Bøger udgivet af Dream Horse Press

Theordore Worozbyt's debut full length book is a powerful collection of poems. His use of language and his ability to inject emotion into image make The Dauber Wings a book to remember for years to come.

A wonderful, imaginative, clever delight of a book. This is a book to read aloud for the enjoyment of sound and its tale. The book is like reading a collaborative work by Berryman, Lewis Carol and the Brothers Grimm.

What I can't figure out about Gregory Lawless's new collection of poems, Dreamburgh, Pennsylvania, is how he did it. This is a book about family, about sorrow and love and joy and people and fun. It's a community book. A book about community. You open this book, to any poem, and are faced with this question: How do I put it down? Because you can feel and see yourself in the work. Dreamburgh, Pennsylvania is hard to put down. Honestly, I don't know if this place exists in the real world but Lawless is such a tremendous poet that it's difficult to think that it doesn't. Actually, it doesn't matter. Somewhere in that space between a dream and not-a-dream is the place where these poems take root, "where the buses are powered / by the collective goodwill / of the people the litter / is beautiful most everyone recycles / and we think about death / only once in a great while." I couldn't put this book down. You won't be able to put it down either. --Matthew LippmanDreamburgh, Pennsylvania is a world both hilarious and heartbreaking, familiar and utterly new. Here, we meditate upon family, mortality, agency; we come to recognize the vivid and the absurd as harbingers of truth. Here, we are human, which is bewildering and beautiful; we would not trade places with the angels, "bored to death by everything / they understand." "I notice / all the birds and things not noticing me, // but I'm too half brokenhearted not / to notice them back," writes Lawless, and we are grateful that he notices and that he shares Dreamsburgh's terror and tenderness with us. --Dora MalechTaciturn, hilarious, strange and true -- Gregory Lawless's poems are funny like Jack Handey and big-hearted like Denis Johnson. I'd trust no one else to take me to Dreamburgh and steer me through the traffic. --Jack Christian

Queer Fish is an original and daring book, crossing the boundaries between human and animal realms to transport us into the world of natural wonders where the poetry of deeply felt sensory experience is the key to inner truth. In this book of stunning metamorphoses, written with both precision and exuberant abundance, the conventional hierarchies disappear, and we are called upon to rejoice in our affinities with a horseshoe crab, an anglerfish, a condor, a tortoise, a damselfly, and squid. Intricately crafted and shrewdly observed, her poetry is participatory, coaxing readers to acknowledge their potential for both love and empathy: "tonight I wake as an anglerfish, / ringing my world with light" ("The Anglerfish Finds her Muse") and for hate and destruction: "We are all poison and poisoned / slick with oil / and its rings of dark pearl" ("When a Horseshoe Crab Grieves"). In this anti-fable world, animals discard their merely symbolic nature and become true agents, inviting us, human creatures, into dialogue and communion with them. These encounters redefine the poetics of Eros, as the scientific blends with the magical, the mundane with the eccentric, and a human lover can inhabit the "hermaphroditic soul / of love" or become "the long-eared hedgehog girl." The poet, like "The Decorator Crab," is an eclectic collector of nature's ordinary miracles, but is also a creature being collected by other creatures - immortalized, loved and accused by the chorus of voices that usher us into the world of mysterious and joyful correspondences between human and nonhuman. --Lucyna Prostko Infinite Beginnings (Bright Hill Press, 2009) With curiosity and wonder, Sarah Giragosian deftly crafts enchanting lyrics of menageries and memories, of mimic octopi and ostriches. Marianne Moore allegorized through pangolins and paper nautiluses. Elizabeth Bishop interrupted the world in the strange gaze of a seal staring up from the bay, near the fish houses. Whether recalling girlhood memories of snails mating in the woods or imagining swimming beneath Portuguese men of war's tentacles, Queer Fish pays loving attention to the honest signals all of life emits. These poems double for those calls, drawing us outside ourselves toward queerer imaginaries and more expansive intimacies. --Eric Keenaghan, Queering Cold War Poetry: Ethics of Vulne PressVisceral, physical, and powerful, Sarah Giragosian's poems unmoor us in landscapes both otherworldly and familiar, as we inhabit the fierce brains and bodies of other creatures and of those who admire them. Giragosian's language is lush, uncanny, haunting. Queer Fish is a book of passions intellectual and animal, crafted by a poet of unmatched compassion and talent. --Jennifer Whitaker, Winner of the Brittingham Prize in Poetry, The Blue Hour (University of Wisconsin Press, 2016)

