by Gary Gildner

by David Swanger

"Wayne's College of Beauty evokes neighborhoods and well-traveled paths....These poems are hard-edged and beautiful, an exciting collection." —Colleen J. McElroy

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

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

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

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 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

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

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

by 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

by Walter Bargen

In The Feast, Walter Bargen has generated a cosmology that ricochets between eschatology and creation, and he's fostered a world that simultaneously dies and is reborn out of the chaos of consciousness.--Gary Young

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

by Terry Blackhawk

Winner of the John Ciardi Poetry Prize, selected by Molly Peacock

Terry Blackhawk's poems, crisp as the first apples of autumn, are tart, knowing, and full of the growth of summer. Poems like these can sustain you. You can read and re-read them, marveling at their construction and arrested by insights you missed the first time which then sneak up on you. Blackhawk's poems make you know, with a touch so light you hardly realize you are being tapped on the shoulder, that you are in the presence of the best poetry: multi-leveled, passionate, varied, thoughtful, intense, and beautiful. 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

by Stanley E. Banks

Along with his mentor Langston Hughes, 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

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