“Many of the poems in Rosemary Willey’s Intended Place are flawless meditations on possibility and denial. The voice in these poems is straightforward, and there isn’t an emotional placebo behind the terse syntax and the believable imagery… From the very first few pages, we realize that this voice embodies empathy and a to-the-point inquiry. Rosemary Willey cannot keep her mind off the real things of this world, touching life where it feels good and where it pains, always snapping the chanced wishbone, and we are more blessed and richer for her daring talent.”—Yusef Komunyakaa, Judge

“Energy, dynamic energy emanates from Mary Weems’ careful, observing eyes into her language. These poems offer immediacy, intelligent response, and rich repartee with the difficult urban world of a gentle warrior.”—Diane Wakoski

Invoking the sacred and the profane, Juliana Gray Vice speaks to the reader with a powerful voice. The poetry of History in Bones catechizes the reader with the mundane and the extraordinary.

“Will Toedtman approaches all his subjects—from street football to Orpheus—with nothing less than full attention. His voice is distinctive, and it clearly has something to say. A steady gaze, subtle pacing, and an ear for the rhythms of both speech and tradition shape these thoughtful poems. In The Several World insight and craft come together in a seamless working whole.” –Don Bogen

“A clear, seemingly effortless voice and a special curiosity animate the world Liz Tilton gives us in Salt. And it is a world, ranging from domestic life—loose change, gardening, the intricacies of love—to manatees and the governor of Texas. Discoveries abound. Salt is smart, subtle, and essential.”—Don Bogen

Richard Tayson’s second book of poems, The World Underneath, concerns birth, motherhood, explorations of the feminine in a world scarred by war, environmental crisis, and violence. The book’s locus is a series of poems related to a home birth, an event that leads the poems’ speaker to question the place of the individual within the home, the world, and the wider universe. All things connect, as the speaker travels cross-country to the birth then back to where he lives in a multiracial relationship of two men committed to each another. The book’s widest aim is to unite the personal and the universal, the masculine and the feminine, the gay and the non-gay. As they explore the crucial dilemmas of our time, Tayson’s poems probe beneath ordinary experience to discover the ineffable and the difficult-to-say, the space between what we know and what remains distant, unreachable.

Winner of the 1997 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize

“The Apprentice of Fever is a brilliantly corporeal first book…rooted in the day-to-day life of a man implicated in the AIDS epidemic, living on the edge, crossing, transforming and transgressing boundaries, always, always paying an extreme and active attention, which is the apotheosis of compassion, which is an act of love… Tayson’s voice is unmistakable: direct, witty, passionate and desperate, in poems with the crucial acid to etch themselves into the reader’s consciousness.” —from the Introduction by Marilyn Hacker, Judge

“Lou Suarez’s poems are about what we can and can’t see. Watch, look, see—usually these verbs are the pivots of his poems. Even our inner lives are visible here; the imagination makes voyeurs of us all. But what we see by means of these carefully made poems is not something like knowledge, but something both stranger and more familiar; a map of our puzzlement and wonder.” —William Mathews

“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