In Robison's Red Creek, we enter not only a site, but also the strangeness and longing behind it, the shadow that always moves with any illuminated thing. Her richly-textured images, clean phrasing, and gift for metaphor combine in poems that resonate in the reader's experience long after the reading. Seldom do we encounter poems in which posturing, whining, timidity, and fraudulence of voice are so consistently, so completely absent - put plainly, this is a true poetry. Steven Riel deftly confronts the truth without losing sight of the joy and possibilities - how to love, and how to dream. Janet Sadler's brilliant poems move like light, but tenderly, helping me to see joyously what had been hidden in sorrow, in longing.
Gene turns our attention to things that matter, radical medicine in a time of lost vision.
Anna Kirwan's poetry is that perfect blend of clear-eyed observation and the sudden high dive into the numinous. Since George Herbert's time, it has grown more and more difficult to be a Poet-Priest, and today the verse of churchmen, which ought to be all embracing, too often sounds specialized. Arnold Kenseth's vigorous and straight forward poems, in which barberry and burning bush are equally real, and 'known lies close to unknown.' are a blessed exception. And, thank you for your support.