With a salve in one hand and a burcher's knife in the other, Janet Kaplan offers her masterful third collection, Dreamlife of a Philanthropist, winner of the 2011 Ernest Sandeen prize in Poetry. The prose poems and sonnets in Dreamlife are packed with postmodern language-leaping, modern irony and absurdity, and a poet's ageless ear for the pleasures of the lyric and formal experimentation. These are poems that can never quite abandon the hope that life--and language—are worthy pursuits; but they never offer up easy assurances about the benefits of humanity to anyone or anything. Get ready for dogs that wail and overtake the scene; an invitation to make love on a mattress of ants; and the philanthropist of the title, who dreams that people are tuned into fish. It's "good luck and bad in random but equal measure," Kaplan writes in "Life and Times."

Ecotones, in the ecological sense, are places in which distinct natural environments and habitatsmeet and converge. Ecotones the book contains bits and fragments of a life and its death, of perception and blindness, durability and ephemera, poetry and prose, fiction, search engine text and samples from Internet cites—confetti-briefness drifting, zeros and ones in time’s test-tube. The fragments converge and converse on the habitat of the page. They call and respond to one another. By placing our human and ecological conditions side by side in this way Ecotones shows that the environment’s responses to stress and our own are very much the same and that there is, ultimately, no separation or distinction between us that will matter.

With a salve in one hand and a burcher's knife in the other, Janet Kaplan offers her masterful third collection, Dreamlife of a Philanthropist, winner of the 2011 Ernest Sandeen prize in Poetry. The prose poems and sonnets in Dreamlife are packed with postmodern language-leaping, modern irony and absurdity, and a poet's ageless ear for the pleasures of the lyric and formal experimentation. These are poems that can never quite abandon the hope that life--and language—are worthy pursuits; but they never offer up easy assurances about the benefits of humanity to anyone or anything. Get ready for dogs that wail and overtake the scene; an invitation to make love on a mattress of ants; and the philanthropist of the title, who dreams that people are tuned into fish. It's "good luck and bad in random but equal measure," Kaplan writes in "Life and Times."

Ecotones, in the ecological sense, are places in which distinct natural environments and habitatsmeet and converge. Ecotones the book contains bits and fragments of a life and its death, of perception and blindness, durability and ephemera, poetry and prose, fiction, search engine text and samples from Internet cites—confetti-briefness drifting, zeros and ones in time’s test-tube. The fragments converge and converse on the habitat of the page. They call and respond to one another. By placing our human and ecological conditions side by side in this way Ecotones shows that the environment’s responses to stress and our own are very much the same and that there is, ultimately, no separation or distinction between us that will matter.