Hero: A Podenco's Tale depicts the experience of many Spanish hunting dogs in a tender, honest fashion that respects the intelligence of younger readers. While it refrains from graphic, gratuitously upsetting vignettes, it also refuses to condescend to its reader by hiding important truths, instead allowing the parent, not a publisher, to decide what depth of content is appropriate for each individual. For parents and others who want their children's education to include an understanding of the plight of animals and the need for increased compassion for animals, Hero: A Podenco's Tale provides a solid beginning with a light touch.

In Maggie Smith's Disasterology the poems lie down and make angels in the fallout as "a tide of fire drags everything away." Whip smart and darkly funny, Smith chronicles how disaster proves itself time after time, film after film, yet another doom after doomsday. But everything is not one red phone ringing away from ruin. There is a future still waiting to be said, a hope that the pear trees will outlast us, bright, unending, maybe even sweet. -Traci Brimhall As with the Hollywood hairdos of her poems' heroines, no strand is out of place in Maggie Smith's fraught and funny new chapbook. Smith brings her characteristic crispness and smarts to questions of disaster, large and small, with poems that expertly snake through iconic films, color-coded terror alerts, and the bleakest of daydreams. Read it, and read it fast-tomorrow we might all be gone. -Natalie Shapero

No detail is too quotidian to escape the dream catcher of this poet's imagination. Drawing on sources as various as Native American lore, Eastern European folktales, classical literature, Shakespearean tragedy, pop culture icons, childhood fantasies and dreams, along with her own considerable powers of invention, Skillman presents us with a psychological landscape as diverse as contemporary American experience. While the starting point of many of these poems is isolated, personal experience-a breast biopsy, a mislaid set of keys-the personal here becomes collective. This drive to mythologize experience becomes for poet Judith Skillman the allembracing, energetic, ongoing, many-storied project of a lifetime. -Belle Randall ...Judith Skillman's dense, fragmentary images, her directness in speaking to the reader, and her interest in interweaving Greek mythology with everyday life put me in mind of the work of Sappho of Lesbos, one of the Western world's most celebrated women poets. -JoSelle Vanderhooft Judith Skillman's ability to wring emotional value from mundane encounters in the concentration of an image, the brush stroke of a narrative, teaches me poetry's ever widening sweep and mystical scope, echoing dogma by simultaneously escaping it into the eternal realm of wild beauty. -Michael Daley Few poets seize the natural world in the tender, particular ways that poet Judith Skillman does... For a poet who sees this world as does Skillman, nature's beauty and cruelty is ours as well. -Chicago Sun-Times Book Review Judith Skillman was born in Syracuse, New York, of Canadian parents, and holds dual citizenship. She is an amateur violinist, the mother of three grown children, and the "Grammy" of twin girls. She holds a Masters in English Literature from the University of Maryland, and has taught at University of Phoenix, Richard Hugo House, City University, and Yellow Wood Academy. The recipient of an award from the Academy of American Poets for her book Storm (Blue Begonia Press), Skillman's also been awarded a King County Arts Commission (KCAC) Publication Prize, Public Arts Grant, and Washington State Arts Commission Writer's Fellowship. Two of her books were finalists for the Washington State Book Award (Red Town and Prisoner of the Swifts). Skillman's poems have appeared in Poetry, FIELD, The Southern Review, The Iowa Review, The Midwest Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, Seneca Review, and many other journals and anthologies. Ms. Skillman has been a Writer in Residence at the Centrum Foundation in Port Townsend, Washington, and The Hedgebrook Foundation. At the Center for French Translation in Seneffe, Belgium, she translated French- Belgian poet Anne-Marie Derese. A Jack Straw Writer in 2008 and 2013, Skillman's work has been nominated for Pushcart Prizes, the UK Kit Award, Best of the Web, and is included in Best Indie Verse of New England. For more information, visit www.judithskillman.com

