice to the inner war of the soldier in the field and the ghost "on the other side of the sky." These poems guide the reader through the climate of the times, going to Vietnam, being transformed by the war, and the lifelong search for reconciliation. Bauer avoids the verbiage of diatribe an makes the war real by paying close attention to detail, allowing the war's natural language and vivid imagery to evoke its own terrible legacy. Veterans have described his work as authentic and haunting, and it has been said that if Tim O'Brien wrote poetry it would sound something like this. Last Lambs gives insight into the moral ambivalence and personal frustration of the American soldier during the Vietnam era.

Lyrics and Laments (translations from the Hebrew and Yiddish)

Howard Schwartz
64 pages, $3.95 paper
ISBN 0-933532-03-2

Lyrics and Laments collects fifty translations of poems by contemporary Hebrew and Yiddish poets, as rendered into English by Howard Schwartz. Many of these translations, collected here for the first time, have been published in various magazines and newspapers in the United States and Israel, including American Poetry Review, Midstream, The Jerusalem Post, Jerusalem Quarterly and Webster Review.

Mapmaking by Megan Harlan A profound meditation on the permeability of past and present, nature and artifice, self and other, space and time, Mapmaking is a miracle of invention.   —Alice Fulton

Mbembe: Selected Poems by Mbembe Milton Smith Mbembe was--IS--one of our most nourishing poets. He used language deftly--with a lively, affectionate respect. We regret his departure. But his legacy will continue to warm literature. --Gwendolyn Brooks

Moving the Seasons

Charles Guenther
80 pages, $12.00 paper
ISBN 0-933532-98-9

...splendid translations...I am reading it with interest and delight and gratitude...and have much to learn from [Charles Guenther's] enviable skills and long devotions. --Howard Nemerov

I love French poetry and there's no better translator of it than [Charles Guenther]. So many masterpieces of the art...A book to reread again and again. --Charles Simic

Charles Guenther's poems and translations, or "reformations" as he prefers to call them, reveal considerable technical skills. They also show his great humility, his devotion to the reader and to other writers of merit as well. Above all, he is a man who weighs his words. --Dan Jaffe

Night Vision

Neal Bowers
64 pages, $9.25 cloth, ISBN 0-933532-87-3
$8.00 paper, ISBN 0-933532-94-6

Bowers is writing the poetry of a grown man, and he keeps his eyes open to what's out there. --Tar River Poetry

Sparkles with variety and invention, filled with poems that keep a fellow poet wistfully sighing. --R.S. Gwynn, Hudson Review

Redemptive--perhaps because of its cosmic vision. Extraordinarily fine. --Southern Humanities Review

Bowers lives in Ames, Iowa and is a professor of English at Iowa State University. He teaches modern poetry writing and edits Poet & Critic.

Other People's Lives

Catherine N. Parke
64 pages, $9.00 paper
ISBN 0-933532-97-0

Wit, forgiveness and amusement are still alive in contemporary poetry. Other People's Lives is a book written out of these sure and diverse responses to the world. And, yet, in the end, there are poems of the finest lyric uplift as well. --Garrett Hugo

Catherine Parke's poems are by turns agile and sardonic, meditative and lyrical, always engrossing. --Sandra M. Gilbert

Parke is the Director of Graduate Studies in English at the University of Missouri-Columbia, and her work has appeared in Webster Review, Poetry Canada Review and Women's Studies.

Playing the Word: Jazz Poems Dan Jaffe Dan Jaffe's celebration of jazz is so vivid and passionate I could hear the tunes and see the smoke. It was 3 a.m. and I had no thought of going home until the last note was played. This book is a great work of love. --James Tate

Plumbers Robert Stewart These poems are moving, experienced--in their own hard-bitten earthy way. Pretty elegant. The knowledge in these poems is hard-won, the craft impressive. --Phillip Lopate

The Portable Famine by Rane Arroyo Proudly Puerto Rican and gay, well-traveled in the U.S. and Europe, and devoted to the modernist projects begun by Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane, Arroyo (Home Movies of Narcissus, etc.) makes all those identities and commitments evident in his compact, intelligent and sometimes sexy seventh book. —Publishers Weekly

Prayer Against Famine and Other Irish Poems John Knoepfle In this moving book of poems, John Knoepfle transforms a search for his Irish roots into a meditation on human suffering and survival. The whole book is a prayer against famine and the gratuitous cruelty inflicted on the innocent, both the Irish of the last century and the Central Americans of today.—Kathleen Norris

Promises in the Dust Bill Bauer Bill Bauer is a poet of spooky power. His poems literally make your neck hairs rise, and his range is impressive: war, family, nature. The poems are brightly or darkly colored with a palette from disparate places. Whether he writes about the Caribbean or a chopper leaving 'Nam, Bauer's the real thing. --Jim McKinley, Editor-in-Chief, New Letters

Real & False Alarms

David Allan Evans
64 pages, $5.25 paper
ISBN 0-933532-45-8

Although he knows the horrors of rural life, he knows its beauties, too. Evans' most powerful work is based on his experiences at the Armor packing plant. Details are precise but it is Evans' insight that makes these poems special. --Ann Struthers, Des Moines Register

This book will be remembered with critical acclaim. It deserves the widest possible readership I can encourage. --James Cox, editor Midwest Book Review

Evans has published three poetry collections, including Hanging Out with the Crows (BkMk Press) and one book of essays. He earned master's degrees at the University of Iowa and the University of Arkansas, and he has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Bush Foundation.

