Invisible Tender
by Jennifer Clarvoe

“The textures of Invisible Tender—the edgy shimmer of quartz, the cool vulnerability of silk—are exhilarating. Clarvoe’s canny perspectives, glistening details, and unnerving surprises are a constant delight. Her book places her at once in the starry company of poets like Elizabeth Bishop and May Swenson. I am moved and thrilled to know, here is the real thing, a poet.” —J.D. McClatchy, Judge of the 1999 Poets Out Loud Prize

Thaw
by Julie Sheehan

“Julie Sheehan’s poetry, at its best and most characteristic, exuberantly returns us to Walt Whitman (the real Whitman, and not the barbaric imitators) and to Walt’s grand parodist in Fernando Pessoa’s Alvaro de Capos.” -- Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of Humanities, Yale University

“The book cover of ‘Thaw’ entices with what looks like the ice-encrusted coil if an old refridgerator touched with water droplets, and the poetry inside, with its eclectic mix of language and style, is just as enticing.” -- Sioux City IA Journal

Door to Door
by Robert Thomas

“This is a fresh, inventive, and moving book. The speaker here enters into a world, exploring, with an engaging openness and fullness of detail, a range of perspectives different from his own. At the same time, he acknowledges wishes the world can never fulfill, wishes he presents with a witty and exuberant loyalty. The dialogue that results is richly engaging.” - Carl Dennis, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

“The poems in this brilliant and urgent first collection traverse the territory between feverish delirium and remarkable sanity. In Door to Door, the lost voices of goddesses as well as salesmen are invoked, and Mozart stands comfortably beside Our Lady Of Baby Back Ribs; Emily Dickinson is called back from the dead and taken on a sight-seeing trip around San Francisco. Robert Thomas is a poet for the 21st century – witty, worries, and ecstatic – and this is a collection that will last.” -Laura Kasischke, author of four books or poetry, including What It Wasn’t

The Glazier's Country
by Janet Kaplan

“Among the leading poets of the newest generation of American writers.” —Molly Peacock

The Glazier’sCountry is a book ofhistory and ethics. The poems follow the life of a survivor of Eastern European pogroms, but the theme is larger: notions of victimhoodas an identity, moral certitude, and the differences between justice and revenge are questioned and explored. The poems’ formal qualities mirror the fractured lives of the people in them: seemingly disparate voices break in, words are scattered across the page. But the ultimate message of The Glazier’s Country is an insistence that we can choose wholeness, “choose good / solo & each day / over faith / over clan or country / it is an art / & each day again.” 

Hearsay
by Lee Robinson

Hearsay celebrates a woman’s life from childhood to middle age, including the often-ignored subject of work, with a voice that is sometimes tender, sometimes whimsical, but always strong. The winner of the 2003 Poets Out Loud Prize, this collection “proffers craft and vision; it begins, one might say, in delight and ends in wisdom” (Robert Wrigley, judge). 

This minute
by Jean Gallagher

"These poems convey a metaphysical meaning as well as a bodily intimacy."—Publisher's Weekly

"This Minute is brilliant and surprising, full of history, invention, wit, humor, motion, stillness, time, no-time--and finally stands empty, like a desert father or mother, glad to 'give [her] inventions away.'"—Jean Valentine

"Here are poems , by Jean Gallagher, that knock me for a loop. They are work I didn't know I was waiting for - intoxicated, true to reality, blindly and rightly trustful of language. Her themes are springboards; they cause a language for ideas that dive into joy. Hers is language at its most dynamic, full of exuberant speculation. The poems speak out. The poems light us up. They are brilliant."—Marie Ponsot

Crocus
by Karin Gottshall

“These are lyrics that briefly and beautifully change our view of the world. In this effort, they do a quietly wild, beguilingly sudden work of making us rethink the ordinary before we can help ourselves, followed by the unnerving next part that hits us consequentially—we live in this world they are describing, though we had thought that we understood it perfectly well already. The best in these poems are their smallest moments, but once encountered, smallness means nothing but inspired surprise, as they have the power to alter us with unexpected ease. . . . The poems here, in sum, offer crisp language, language that speaks to new views, felt and therefore inherently worthy ways of reporting, all made forceful by strong and easy narrative guidance. The speaking of these poems throughout, even in their drama, is quiet, making everything that happens all the more unsettling as these ideas reach into us.”—Alberto Ríos

KARIN GOTTSHALL was recently writer-in-residence at Interlochen Arts Academy. Her poems have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Southern Review, and in many other publications. She lives in Middlebury, Vermont.

Corinna A-Maying the Apocalypse
by Darcie Dennigan

Corinna A-Maying the Apocalypse simultaneously celebrates and laments that “we are but decaying.” Betraying a love of old poems and symbols and new words and forms, these are poems where “the moon’s spritzing its perfumes and the phlegm is thick and fast” over cities and Starbucks and suburbs. The poet is in love with the rhythm of the man-made world, and “the rhythm is so strong sometimes / it blows up the room.” 

"A powerfully original poet—one whose idiosyncratic power could not be learned or taught.”—Alice Fulton 

"With a love for the dance of syntax and a delight in the polyphony of dictions both high and low, Dennigan springs onto the contemporary poetry stage with a fresh original style. Her poetry is an exuberant celebration of language and insight."
—Mark Jarman, author of Epistles