Winner of the 1990 Barnard New Women Poets Prize.
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Like the seismic shifts and explosions that reveal hidden features of the earth, Paulette Roeske's poems record upheavals and jolts of self-knowledge in the seeming-solid world where we hammer out our lives. The labor of poetic creation cracks open the self: "How could I have guessed the geode's / rare concentrics, its brilliant sharp-toothed crystals / . . . It was hope that returned me to the hammer / to lay open the bright interiors / I could ...

Thomas Merton wrote to Catherine de Vinck back in 1966, "You have a wonderful Blake-like response to the sacred world". And Cornelia Jessey Sussman expressed these sentiments about her poetic gift: "...perhaps there are only three or four every century... given the gift to voice the eternal vision, to put into words what we know cannot be put into words. Like the sun breaking through the clouds of a dark frozen winter sky, such poets bring the ...

Beautiful Chaos is the first book to examine contemporary American fiction through the lens of chaos theory. The book focuses on recent works of fiction by John Barth, Michael Crichton, Don DeLillo, Michael Dorris, Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, Carol Shields, and Robert Stone, all of whom incorporate aspects of chaos theory in one or more of their novels. They accomplish this through their disruption of conventional linear ...

The Crockett Almanacs were the best-selling and longest-running series of comic almanacs published in antebellum America. Their portrayals of backwoods women both create uproarious laughter and provoke serious commentary. ...

The collected poems of a celebrated early twentieth-century Northwest poet whose fierce, crystalline verse and modern sensibilities have in recent years attracted a new generation of readers. ...

b?~It's about what can be bent, ' William Reichard writes in a poem called b?~Bonsai.' These poems, too, are about the ways we're bent by experience: by loss and by desire, by love and difficulty. William Reichard's poems are beautifully open to the b?~bent' in all its senses: the not-straight, the damaged, the curves the world throws us. These delicately etched lyrics are attentive to what Reichard calls b?~the intricacy of emotion; ' it doesn't ...

Although he is best known as a poet, Henry Taylor is also an astute critic, as the essays in this discerning collection demonstrate. In Compulsory Figures, Taylor writes about seventeen contemporary poets, much of whose work, he says, has been a part of his mental landscape since he himself began to write poetry. The pieces were written, and most of them published, over an extended period of time; as a whole, the collection reveals Taylor's ...

In an era of handsomely written books of poetry largely about their own skill with language, it's more than a little breathtaking to encounter a poet who writes for the most basic reason: Because he has to. That emotional and psychic pressure that derives from the absolute need to write is almost everywhere in this book, and it gives the poems at times an almost unbearable urgency....
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Collections of interviews with notable modern writers ...