Daniel Johnson was born in Salem, Ohio. His poetry has appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies including Best American Poetry 2007, The Iowa Review, American Letters & Commentary and I Have My Own Song for It: Modern Poems of Ohio. Johnson is the founding director of 826 Boston and, for over a decade, has taught writing in public schools, hospitals, and prisons. He lives with his wife in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

"How to Catch a Falling Knife is a perfect title for this book: there is danger, playfulness, impossibilities made possible, and surprise, in varying doses, in every poem! Most of all though, what I end up loving most about these spare, intense poems, is their heart, their urgent, nutty, burning, utterly whole heart."
—Thomas Lux

Brian Turner earned an MFA from the University of Oregon before serving for seven years in the US Army. He was an infantry team leader for a year in Iraq with the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division. Prior to that, he was deployed to Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1999-2000 with the 10th Mountain Division. His poetry has been published in Poetry Daily, The Georgia Review and other journals. He received a NEA Literature Fellowship in Poetry, the Amy Lowell Traveling Fellowship, and a Fellowship from the Lannan Foundation. His work has appeared on National Public Radio, the BBC, Newshour with Jim Lehrer, and Weekend America, among others.

“With courage and an uncommon willingness to see the world as it actually is, Brian Turner returns in Phantom Noise with a bullet-borne language in which helicopters hover like spiders over a film of water.  His poem Al-A’imma Bridge alone proves his mastery, and joins him to the tradition of Wilfred Owen and David Jones, for he is their descendent, his poetic gifts detonated into a spray of lyric force that will mark what is possible in poetry for years to come, a chiseling of agony onto paper and a poignant cri de Coeur to the republic of conscience.”
―Carolyn Forché

Reginald Dwayne Betts has been awarded the Holden Fellowship from MFA program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. A Cave Canem fellow, his poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, Crab Orchard Review and Poet Lore among others. He is a Breadloaf Writer’s Conference scholarship recipient and a graduate of Prince George’s Community College in Largo, MD and the University of Maryland in College Park, MD. In August 2009 his memoir, A Question of Freedom, will be published by Avery/Penguin.

“Inside silence there is a sliver of light that is the seed of the music of these poems, the origin of a melodic range we seldom see in a poet’s first collection.  These melodies move in a harmonic range affirming human struggle with an extraordinary elegance.  This collection of song is definite evidence of the gift.”
—Afaa Michael Weaver

Chad Sweeney is the author of two previous books of poetry, Arranging the Blaze (Anhinga) and An Architecture (BlazeVox), and five chapbooks, most recently The Lost Notebooks of Juan Sweeney (Forklift)—and he is cotranslator, from the Farsi, of The Art of Stepping Through Time: Selected Poems of H.E. Sayeh (White Pine, forthcoming).  Sweeney’s poems have appeared widely, including in Best American Poetry 2008 and Verse Daily. He is coeditor of Parthenon West Review and editor of the City Lights anthology Days I Moved Through Ordinary Sounds. A PhD candidate at Western Michigan University, Chad teaches poetry in Kalamazoo and lives with his wife, poet Jennifer K. Sweeney.

“Chad Sweeney’s poems are matryoshka dolls of imagination: strangeness inside longing inside charm. Relentlessly figurative, they read as dreamscapes and translations: if the human soul has peripheral vision, these poems are what it sees. And gentleness, gentleness abounds here and makes the point of fancy to unite, to bring one thing beside another and build a home of their touch.”
—Bob Hicok

Nicole Cooley grew up in New Orleans. Her third book of poems, Breach, about Hurricane Katrina and the Gulf Coast, will be published by LSU Press in April 2010. Her first book, Resurrection, won the 1995 Walt Whitman Award and was published by LSU Press in 1996. Her second book, The Afflicted Girls (2004), was chosen as one of the best poetry books of the year by Library Journal. She also published a novel Judy Garland, Ginger Love. She directs the new MFA program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation at Queens College--City University of New York and lives outside of New York City with her husband and two young daughters. 

"If it's possible for a book to account for why and how mothering changes everything:  so many things change everything:  in this book, in the background and sometimes in the foreground, New York City after The World Trade Center Towers were destroyed, New Orleans after Katrina's devastations, a woman's body after a baby takes it over, a woman's body when it's an extension of a baby, a poet's body understanding our elemental destiny, Milk Dress is a meticulous chronicle of devotion and terror, love and responsibility.  To watch a poet with a poet's skill with words and music address what is, after all, that which without which we would have nothing, is exhilarating and what we have poetry for."
—Dara Wier