Vendettas, charms, and prayers

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Matt Rasmussen

In his moving debut collection, Matt Rasmussen faces the tragedy of his brother's suicide, refusing to focus on the expected pathos, blurring the edge between grief and humor. In "Outgoing," the speaker erases his brother's answering machine message to save his family from "the shame of dead you / answering calls." In other poems, once-ordinary objects become dreamlike. A buried light bulb blooms downward, "a flower / of smoldering filaments." A refrigerator holds an evening landscape, "a tinfoil lake," "vegetables / dying in the crisper."

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Andrea Gibson

Andrea Gibson's dynamic and energetic first book, <em>Pole Dancing to Gospel Hymns</em>, challenges us to not only read, but to react. Hauntingly vivid, the poems march through a soldier's lingering psychological wounds, tackle the curious questions of school children on the meaning of "hate," and tangle with a lover's witty and vibrant description of longing. Gibson's poems deconstruct the current political climate through stunning imagery and careful crafting. With the same velocity, the poignant and vacillating love poems sweep the air out of the room. It's word-induced hypoxia. <em>Pole Dancing to Gospel Hymns</em> whispers with a bold and unforgettable internal voice rich with the kind of questioning that inspires action.

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Iftikhar Arif

This anthology brings together the work of forty-four poets and reveals a society riven by ethnic, class and political differences - but also a literature unified by traditions both classical and modern, belonging to the same culture, and sharing many of the same concerns and perceptions.--From back cover.

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Ben Berman

"Ben Berman's wonderful first book, Strange Borderlands, is a masterful study in the power and limits of empathy, of respect for difference in tension with the urgent need for common ground. Beyond his formal and stylistic range, linguistic flexibility, eye for detail, irrepressible wit and powerful feeling, what's most impressive about this terrific book is Berman's inclusive generous spirit, the dealy serious imaginative play he exercises in every line of every poem ... These are poems that weigh, consider, and restore some flesh-and-blood meaning to the experience of multiculturalism ... Ben Berman's lyric poems mostly set in Zimbabwe dig deep into the casual and the casualty of daily life: the hammer striking the sheep's head, the sustenance that follws; disciplinary beatings that students, giggly and protesting, could count and count on to fade. Unassuming but wise, compassionate yet wildly, unpredictably funny at times, Berman delivers to us escalating hardships that somehow elevated us toward the sacred; the pathetic harvest and sweetness that comes from the least likely of places. This least likely of places is where Berman thrives, calling on closely observed facts to chronicle the perimeters of tenderness and cruelty ... Strange Borderlans, chronicles in startling and ungorgettable poems his sojourn in Zimbabwe and his immersion in a culture that both embraces and exiles him, attracts and reproaches, changing him forever. Using a variety of poetic approaches: rhymed couplets, prose paragraphs, sonnets, free verse--he gives us a multi-tonal description of landscapes that are as elusive as they are inviting, as unfamiliar to most of us as they are intuitively recognizable ..."--Back cover.