Barbara Rockman is the author of Sting and Nest: Poems, winner of the New Mexico-Arizona Book Award. She teaches writing at Santa Fe Community College and at Esperanza Shelter for Battered Families. Raised in western MassachuSetts, she now lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

To cleave, meaning both to cut and to cling, contains its opposites economically, and so within Barbara Rockman's luminous collection we find ourselves standing within the familiar fallen world: living to die, loving from a solitude we both long for and long to escape from. These are poems that cast a spell, an incantation, a divination, in Language rich enough to eat, that calls out from the soul and returns us to our senses." - Marie Howe, author of Magdalene: Poems