The Usable Field by Jane Mead
Available May 2008

These lyric elegies, spoken by the "under-self," become a series of subtle chants which sing the speaker into being, physically and spiritually, and through which Mead seeks solace, enlightenment and joy in the cycles of life and death in the natural world. The poems in this musical, meditative third collection yearn for acceptance as they struggle with loss.

"Jane Mead's our Emily Dickinson, our most ambitious solitary. Her austere poems are brilliant: endlessly inventive, syntactically, tonally and emotionally rich. Alternately ironic and undefended, she never sacrifices compassion, justice, her quest for pleasure. In their longing and their loneliness, tending to the otherness of nature, the beauty of expression, these poems honor the frailty that makes us most human."
—Ira Sadoff

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

This richly metaphorical debut examines what it means to inhabit a world of "losses that outnumber us." 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