“Lisa Coffman is a major poet in the making. Imagine a voice that combines hear-of-American brooding like James Wright’s with a shaded elegance like Elizabeth Bishop’s. Imagine Whitman’s spirit somewhere in the vicinity. Imagine a love of small towns ringed by mountains, a shrewd ear for lonely folks’ dialogue, and a music that seems to pour out of your own life as you read these poems. Likely is a book brimming with surprises and beauty; some of the poems―’Rapture,’ ‘The Products of Hog,’ ‘The Graveyard’―left me breathless.”―Alicia Suskin Ostriker, Judge

"The voice \[in Anele Rubin's poems\] is so new, and yet the movement is so artful, subtle, and modest—there are never any theatrics in these poems. They never yowl, Pay attention to me! . . . Rubin is on the same wave-length with Tomas Transtromer and Yehuda Amichai... The emotional range of her poems, like theirs, is enormous, as is the range of locales, many of which I know well, and yet in Trying to Speak, they appear with a clarity that had eluded me."\— Philip Levine, Judge "Anele Rubin's poems illuminate an astonishing range of emotional experience. Visual, tactile, simple and complex, her words lure you from poem to poem—sometimes exquisite, sometimes austere, always original."\— Ruth Stone "This is a powerful and beautifully lyrical book of great wisdom, whose theme is emotional resurrection."\— Toi Derricotte

"There are poems which carry us clean away, transporting us into worlds as specific as the pink purse the author of Visible Heavens helps a little boy buy for his teacher, Miss Stone. Melancholy and loss, the missing of a gone mother, passion and solitude—-stirringly well mixed in one potent brew of a book. Readers will feel at home here, but they'll also feel ignited with new presences, keenly visible and invisible perceptions—-'It is a gift, this light we carry in our lungs....' Cheers to Joanna Solfrian for a fine first book, the stunning deep breath of her voice."—- Naomi Shihab Nye" "Visible Heavens is a 'measure of wonder' where the unadorned materials of language and life, of frailty, music, and mortality, propose to us profound beauties. Stitched with the silver thread of longing through hauntings and meditative clarities, Joanna Solfrian's poems are bracingly restrained, nimble and vivid, informed by earth, lifted by sky."—-Dean Young" "The exactitude of emotion that courses through these poems is quietly breath-taking. Continually and without fuss, Joanna Solfrian finds metaphors that go to the heart of many perplexed matters. These talents speak for her ability not only to express what is forgotten or merely ignored but what seeks the special grace of language. The experience is haunting; the poems are sturdy."—-Baron Wormser" "If you have ever loved and grieved, you will find yourself in these poems. Elegant, spare, and evocative, they capture the essence of both loss and resilience."—-Olivia Gentile, author of Life List: A Woman's Quest for the World's Most Amazing Birds.

Winner of the 1996 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize “Many of the poems in Rosemary Willey’s Intended Place are flawless meditations on possibility and denial. The voice in these poems is straightforward, and there isn’t an emotional placebo behind the terse syntax and the believable imagery. “From the very first few pages, we realize that this voice embodies empathy and a to-the-point inquiry. Rosemary Willey cannot keep her mind off the real things of this world, touching life where it feels good and where it pains, always snapping the chanced wishbone, and we are more blessed and richer for her daring talent.”―Yusef Komunyakaa, Judge