Begin Anywhere by Frank Giampietro
Available September 2008

A beleaguered, appealing self-as-persona wades through the crowded, messy rooms of adulthood in this unpredictable debut. Tension between the alluring promise of contemporary American suburbia and the high anxiety of a born second-guesser characterize this funny, self-deprecating, and frank portrayal of fatherhood, marriage, and personal transformation, as the speaker’s definition of happiness evolves.

"Frank Giampietro's poems speak to our American lives—the woe of commercialism, the heartbreak of suburbia, and the exquisite complexities of family. Within his breakneck hilarity, there is always some nod toward our own fleshy mortality, a small sigh of death. Giampietro's unique brand of genius makes the world more glorious, uproarious, and lonesomely true."
—Julianna Baggott

The Next Country by Idra Novey
Available November 2008

In these powerful lyric poems, Novey's exploration of "country" extends beyond national boundaries into the countries of marriage and family, history and the unspoken, leading to a bold and imaginative reckoning of the self with the larger world.

"Big-hearted, individualistic in scope and voice, Idra Novey's The Next Country surveys a terrain that’s truly multifaceted and calibrated down to every word, every nuance. Each poem’s imagistic certainty enlarges meaning. Line by line, a playful innuendo moves us, and we find ourselves in that rugged country of the human spirit where enlightenment and surprise are twin rulers."
—Yusef Komunyakaa

Shelter by Carey Salerno
Available January 2009

Disturbing because of the cruelty intended as kindness to animals and the speaker's unflinching, relentless insistence on her culpability, these poems force us to consider whether we can be redeemed by our capacity for love, compassion and personal responsibility. Heartrending, but absolutely necessary and enlightening, this lyric debut is beautiful in its courage and honesty.

"In a volume as compassionate as it is unsettling, Carey Salerno questions the moral authority assumed in the narrow confines of the animal shelter. Abu Ghraib haunts these lines as the shelter takes on harrowing, allusive dimensions, and as the narrator weighs her burden of complicity. Shelter is filled with fierce and desperate yowling, much of it our own."
—Michael Waters

Rough Cradle by Betsy Sholl
Available April 2009

"Betsy Sholl's Rough Cradle is a marvelous, intricate book of contraries. Ruin and healing, beauty and blight, the just and the unjust are at war, not just out there in our politics and our histories, but in here, daily, hourly, in the human soul. I love Sholl's unyielding honesty, the great heart and deep intelligence of her vision."
—Nancy Eimers

Slamming Open the Door by Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno
Available April 2009

"Slamming Open the Door is a gift to us—a gift of power, truth, rage, and beauty. It lets us stand close beside its speaker, where we long to be. What we have feared to know, and need to know, Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno's poems let us know. Her book is true to devastation and it’s true to love—it meets a kind of end of the world with an action of fresh making, which teaches and holds us."
—Sharon Olds

Winter Tenor by Kevin Goodan
Available May 2009

"We readers are lucky when we encounter a voice that speaks as if it were speaking to each of us alone, an impossible and therefore necessary illusion, a miracle of multiple visions, essential in a commonplace way only what's divine can determine—this describes Winter Tenor's quintessential and most valuable presence. I love reading this book.""
—Dara Wier