American Poets Continuum (Paperback) – Serie

WINNER OF THE QWF FIRST BOOK PRIZE "Alice Petersen writes as eloquently about the natural world as she does about the world of human emotion and desire. This is a wise and impressive collection of stories."--David Bezmozgis, author of The Free World Alice Petersen's All the Voices Cry is masterful and potent--incredibly satisfying for a reader. -- Kathleen Winter, author of Annabel An academic's wife, struggling to keep up with her husband's quest to find a long-dead author's Tahitian love-garden, realizes that her own idea of paradise no longer includes her husband. An architect dreams of slender redheads, Champlain's astrolabe, and a brush with mortality--and finds at least the latter at Danseuses 7 Jours. An elderly man boards a trans-Pacific flight in an attempt to elude the prediction of a psychic, only to understand too late how the prophecy has shaped his actions. In All the Voices Cry, modern life collides with all the old pushes and pulls: city and country, the global and the local, the ideal and the real. Petersen's characters chase the mirage of escape, and are brought up hard by reality.This is a book rooted in landscape, tangled in the brambles of personal history, and it introduces in Alice Petersen a wondrous new voice that is yours to discover. Alice Petersen is a writer and critic whose work has been shortlisted for numerous Canadian prizes and awards. She was born in New Zealand and now lives and works in Montreal, Quebec.

Beginning with an auto accident that occurred during a family outing that took the life of Ms. Mnookin's father, the ensuing poems track the effect of that tragedy and loss, as the family heals from disaster, as the child grows up in a household with a stepfather and makes her uneasy way into adulthood, all under the shadow of a psychic uneasiness born of loss and impermanence. Wendy Mnookin's poetry has received awards from journals including The Comstock Review, Kansas Quarterly and New Millennium Writings. She was a 1999 recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. She teaches poetry in Boston. Also available by Wendy Mnookin To Get Here TP $12.50, 1-880238-73-X o CUSA

Steve Kronen's poems explore the hardships that daily challenge the human heart. Some of the poems in Splendor focus on our inescapable vulnerability due to aging or accident. Splendor also includes love poems to the author's wife and daughter. Many of the poems are rhymed and metered and use formal elements such as sonnets, villanelles, a sestina, a Dantean canzone, nonce forms, and others. Steve Kronen's first book, Empirical Evidence (1992), won the Contemporary Poetry Series Competition. Poems from Splendor have appeared in Poetry, The New Republic, The New Criterion, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Agni, The Georgia Review, and elsewhere.

In 2007, Lucille Clifton became the first African American woman to win the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, one of the most prestigious American poetry awards and one of the largest literary honors for work in the English language. Clifton has also won the National Book Award in poetry for Blessing the Boats (BOA Editions, 2000), and is the only author ever to have two collections, Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir (BOA Editions, 1987) and Next: New Poems (BOA Editions, 1987), named finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in one year. In Voices, Clifton continues her celebrated aesthetic of writing poems for the disempowered and the underprivileged while finding humor and redemption among life's many hardships. This book also highlights Clifton's ability to write inventive dramatic monologues. Voices includes monologues spoken by animals, as well as by the food product spokespeople Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben, and the apparently nameless guy on the Cream of Wheat box."cream of wheat" sometimes at night we stroll the market aisles ben and jemima and me they walk in front humming this and that i lag behind trying to remove my chef's cap wondering what ever pictured me then left me personless rastus i read in an old paper that i was called rastus but no mother ever gave that to her son toward dawn we head back to our shelves our boxes ben and jemima and me we pose and smile i simmer to myself what is my name BOA Editions is thrilled to present the newest poetry collection by the one and only Lucille Clifton.

The Moon Makes Its Own Plea is a departure from Wendy Mnookin's previous work. Rather than considering a single experience that transforms her perception of her world (such as a child's illness, a father's death), Mnookin explores the idea of self and how that self is strengthened and challenged by relationships. Although the book is still anchored in everyday life, the narrative is more fluid, making greater use of associative thinking. Wendy Mnookin's previous books include To Get Here (BOA Editions, 1999) and What He Took (BOA Editions, 2002), which won the New England Poetry Prize. Her website is www.wendymnookin.com.