The Record-Breaking Heat Wave

Jeff Friedman
 

Urban poetry, working-class poetry, strongly felt, carefully observed, cleanly written. --Donald Justice

The Resurrection Machine Steve Gehrke What I like most about the poems of Steve Gehrke is that while they're finished, they're not complete. There's always something left undone for me to do, so that when I've read one I feel like I've been inside of it with him. Making this possible takes both skill and what I want to call an amiability on the part of the poet--the willingness to invite a reader in, and the skill to leave room for that. It makes the reading a joy. --Miller Williams

Salvatore's Daughter

Maryfrances Wagner
64 pages, $10.00 paper
ISBN 1-886157-00-6

Wagner writes beautifully and lovingly from her Italian-American heritage in a voice that is sometimes melancholy but never bitter or self-pitying. Poems with insight and compassion, fresh straightforward language. --William Trowbridge

It's a real pleasure to read one poem after another about affection in its many dresses. --Gary Gildner

Wagner has published two other full-length poetry collections and one chapbook. A native to Kansas City, she has worked as a teacher and English department chair at Raytown High School for many years.

Secret Wounds (available soon) by Richard M. Berlin ...these smart and surprising poems aspire to nothing less than "the chance to change the world." —Peter E. Murphy

Seeing the Darkness Bruce Cutler ['Angelita' has] sweeping narrative power, gorgeous visual detail, and varied and surprising music, the range of whose modulations is most effective when the poem is read aloud. A waiting minefield of sentimentality, occasionally but triumphantly just skirted here and there, somehow adds to the exhilaration. --Amy Clampitt

Selected Poems of John Knoepfle

John Knoepfle
110 pages, 6.50 paper
ISBN 0-933532-53-9

"Among the finest work of our time." --Abraxas

"Clear, virile, and honest. Vivid with image, rich in sound fitted meticulously to rhythms. Recommended for all public and academic libraries." --Small Press

"Plays between historical fact and the keener religious and mystical experiences that underlie and give scope to his whole achievement." --Theodore Haddin, The Chariton Review

Knoepfle, a former recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant, has published other books including Poems for the Hours and Whetstone: A Book of Poems.

Sleepwalking Beneath the Stars

Howard Schwartz
64 pages, $9.50 cloth
ISBN 0-933532-82-2

The poems of Howard Schwartz captured me on first reading them and made me want to go back and read them over again and again. His is a wonderful new voice in the U.S.--Yehuda Amichai

I'm awed by the unity of vision and tone, by the incredible simplicity and resonance of the imagery. Each one of these poems contains a kernel of something uniquely seen and experienced. Or, put it this way: Not a proposition about a psychic equation, but the equation itself resolving in the proposition. --Charles Simic

Howard Schwartz was born in St. Louis in 1945. He is the author of two previous books of poems, Vessels and Gathering the Sparks, and of several books of fiction including The Captive Soul of the Messiah. Sleepwalking Beneath the Stars is his first book of poems in twelve years. He currently teaches at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.

Starting a Swan Dive

Patricia Cleary Miller
64 pages, $9.00 paper
ISBN 0-933532-91-1

Miller's poems toss and turn like lovers seeking ecstasy. She closes in on sensual detail pulling us into erotic mysteries that emerge like Fabergé eggs. --Gloria Vando Hickok

This spirited first collection proves Miller a truly gutsy lyricist well worth hearing. I like Miller lots better than many cooler and more cautious poets. --X. J. Kennedy, Harvard Review

Miller teaches creative writing and literature at Rockhurst University in Kansas City, Missouri. She edits The Rockhurst Review, and she has been a Bunting Fellow at Radcliffe College.

Stations of the Air John Ciardi Stations of the Air provides 33 poems left among the papers of John Ciardi at the time of his death in 1986, selected and arranged by Miller Williams. They offer us a last breath of genius from one of the great literary men of our time. They demonstrate the wit, skill, profundity, intensity and multiplicity of a great poet and supreme translator--a man for whom art was devotion without pretension, who believed in the life-size but who expected poets and readers to stretch their intellects and emotions. John Ciardi's work did not weaken, but continues to enrich the lives of alert readers who care about depth of engagement and subtlety of interpretation.