As unflinching as it is graceful, Gary L. McDowell's second collection, Weeping at a Stranger's Funeral, intones an elegy and prayer for all of us. Stippled by loam and lit by awe, these elliptical lyrics wander and leap, tenderly tracing a map of human limitations and luminosities. McDowell's charged fragments and micro-narratives spiral in constellation inwardly and outwardly at the same time, toward discovery and return, the primal and paradoxical motion of being. Reading this book reminds me of what I love about poetry! -Chad Sweeney Weeping at a Stranger's Funeral has done the impossible-made an odyssey of the mind that is just as compelling as the eponymous one, only McDowell never leaves home. His ships and sorceresses and capricious gods are domestic. In this amazing undertaking, the poet regards his life, addressing his imagination, ...thrilling us with aphorisms that pierce and pervert. "Pigeons can't tell the difference between night and a vision of night," McDowell writes. The difference makes no difference, he suggests, and that's what makes this book, which is both odyssey and tapestry, poetry at its best. -Larissa Szporluk In these stunningly mosaic-worked poems, Gary L. McDowell pieces together the fractured quotidian bits of familial relationships and loss, place, and domestic ritual. In paratactic shards and glittering non sequiturs, this art of assembly is both recuperative and illusory, and like traditional Japanese ceramicists who aggrandized the fault-lines by gilding cracks and breaks in pots, the spaces between McDowell's rivetingly attentive lines in Weeping at a Stranger's Funeral allow in breath, light, river, and sky. -Lee Ann Roripaugh The way to tell a story is to circle the story, reporting flashbacks and definitions, interrupting with domestic news flashes and small factoids. Also, be mindful of the narrative that is the present tense of the story's telling. Whatever comes along, in other words. These assemblages, accumulations of disparate detail (images, quotes from numerous other texts), flare up in the mind as the TRUTH, since language best stumbles its way toward insight and self-revelation. "All lies have basic truths in common," writes McDowell in Weeping at a Stranger's Funeral, a book full of dead-on specifics, luminous miscomprehensions, and portentous sounding approximations. Not one line in this collection of dispatches does less than delight and amaze. McDowell's poems are wise and hilarious. I couldn't stop reading them. -David Dodd Lee Gary L. McDowell is the author of Weeping at a Stranger's Funeral and American Amen (Dream Horse Press) and co-editor of The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Prose Poetry (Rose Metal Press). He lives in Nashville, TN with his family where he is an assistant professor of English at Belmont University.

In The Even Years of Marriage, Ash Bowen bravely explores the difficult mysteries of human relationships. In this powerful book, a new American voice, honest and forthright, probes without flinching the depths of love, hope, disappointment, failure, and regret. These sharply honed poems are like daggers in the heart. -David Bottoms Ash Bowen's debut poetry collection carries its readers from the bedroom to the heavens in order to define what it means to be alive at this moment. The world seen in The Even Years of Marriage teems with promise while echoing strains of loss, with a constant awareness of personal mythology and universal longing. Bowen's poems are home to an eerie intimacy where desires mingle and clash, as in "The Last Known Love Letter of Poseidon," where the speaker states, "My power can pull down any stubborn star / my finger chooses but cannot draw you back. / I wonder at the clatter coming from the dock: / Is someone knocking my name from off your boat?" This collection trusts the reader with secrets, and Bowen's voice inspires our own notions of what makes us whole. -Mary Biddinger In The Even Years of Marriage, love is barely enough to hold a relationship together, jealousy is terminal, and movie screens mirror every attempt at affection. Bowen's gifts with wit and image offer all the things I want from poems-intelligence, self-awareness, humor and empathy. In this book, the radioactive troubles of the universe arrive on earth like collect calls from outer space, reminding us that life requires an extravagant amount of forgiveness, and "It's the gravity of Earth that makes letting go so hard." -Traci Brimhall Ash Bowen holds an MFA and PhD in creative writing. He lives with his partner and step-children in Alabama, where he teaches creative writing and literature at the U of A in Tuscaloosa.

