"Always enjoyable for the essential frission of recognition they provide, these stories...call us to witness the subtle nuances of our own experiences."--Publishers Weekly
"As a lyricist and personal narrator, John Logan transmitted all he sensed with consummate artistry and honesty. This superbly edited collection of his poems is worthy of his memory."--St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Until the late 1970s, W. D. Snodgrass was known primarily as a confessional poet and a key player in the emergence of that mode of poetry in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Snodgrass makes poetry out of the daily neuroses and everyday failures of a man—a husband, father, and teacher. This domestic suffering occurs against a backdrop of more universal suffering which Snodgrass believes is inherent in the human experience. Not for Specialists includes 35 new poems complemented by the superb work he wrote in the Pulitzer Prize winning collection, Heart’s Needle, along with poetry from seven other distinguished collections. from “Nocturnes” Seen from higher up, it makes its first move in the low creekbed, the marshlands down the valley, spreading across the open hayfields, the hedgerows with their tops still lit, laps the roadbed, flows over lawns and gardens, past the house and up the wooded hillside back behind us till only some few rays still scythe between the treetrunks from the far horizon and are gone. W. D. Snodgrass, born in Pennsylvania in 1926, is the author of more than 20 books of poetry, including The Fuehrer Bunker: The Complete Cycle (BOA, 1995); Each in His Season (BOA, 1993); and Heart's Needle (1959), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His other books include To Sound Like Yourself: Essays on Poetry (BOA, 2002), After-Images: Autobiographical Sketches (BOA, 1999) and six volumes of translation, including Selected Translations (BOA Editions, 1998), which won the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award.
In Is, Wayne Dodd continues his on-going search for a poetry able to incorporate the polyphony of our culture's past, while investigating the insights and implications of quantum physics and the motion and fate of our being. At once lyrical, self-mocking, skeptical, and haunted by loss, Is gives us a complex music and tone for our time. Distinguished Professor of English at Ohio University, Wayne Dodd is the author of eleven books of poetry and a book for children. He was editor of The Ohio Review from 1972 until 2001. Among his awards and honors are a Rockefeller Residency, an NEA Fellowship, a National Book Critics Circle Award nomination, and the Ohio Governor's Award for the Arts.
Dramatically urgent from the get-go, many of Jacqueline Osherow's poems approach inconsistencies and mysteries in Biblical texts. From traditional poetic forms (sonnet, terza rima, villanelle, sestina, acrostic, loose ottava rima) to an austere free verse, Osherow mixes humor and seriousness while maintaining a conversational tone. These poems deal with Jewish tradition and the land of Israel in revelatory new ways. Jacqueline Osherow is the author of four previous poetry collections. Her work has appeared in The Norton Anthology of Jewish American Literature, The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, Best American Poetry (1995 and 1998) and The Extraordinary Tide: New Poetry by American Women. Awards include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the NEA. She is a distinguished professor of English at the University of Utah.
Wayne Koestenbaum knows how to drop the language in the blender of the imagination and hit frappe! The 13 ottava rima cantos in Model Homes present a neo-Freudian tale of the goings-on in the poet’s present home and various events from his childhood. Modulating a voice that is urbane and ribald, melancholic and wry, Koestenbaum puts a memorable spin on the status quo notion of domestic arrangements. Wayne Koestenbaum holds a Ph.D. in English from Princeton University. He was co-winner of the 1989 Discovery/The Nation poetry contest, has published three books of poetry and three books of prose, and writes frequently for The New York Times Magazine, The London Review of Books and other periodicals. He lives in New York, NY.