A Story to Tell

Michael Paul Novak
72 pages, $9.50 cloth
ISBN 0-933532-75-x

[This book] brings a reader as close to the moment of experience as possible and does it with uncomplicated, graceful language and palpable feeling. You can revel in the absence of hyperventilation and wonder why more poets don't write like this. --Kansas City Star

Novak has taught at St. Mary's College in Leavenworth, Kansas since 1963. He has won awards from the Kansas City Star and Kansas Quarterly, and he is the author of The Leavenworth Poems and Sailing By the Whirlpool.

Streetfighting by Daniel Donaghy Streetfighting is a racy, sobering book about the vicissitudes of an urban childhood. Every poem has the ring of authenticity—the observed, the suffered, the mourned—but only because the language of every poem is wound tight as a fist.—James Longenbach

Studies on Zone Alice Glarden Brand Imagine landscapes as varied as the pace. From Australia to Hai Chen to Dubuque. From Aboriginals to women asking for a moment's attention, Alice Brand skips deliciously from an easy pace to a gallop. Imagine a sense of voice until it said of her poems as it's said of the Aboriginals: "They claim sacred sites that planes cannot fly over." -- Diane Glancy

Time Winds Alfred Kisubi Alfred Kisubi's narrative and elegiac poems show admirable compassion and adroit statement-making explicitness which I respect. Clearly his poetry is in the tradition of African prophecy and proclamation, one that includes distinguished voices such as those of Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Dennis Brutus and Okot P'Bitek. -- Andrew Salkey

Tongue of War: From Pearl Harbor to Nagasaki by Tony Barnstone "Tony Barnstone has revealed humankind’s capacity both for evil and for redemption with a power that few writers have ever achieved."      —Robert Olen Butler

Wayne's College of Beauty David Swanger "Wayne's College of Beauty evokes neighborhoods and well-traveled paths. I was much impressed by the way music and metaphor fueled the narrative thread....These poems are hard-edged and beautiful, an exciting collection."  -- Colleen J. McElroy

Wild Bouquet Harry Martinson [Nobel Prize-winning poet Harry Martinson] writes with profound empathy...in poem after poem Martinson invests his trees, brooks, his butterflies, cabbages and everything else in nature with its own peculiar sentient being. As for the translations into English, only the highest praise is due William Jay Smith and Leif Sjöberg. -- David Ignatow

Without Warning

Elizabeth Goldring
64 pages, $10.00 paper
ISBN 1-884235-13-1

Her vision illuminates intimate moments. --Paula Dawson

Goldring discovered the world in a ring of gold. She made suffering and success meaningful. --Nam June Paik

Although nearly blind, Goldring writes with the wild vision of an unconventional visual artist for whom language is corporeal. She is a research fellow and exhibits and projects director at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT. Goldring lives with her husband on a farm in Groton, Massachusetts. Without Warning was co-published with Helicon Nine Editions.

Wolf Howl Francis Blessington Francis Blessington uses words as though they matter supremely. Even his longest poems are terse. Challenging, fresh, compressed--a blend of high intelligence and emotional power--those terms come close, but don't quite capture a sense of him. Wolf Howl is a book like nobody else's. It has to be read. The reader will discover rich rewards. --X.J. Kennedy

The Woman in the Next Booth Jo McDougall Jo McDougall's poems seem so clean and clear at first reading I want to hold them up to a window to let them catch light. Then quickly they take on flesh tones and then marvelous signs of aging begin to show between the lines. The cleanness and the clarity are still there in all the funk and smell of humanity. I ask myself how this can be, decide that it's some kind of magic, put the question out of my mind, and read for the joy. --Miller Williams

The Word for Everything Roger Mitchell It's this unsentimental goodness in the work that most moves me. And how each poem turns and turns again, making its way by slow surprise. --Marianne Boruch Many poets write about memory, but few manage to track the actual motions of the mind as it roams across the past. In The Word for Everything, Roger Mitchell delineates that fine line between the thing remembered and the mechanics of remembering. The poems are poignant and intimate, but they're also wonderfully brainy. Their self-scrutiny keeps them tough and lean. --Chase Twichell

 

Poetry Back List

New and Selected Poems

Donald Drummond
84 pages, $4.95 paper
ISBN 0-933532-00-8

Quintet

Robert Killoren et al.
88 pages, $4.95 paper
ISBN 0-933532-04-0

Starting from Ellis Island

Frank Higgins
64 pages, $3.25 paper
ISBN 0-933532-01-6

Stealing Home

Peter Simpson
72 pages, $5.25 paper
ISBN 0-933532-43-1

Three Legged Dog

James Ward
64 pages, $6.50 paper
ISBN 0-933532-67-9

To Veronica's New Lover

Marc Munroe Dion
64 pages, $7.95 cloth
ISBN 0-933532-60-1

Writing in Winter

Constance Scheerer
72 pages, $5.25 paper
ISBN 0-933532-54-7

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