2002

A Girl in Water
These poems swim the depths-sometimes murky, sometimes shimmering-of our complicated relationships to family, lovers and ourselves. Along the way, Edelman’s precise, luminous language and ear for the song in a […]


From the Sketchbooks of Vanessa Bell
“…I, turning over the drawings/I’ve made through the years,/look into these mirrors/for some other shape the light might return to me…” As a painter may be endlessly fascinated with changing […]


Rendered into Paradise
Like a devoted archaeologist, Feraca sifts the multi-layered strata of spirit and flesh, insistent on uncovering the ancient secrets of their intermingling. She perceives them not so much as competitors […]


Sand Island Succession: Poems of the Apostles
In 1998, Judith Strasser accepted an invitation to serve as poet-in-residence at the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore on Lake Superior. Here, in a rustic cabin without plumbing, she “hear[d] the […]


Small Acts
“I’ve always wanted/to do that. Let go of everything/I hold too dear. Become an empty tree./They say/a man once climbed a sycamore/to see eternity.” Mary Mercier’s poems climb eagerly, reaching […]


What the Body Knows
Rolling and dancing in mud, a child discovers an ecstasy of connection, a “moment of pure light/when I was the land…” So Townsend launches an exploration of “the truth of […]