ALISON STINE is a 2008 winner of a Ruth Lilly Fellowship. She was born in Indiana and grew up in Ohio. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, she is the author of the chapbook Lot of My Sister, winner of the Wick Prize. Her poems have appeared in such journals as The Paris Review, Poetry, and The Kenyon Review. This is her first book. She lives in Athens, Ohio.

"Alison Stine writes, 'Believe me.' I am telling you a story,' and the story she tells us we believe as it unfolds. The poems are moving - beautiful, tragic, death-haunted, and uncanny - like old folk songs and murder ballads - lovely on the tongue, heavy on the heart. As a narrator, Stine does not and will not swerve when faced with the brutal, the adamantine and the ordinary damage that equals a life." - Eric Pankey, judge and author of Reliquaries"