In each poem in Scoring the Silent Film, Keith Montesano uses a peripheral character in a film by such varied directors as Michael Haneke, Steven Spielberg, Wes Craven and Ang Lee to draw a deeper meaning from a fleeting scene. The poems make time stop-in the middle of madness, violence, action-long enough for us to realize how much a human life is worth. In doing so, Montesano turns the rich history of film into brilliant, unforgettable poems. - Jesse Lee Kercheval Though the poems in this ambitious collection spring from the author's abiding love of movies, their obsession is ultimately with our humanity. Violence-both realistic and fantastic-is ever-present, and emerging from the looming shadow of that violence are urgent meditations on empathy, inaction, fear, faith, and guilt. Keith Montesano has mingled the mediums of film and poetry and given us something utterly new. Scoring the Silent Film unspools before us, a poetic tour-de-force, mesmerizing and shot through with light. - Brian Barker The personas found in Keith Montesano's Scoring the Silent Film are in the voices of victims, neighbors, friends, and other shattered lives, some of who survive wearing long scars of their traumas. And yet despite these harrowing circumstances, Montesano's interpretations of characters are rendered with a profound sense of empathy as he holds the lens of his poetic gifts up close to the turbulent landscape of cinema violence, and shows us that there is still the possibility of blossoms among the ash. - Oliver de la Paz

Richard Garcia is the author of Rancho Notorious and The Persistence of Objects, both from BOA Editions, and a chapbook of prose poems, Chickenhead, from FootHills Publishing. His poems have appeared in The Georgia Review, Crazyhorse, Ploughshares, Pushcart Prize XXI and Best American Poetry. He teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Antioch University Los Angeles. He lives on James Island, SC. His website is www.richardgarcia.info.

Jaime Brunton's poems appear in SPECS journal of art and culture, Denver Quarterly, Diagram, Cincinnati Review, Poet Lore, and other journals. Originally from Shawnee, Ohio, Brunton currently lives with her wife and daughter in Lincoln, Nebraska, where she is an editorial assistant for Prairie Schooner. Russell Evatt is the author of the chapbook We Are Clay (Epiphany Editions, 2012). His work has appeared in Barrow Street, Cimarron Review, Lake Effect, Louisville Review, and elsewhere. He lives and works in South Texas. Find him online at russell-evatt.com.

What is Wen Kroy? It is New York spelled backwards, and when people come to the city in their youth, how can it be anything but? Through these poems, we come to love and understand the hardships of being young and the difficulty of building a self. Sheila Black uses the city as a character in the discovery of a self through love, passion, fear, and, in the end, empathy. -Jennifer Bartlett Some poets blindfold themselves to better see in the dark, others bravely face the day. Sheila Black is one of those. Big-hearted, generous, all-embracing, the poems in her stunning new book Wen Kroy awake us to a world where the ordinary is "radiant, transfigured" and at the furthest frontiers of experience "pain shines like pleasure." - L. S. Asekoff Enter here Black's ghost-city held up to a mirror, her heart (your heart) on her lap like a terrible red baby. From the velvet, smoky hush of a room the moon is in and straight out into the streets and vacant lots and snow, Black spares us no thing. or Here is ruin and the blue-edged shadow we cling to, Lou Reed or Billy Bang playing the darkness. How I love the rage and tenderness in this voice. Indeed, "nothing but simple aria and/ the glass breaks." -Joni Wallace This is a fantastic book. Sheila Black is a master of metaphor. In "First Love" she transforms loneliness into "a raincoat pricked with so many holes." These poems speak expertly of desire, difference and danger. Wen Kroy captures "all the motley messy details / of daily life" with spontaneity and verve. - Jillian Weise Sheila Black is the author of House of Bone and Love/Iraq (both CW Press). She co-edited with Jennifer Bartlett and Mike Northen Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability (Cinco Puntos Press), named a 2012 Notable Book for Adults by the American Library Association (ALA). In 2012, she received a Witter Bynner Fellowship, for which she was selected by Philip Levine. She lives in San Antonio, Texas where she directs Gemini Ink, a literary arts center.

