The lyrics in Sue Standing’s False Horizon quietly celebrate the lust that is living, the lust that is memory. “The risks we're taking aren’t really risks/ Orange trees. Umbrella Pines. Wisteria.” These poems, some of which are set in the far reaches of Africa and India, argue for the primacy of the present tense, a present tense that shines erotically out from under the beautiful drapery of a manifold rich and cultural world history. Therefore, False Horizons is a book full of sensations. And yet the world remains elusive and mysterious. “In the moonlight I can see the shadow of a tree that is no longer there.” Standing writes a wonderfully understated poetry about the intimacies of experience. She says, “I need a life that won’t diminish.”

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Literature & Fiction

Standing, Sue

Poetry

Four Way Books

Three Flights Up is the posthumous book of poetry by Beth Stahlecker and establishes The Stahlecker Series of Four Way Books: books by poets at decisive stages of their careers, favoring the shorter collection. This collection also contains an an Afterword by Ellen Bryant Voight.

Three Flights Up

Stahlecker, Beth

The Nervous Filaments

Lee, David Dodd

Poetry, co-winner of Four Way Books Award Series

The Tension Zone

Gorham, Sarah

Poetry  ...It is Pamela Kircher's genius that she makes of familiar material something unexpected and strange. She knows how to move a poem through rhythm and syntax so that it arrives finally at a wholly other place without having left us behind. There is great sadness in these poems, and excoriating vision, but they are a joy to read because they are so meticulously constructed: against the forces of destruction stands the greater power of this poet's shaping force. This is hard-won work, luminous and necessary and alive. --Michael Ryan

Whole Sky

Kircher, Pamela

These are bold poems, rugged and good, hard the way diamonds should be, but the way coconuts are as well. These works both sustain and delight, but what I am sayings most is they crack open, and constantly. Past the tired cemetery where the three year old Asks what's that little city made of teeth These poems surprise and push, line by line.  -- Alberto Rios, judge The Four Way Books Award Series

Radio Tooth (Award Series)

Jenkins, Paul

Poetry  ...Aleshire's reflective turn of mind, her profound engagement with nature, coupled with her gifts of music and insight, mark her as a poet to cherish and applaud.  -- Colette Inez

The Yellow Transparents

Aleshire, Joan

Shaving

This isn't a book to read aloud in polite company. But what a refreshment that is, given the overpowering strain of gentility and restraint in American poetry. Useful as decorum may be as a poetic virtue in Moore and Bishop, interesting as some poems are by Frost and Stevens that conceal rather than reveal, such tendencies have become moribund in lesser writers. There has been a justly strong reaction against the confessional, suicidal poetry of the Sixties. But Berg's work, while deeply autobiographical, is not confessional. It is meditative, "metaphysical": it presents profound psychic knots and tries to untie them or at least show us their shape. There is an amazing variety in this work, of tone, of movement, of narrative, of anecdote, of subject. Shaving is more presentational and objective (a la Chekhov) than anything by Lowell, Plath or Sexton. The self is certainly a similar amphitheater for Berg, but it isn't inexorably at center-stage; its sympathies and boundaries are wider. And it is this expansiveness (precisely what is lacking in confessional poetry) that is so exhilarating. Something absolutely new is being done in this book.

Berg, Stephen

This collection of poems are the record of the lives of a married couple who emigrate from Estonia to Canada during the first half of this century. The woman, a preacher's daughter and musician from coastal Estonia, is the narrator for the first 5 poems of Part One, Leaving Estonia. Her husband's voice interweaves with hers for the rest of the section. The man, an estate foreman, merchant, and farmer, is the speaker in Part Two, High Canada. The woman's voice returns as the major narrator in Part Three, Easter Snow. Voices Over Water is dedicated to Viktoria and Villem Nurske. The events in this book are fictitious.

Voices Over Water

Nurske, D.

"Susan Wheeler's Smokes looks like a book that sets itself the task of continuous invention and surprise... It's like listening to the still chancy and experimental transmission of the post modern vehicle gleefully downshifting into the breezy updrafts of the traditional musics of English verse, and then lurching into the future again. Smokes contains elegies, poems of urban and domestic angst, laments, invectives, cakewalks, struts. It's very much of the moment but it is also a deeply literary book -- how could it not be? And its confident rueful, and playful grasp of its tradition is eye-opening and, sardonic as it is, boisterous fun." 
-- the Afterword by Robert Hass

Smokes

Wheeler, Susan

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