Books

• Winner of the 1987 William Carlos Williams Award presented by the Poetry Society of America With The Imaginary Lover, Alicia Suskin Ostriker takes her place among the most striking and original poets whose work is informed by feminist consciousness. Her characterization of the best poetry by women, in the New ...

Cold Comfort is a book of poems written out of deep affection and concern for the world in a dangerous time. An urbane stylist, Anderson characteristically focuses on rural and small-town America, where the events of personal history intersect those of the larger world.

Winner of the 1987 American Book Award The Essential Etheridge Knight is a selection of the best work by one of the country’s most prominent and liveliest poets. It brings together poems from Knight’s previously published books and a section of new poems.

Night Watch on the Chesapeake is Peter Meinke’s third collection of poetry. The poems traverse a wide landscape of topics from playing baseball, the death of a friend, divorce, and even poetry itself.

Kate Daniels’s central myth is that of Niobe, the mother in Greek mythology whose children were killed by the gods because of her great pride in them. She taps the lasting power of the ancient story in poems about personal loss and political insanity. Though the subjects are ...

The speaker in Irene McKinney’s poems is most often alone, sitting at the side of a stream, or standing at her own chosen gravesite in the Appalachian mountains, and the meditations spoken out of this essential solitude are powerfully clear, witty, and wide-ranging in content and tone. The ...

Alicia Suskin Ostriker is that rare combination, a writer equally admired as poet and critic. The variety of subjects in Green Age is characteristic of her writing: from the opening poem, “Fifty,” funny, courageous, and defiant, to a set of birthday poems for a grown daughter; from emulations of the ...

What are the forces that cause us to strike out and harm each other? Captivity explores the way in which the individual is held hostage by society; how the forces of racism, sexism, and classism frequently express themselves as violence within the family. The book also explores a deeper captivity, ...

Winner of the 1989 Associated Writing Programs’ Award Series in Poetry “Waring’s poems forcibly avoid the workshop warp. From the opening, her language lashes. . . . Anyone would be convinced of both her originality and her toughness. . . . Waring uses tactics that women singers have known about for a long time: the balm ...

Wallace’s poems cover the range of human experience: music, religion, sex, art, childhood, adolescence, nuclear war, illness, and death. But it’s in his wit and good humor, against undercurrents of sorrow and grief that best characterize his poetry: part Emily Dickinson, and part Harpo Marx; part ...

The result is a book of discursive meditations that will amply reward the reader. Part travelogue, part pilgrimage in which the shrines remain hidden until they are recognized later, Larry Levis’s startling and complex fifth book of poems is about the enslavement to desire for personal freedom, and the ...

Peter Meinke was a master of traditional poetic forms long before the current interest in “the new formalism.” His work is, in turn, witty, comic, sane, deeply moving, and always readable. Liquid Paper collects the best of his previously published poems from the late 1960s on with a ...

When Shawn Doubiago graduated from high school, she and her mother Sharon, embarked on a journey through Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru. In Cuzco, Peru, standing before an alter where the Incas had sacrifced their female virgins, the daughter asked, “Are there any good men?” South American Mi Hija is Sharon ...

Previous Praise for Maggie Anderson’s Cold Comfort “We are struck by the generosity of a voice that manages to bridge the gap between a personal and a world view, a balance that reveals a narrator who is of the world yet not overwhelmed by it.” —Prairie Schooner

Winner of the 1991 Associated Writing Programs' Award Series in Poetry