Midway through James Cihlar s splendid "Rancho Nostalgia" you ll find some advice: Keep reaching into the past / to grab something new. One of the great wonders of this book full of wonders is that Cihlar follows his own instruction so brilliantly. Whether invoking scenes from classic movies or from the poet s own life, the results are poignant, complex, and full of bracing insights. These poems feel like they re being projected from a beguiling, not-quite-familiar place somewhere behind us, close to the border, where / the light is good. Mark Bibbins "James Cihlar s poems in "Rancho Nostalgia" contain the twisted love of a stage mom and the nervous energy of an Oscar Show producer. Here s a cinephilic poet who can pretty much direct anything, even the transformation of Sherlock Holmes into a wharf rat. Of course, Cihlar can t shut off his camera. A woman s face is the Wrigley building lit at night. Teddy Roosevelt and Winston Churchill are rag dolls in the future s toy box. And Cihlar s alter ego parades down Wall Street wearing a diadem of wheat. At one point, he flatly says, Inspiration comes when we don t want it. Lucky for us he has the conviction to be willfully misguided. Every page in this book possesses at least one tiny miracle." Steve Fellner "You know the marquee, the one above that closed and chained movie palace you still pass every time you visit your hometown, hoping it has been resurrected. If you managed to get inside, you d feel as if you were drifting in and out of someone s noir scrapbook, which also housed scratched glossies and faded lobby cards from Hollywood s golden age. "Rancho Nostalgia" s title should be spelled out with an achingly incomplete alphabet on that dark marquee. In this engagingly surreal collection of poems, Jim Cihlar has produced what we ve been secretly yearning for. He s located the keys to that movie palace, shaped the absent letters, replaced the projector bulbs, and polished the lenses clean but not too clean. When you take your seat and watch the smoky images begin to move on screen, you ll feel the bittersweet tug of our collective irretrievable pasts." Eric Gansworth About the Author: James Cihlar s previous books include "Undoing" and "Metaphysical Bailout." His poems have appeared in "The American Poetry Review, The Awl, Court Green, Smartish Pace, Prairie Schooner, Lambda Literary Review," and "Forklift, Ohio." He lives in St. Paul, Minnesota."

"Spinoza is rubbing my glasses again, leaving / the middle range blurred for a reason. / Any truth is a blur," Barbara Carlson begins one poem, then carries us to Spinoza's periphery with Miro, Chekhov and Jesus in quick order. Truth is not only a blur, but what we find in the unexpected. It is the "haunting music" in all that is unmusical, but out of which this essential book of poems creates an essential music. Ranging from Hungary and Slovenia, across the US continent, from Orpheus and Schubert the everyday world of love and death, Carlson gives speech to the "unspoken." Yes, we are driven up a Fire Road that is rarely travelled except by hikers and emergency vehicles and we find ourselves in the uncanny position of both wondering and mending, of discovering that "the light of dead stars / is full of gusts and grace." All of which is to say this is an amazing first book, a wonder, a book I dearly cherish. -Richard Jackson Carlson evokes blindness, deafness, and muteness over and over in Fire Road. Speechless yet compelled to speak, she works to articulate the surreal, kaleidoscopic world around her. In the process she discovers that "If the words make you mute your soul will be fed." A soul is seeking - and not always finding - its mate in the universe but Carlson's courage pushes her on. Reading this sojourner's book the boundaries of my own world dissolved and another universe was revealed. -Tam Neville The poems of Barbara Carlson follow in the now-quite-venerable tradition of surrealism. They are poems where the world of dream and of the world of our quotidian lives comingle and coexist. But Carlson is never interested in the easy pyrotechnics and associative glibness which so often characterize poems that nod to the surrealist tradition. Instead, she offers her mysteries in a voice that is quiet, humble, humane, and the best of the work recalls certain moments in the lyrics of Bishop, Ritsos, and Follain, poets whose greatness lies in making what is homemade seem strange, and what is strange seem matter-of-fact. These are bracing and durable poems, and their delights and insights are many. - David Wojahn

Winner of the 2011 Dream Horse Press Chapbook Prize Ariana-Sophia Kartsonis's book, Intaglio, was published by Kent State University Press in 2006. Her collaborative chapbook, Emuseum, written with Caleb Adler was published in 2009. She currently works at Columbus College of Art and Design where she is the facuty adviser for Botticelli Literary/Art Magazine. Kartsonis lives in Powell, Ohio with cats Cricket and Guthrie and cool-cat, Mitch Lear. Cynthia Arrieu-King is an assistant professor of creative writing at Stockton College and a former Kundiman fellow. Her books include People are Tiny in Paintings of China (Octopus 2010) and Manifest (Gatewood Prize, Switchback 2013). This year she served as a Dodge Poet. Her poems will have appeared his year in Offending Adam, Everyday Genius and American Books, Steck Editions. Her collaborations with Sophia have appeared in Boston Review, New Orleans Review, Black Warrior Review and many others.

