Bold. Vibrant. Authentic.

This is a new-century work, a voicing of Barbara Cully's tidal sense of the temporal, her premonitory stillness, written by desert and sea-light, inscribing the endurance of loss, the necessity of vigilance. Her images are beautiful and precise, her sensibility profound. 

Identities and realities sweep over us in Meagan Lehr’s exciting debut collection of poetry, reminding me of Virginia Woolf’s waves of language, except that Lehr’s monologues are sparer, more enigmatic. Patches of conversation, reminiscence, and conjecture hang in the air tantalizingly, as time itself does in these sea-crossings....One thing’s for certain: this is exciting poetry.     

Maureen Seaton's subject is womanhood-an experience she presents as, by turns, a liturgically voluptuous sacrament and the kind of party that prompts the neighbors to call the cops. Her poems always make me feel lucky in my gender, doubly lucky in loving women.  

Alaska native Caroline Goodwin’s first poetry book, Trapline (Jackleg Press), is set at the edge–of the sea, the swamp, the wilderness..... Goodwin will connect what you see to the human you through a hand, a thigh, a boot. What you discover will be big and beautiful and brutal.  I didn’t get a free book for recommending Goodwin’s poetry; I simply bought her book and fell in love with the poems.