John Keats was of the belief that a "life of any worth is a continual allegory." A.E. Watkin's debut collection takes on the notion with a lovely seriousness. The brilliance in these poems isn't simply in their lyric surety-a music so unfailing it turns image melodious-but in using lyric for a purpose often neglected in contemporary poetry. The poems here become a space in which the grain of the personal is held within the furrow of the allegorical, and over the course of a year, we witness the speaker's identity suffer into symbolic sympathy. That sympathy is erotic and agricultural-that ancient twining-and allows Watkins to invoke the world of Orpheus and Eurydice into his own, all while showing his readers, as a poet must learn to do, the reciprocal consequences of having one's own life called back into the forgotten one. Well, the forgotten world save only for poems such as these, which refuse to accept the post-modern condition as a separation from our allegorical one. These are poems of wonder and nostalgia, and a reminder that such conditions are not easy, but are instead evidence of the very wound that "wondered this world green." -Dan Beachy-Quick Herein, a poetry that takes its time, forgoing pyrotechnics for a low, slow burn. Other elemental activity's here as well-the wind flogging the prairie; the mind dirtying itself; a glass of water having its way with a stick. Dear, Companion is a definitive bewilderment, a bountiful catalog of thought and observation and loss. Read it and reap. -Graham Foust A.E. Watkins is a graduate of the St. Mary's College of California MFA Program and currently attends Purdue University, where he is pursuing a Ph.D. in nineteenth-century British literature. Dear, Companion, his first collection of poetry, was runner up for the 2011 Amercian Poetry Journal Book Prize. His poems and reviews have appeared in Barrow Street, Copper Nickel, Denver Quarterly, Hayden's Ferry Review, Ninth Letter, Sycamore Review, and elsewhere.

Dan Rosenberg drank all the great masters, took them inside, dead and alive, all alive. He explodes them and then he says: "I want the sun to be potent and kind." The sun listens. Or: "The heavens are bleached out with streetlights and we all feel larger." The reader's body reacts. Only the power of true poetry can make this happen. Here. In this book. - Toma alamun At once tranquil, blighted, and ravenous in a time all its own, The Crushing Organ leaves no room for allegory, prophecy, or symbolic disclosure of any sort. Dan Rosenberg has a new kind of system where things already apprehended are things already agreed upon, which is to say filthy, annoying, and complicit in the horror these poems both survive and indict. But it is also a system for learning new joys, wakefulness, and physical kingdoms which have not yet begun. "yellow my finger in the lily. It doesn't keep to itself." Nor will the liberties in this striking book. To read it is to feel volition do its work on you. -Peter Richards Quick, immediate, and deeply compassionate, Rosenberg's poems cover the vast range of the immanent quotidian. Through all their impossible turnings, we're nonetheless convinced that we're in the presence of the concrete, even the documentary. And while they recognize pressing catastrophe when they see it, yet they also see a way out-in a burst of flame, in storms with eyes, in a wire hanger bent to the shape of a human heart. Rosenberg has given us a tour de force of hope achieved through, rather than despite, a clear view of the current world. -Cole Swensen Dan Rosenberg holds degrees from Tufts University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He is a Ph.D. student at The University of Georgia in Athens, GA, and a co-editor of Transom.

Within the composure of Katherine Soniat's phrasing in A Raft, A Boat, A Bridge something unsettled emerges and will not rest. She presents us with a richly conceived world 'given to see through.' But the seeing is rigorous. These poems are revelatory. -Ron Slate How might one move quietly and slowly enough-crossing water to land or to ether, to high altitudes or low, the strange or the everyday-to give us time to dream what happened on both banks? In A Raft, A Boat, A Bridge, Katherine Soniat's beautifully understated poems sometimes pass through places of great pain, but ultimately beyond them as well. Myth and history, mountains and deserts, grief and intimacy are all transformed in this collection into a poetry of depth, dignity, and richness of language. -Lisa Lewis One kind of lyric is a vertical narrative that demands dense fuel to attain escape velocity. For Katherine Soniat, the heavy metals of the everyday yield a superheated plasma that seem virtually effortlessly extracted (though it is never so): "The astronomers call for marvels, a cosmic shower / in the pre-dawn sky. But this dog won't be energized / by prediction." The epicenter of her poems' orbit is the heart of a long and rich poetic tradition, which means it is also the human heart, and that is just were it ought to be, for Soniat's masterful work reveals again and again that tradition's inexhaustible power. -T.R. Hummer Katherine Soniat is a conjurer. She possesses the third eye-that extra sense-in her astonishing and scintillant fusion of image with concept. Her synesthetic mind fashions images the rest of us must envy. This poet carries her own microscope through which we see a new order: buoyant, surprising, and rare. Her intelligence ranges over a fascinating array of subjects as she reminds us of what true poetry can do. A Raft, A Boat, A Bridge returns us to the choral pavement of its origins. -Tina Barr A Raft, A Boat, A Bridge guides us through and beyond an ever-dissolving world's beauty and brutality. We enter the atmosphere of Katherine Soniat's brilliant, startling, and intimate poems, and we emerge shaken and renewed. -Lee Upton The Swing Girl was selected as Best Collection of 2011 by the Poetry Commission of North Carolina (A.O. Young Award). A Shared Life won the Iowa Poetry Prize given by the University of Iowa Press, and a Virginia Prize for Poetry selected by Mary Oliver. Her fourth collection Alluvial was a finalist for Library of Virginia Center for the Book Award and Notes of Departure won the Camden Poetry Prize, selected by Sonia Sanchez. Soniat has served on the faculty at Hollins University and Virginia Tech. Currently an instructor in the Great Smokies Writers Program at University of North Carolina at Asheville, she lives on a deep ravine with a mother bear and two cubs.

Judith Skillman's "The Sister," which I accepted for Seneca Review earlier this year, was striking for recasting Cain as sister and memorably arresting for the feral fierceness of the portrait. Her other poems in The Never are equally astute, unsentimental and unflinching; her identification with the icons and motions of mythology, the armature for so many of the poems here, derive from their visceral passions. These poems sizzle with elemental directness and judgment, linguistically sharp and probing. Like the never which seems indistinguishable from the always, this book aims for elemental truths which give us the comfort of no-comfort. That makes poems in this collection something to trust. --David Weiss, Editor, Seneca Review Pay careful attention to the lines of Wheatland's: "to travel is to dream of wheat...to dream is to revel in scenery...to sleep is to travel inside the germ and the chaff." To read The Never is to venture into a mysterious world of the plain and the mystical, "the drape and pleat of hill and valley" that sustains us. --Tina Kelley, The Gospel of Galore Few poets seize the natural world in the tender, particular ways that poet Judith Skillman does...For a poet who sees this world as does Skillman, nature's beauty and cruelty is ours as well. --Chicago Sun-Times Book Review Skillman's was the first truly brilliant poem I ran across on my poetic journey, and I was in awe of the sheer skill of her line breaks, movement, and control... Much like Heather McHugh, Skillman is a 'poet's poet,' and to read her work makes me rejoice, as poet, in the possibilities of the art itself. --The Pedestal Magazine, Terri Brown-Davidson

Seldom does beauty collide naturally with gravity, but that is what happens in Diane Kirsten Martin's Conjugated Visits repeatedly. Again and again, one finely tuned poem after another, this collection brings the natural world into our everyday lives, and we can't escape or deny our debt. The observed is clearly the crystal engine here, at the heart of Conjugated Visits; an urgent music moves each poem down the page with a calibrated knowingness that releases us to truth and wonderment. - Yusef Komunyakaa Diane K. Martin's strong voice and measured wit infuse these often bluesy poems with energy and precision ... [S]he possesses the ability to carry her readers through "the infant skin of light," seeing deeply into the core heat of the physical world. - Dorianne Laux Taut and intelligent, yet spiked with wry humor, Diane Martin grabs your hand, leads you, and never lets go. What a pleasure! - Francine Ringold, Editor-in-Chief, Nimrod International Journal These poems visit desire from childhood and first love to the long-term or more transitory and expand to include the yearning toward some kind of god. Diane K. Martin's art is that of an ever-widening embrace of the "conjugated visits" we call our lives. - Fred Marchant, author of The Looking House

This is two great magazines sharing one spine!Authors in the TNPR: Larry Sawyer, Tracy Knapp, James Grinwis, Julie Danho, Gregory Lawless, John Mann, Susan Rothbard, Edison Dupree, Heather Kirn, April Manteris, Mary Biddinger, Douglas Basford, Melissa Studdard, Amanda Auchter, Gerry LaFeminaAuthors in the APJ: Andrea Henchey, Andrew Sage, Lisa Fay Coutley, Sandra Kohler, Sandra Kohler, Kate Hanson Foster, Rachel McKibbens, Jeremy Halinen, John Estes, Lee Rossi, Kyle McCord & Jeannie Hoag, John McKernan, Bill Neumire, David Dodd Lee, RT Smith, Lois Marie Harrod, Andrew Cox, Katherine Williams, Lara Candland, Katy Waldman, Wendy Xu, Scot Siegel, Lightsey Darst, William Reichard, Arra Lynn Ross, James Cihlar, Sam Woodworth, Rebecca Foust

If you were to splice the DNA's of Walter Mitty and Salvador Dali, or Cuisinart together the collected works of Louis Simpson and Dean Young, you might get the poems of Bruce Cohen. His suburban speakers are often cleaning the garage or steaming off wallpaper in the bedroom, but secretly they are involved in criminal adventures of the imagination, in subtle and hilarious cultural critique, in fantasies of quiet desperation. These are rampages of irony, tenderness and wit, furnished with the verbal wizardry and bravado of a quiet maniac.-This is terrific work from start to finish, by a bright new poetry star in the American sky. --Tony Hoagland Bruce Cohen's Disloyal Yo-Yo is not a collection of poems so much as it is a full-blown surreal but humane visionary account of what it means to be alive in the 21st century. His imagination sweeps across his experience like the Super Doppler he hopes might hover over our lives to transmit intimate newscasts. And what gets transmitted in Cohen's poems is not only the intimacy of human relationships but the strange, quirky, unpredictable transformations, a tornado of patio furniture, that refreshes and reinvents our world. --Michael Collier Like the paintings of Rene Magritte, the songs of Tom Waits, and the Coen brothers' films, Bruce Cohen's poetry offers observations that are simultaneously razor-sharp recognizable and arrestingly askew. His poems are haunting and hilarious, coolly surreal and stingingly poignant. As the best literature always does, his poems knock me off-balance as they expand my understanding of the absurdities, challenges, and dividends of modern life. Cohen sits at the top of my short list of favorite contemporary poets. ---Wally Lamb Bruce Cohen's poems, which I have known for years, keep coming back to me in some askew way that leads me forward. He is one of the most loving and unpretentious humorous poets I know, and the incisiveness of his craft is always guided by awareness. He means poetry to be quick--bared, vital, bold, original, alive--and he pulls all this off again and again. Finally, a whole collection to begin to do Bruce Cohen's poetry some justice. --William Olsen

The National Poetry Review, Winter 2009 Issue: Poetry, Essays, and Interviews by Jeannette Allee, Cindy Beebe, Ben Berman, Sarah Blackman, Sam Byfield, Patrick Carrington, Mark Conway, T. Zachary Cotler, J. P. Dancing Bear, Oliver de la Paz, Teresa Chuc Dowell, Angie Estes, Judith Harris, Dyani Johns, Ted Kooser, Dorianne Laux, Tony Leuzzi, Amit Majmudar, Beth Martinelli, Darren Morris, Mia Nussbaum, Rita Mae Reese, Melissa Stein, Lee Upton, Angela Vogel, Karen Volkman, Lesley Wheeler, and Martha Zweig

A sensual, lyrical journey into modern day mythos.

James Haug's poems abound in the mysterious, in the world gone wrong by inches. The details are always there, slightly askew, so believable you accept them against your will. And wake up in a world of insight and conviction. These are marvelous poems, ones that help us see what might have been or could have been, in a world full of light. - James Tate In James Haug's poems, precision of observation and plain speaking comfortably coexist with authentic strangeness, in a way I feel is deeply true. The speakers in these poems are friendly, familiar and knowing, but also a bit distanced; they seem also always oriented towards the mysterious, and therefore towards possibility. I love reading these poems, laughing, feeling silent, and drifting off into what feel to me like very real lucid necessary dreams. - Matthew Zapruder Sometimes we go looking for poetry because we are looking for a conversation that defies predictable directions. In James Haug's poems we are so lucky to be in the presence of a generous, complex, surprising, and lucid collection. We are steadily sure of why this poetry is here. We're grateful, we're enriched, we're sustained by it. - Dara Wier