<p>These poems delight with their precise gift of the real and observable world. Food smells as it cooks, apple trees suggest their own history, jellyfish look like old dimpled glass. And beneath the keenly observed surfaces of things is the underlying world of ideas, and of feelings set off by the tripwires that the natural world lays in the path of the observant poet. There are forays, too, into a more imaginary realm, one where Adam's creation of language goes beyond the naming of the animals, where cloistered nuns resemble whales, and where the Dalai Lama visits Hadrian's Wall. These are not obscure poems, but they may challenge readers to reflections-reflections as startling as the sudden glimpse of unrecognition we experience when we spot ourselves in a dark window or an unexpected mirror. "Elizabeth Danson's poems live in detail. They note with witty affection 'the owl's head turning/further than it should be able to,' a wasp choosing a clean spot on a plate to settle, the 'plip' of a small frog hitting the water. They know that gulls stand on one leg to conserve body heat and that you should take 'almond for colic, cardamom for sweet breath.' They like to muse on the 'scribble' of landscapes and lives, delighting sometimes in their legibility, often in their mystery. As much magician as naturalist, Danson transforms what looks like solitude into something populous and even intimate: yew berries are 'sealing wax on sinister dispatches,' dawn is the suddenly close flush of a dancer's cheek, and even owl pellets can become 'dreams/filled with remnants of the day before.' With her precision of tone and tune she crafts poems that are at once wry and fond, sensuous and restrained, luxurious and clear." -James Richardson, author of Interglacial: New and Selected Poems &amp; Aphorisms</p>

The Luxury of Obstacles (The Ragged Sky Poetry Series)

Literature & Fiction

Danson, Elizabeth

Poetry

Ragged Sky Pr

These poems are short dances under the crescent moon. They carry a dreamy perfume that is light in the air. There are ancestors and tricksters around every corner. Hernández Peña's influences are the daily papers and his ancient Pre-Columbian family's posited tales all artfully played in stop-motion and flute-whistle. "To write poetry, Carlos Hernández Peña gives up his native Spanish and uses English-his 'alien language.' This otherness of his English allows him to write, as he says, 'from another side of the world,' aquellos ojos verdes, where tarantulas are amicable drunks and bottles are bruised. His wild new language keeps him awake 'through a white night' and wakens us to surprising lands where he asks whales to 'name this living' and icicles to breathe on our shoulders. His second tongue makes him puzzle the cold walrus and send the 'quetzal morning' flashing before our eyes. His new speech allows Hernández Peña to retell the old riddles in a new world: the 'Möbius strip confection' becomes the 'giant waves' that 'spin a riddle between birth and death.' We recognize his other world in our own mouths, and taste it new as 'sparks of snow.'" -Lois Marie Harrod, author of Put Your Sorry Side Out

Moonmilk And Other Poems (The Ragged Sky Poetry Series)

Carlos Hernandez Pena

<p>The threshold of what is about to happen or has just passed, the liminal moment- these are the subjects of the poems in this volume. As if the lift in the breath and the skipped heartbeat can be caught in words, as if the shadow were known as fully as the person who casts it. Anticipation is as important as accomplishment. There is attention to what often goes unseen, as when great wild cats pause before the pounce. Life seems larger and more luminous with these spaces filled in. The poems suggest that if we saw more and praised it, we might envy our own lives. "Elizabeth Socolow's poetry is at once graceful, powerful and provocative. She captures above all those flashes of consciousness, replete with evanescent meaning, that elude less refined perceptions. In this, she reminds me of Robert Browning's fascination with the 'moment one and infinite.' She celebrates the unnoticed small perfections of the natural world, like the spores of the fern, and links them to large questions of connectedness and complexity." -Evelyn Witkin, Geneticist, Director-at-Large, New York Browning Society. "Borrowing from ecstatic tradition, Elizabeth Socolow turns rapt attention to what lies 'between'-to the hidden spaces one seeks for safety, to solitudes and the tensile strengths that bind us. Her lovely, devotional reflections make repair of aging, loss and loneliness and show us many ways 'to love the days and be surprised.'" -Terry Blackhawk, author of Body &amp; Field and Escape Artist, Director of the Detroit Inside/Out Project of Poetry in the Schools</p>

Between Silence And Praise (The Ragged Sky Poetry Series)

Socolow, Elizabeth Anne

Escape Velocity (The Ragged Sky Poetry Series)

Weiner, Arlene

In these 66 poems, Anca Vlasopolos describes life and loss, ecology and extinction, in heart-breakingly beautiful images that cause readers to catch their breath at every line. The subject matter ranges from nature, both beautiful and blighted, to blighted urban areas like Detroit (sometimes beautiful in their blight), to characters (actual, fictional, mythological), to the poet's mother. Like all good poetry, it explores the human condition; like all great poetry, it offers insights into that condition that surprise the reader with a truth suddenly revealed.

Penguins in a Warming World

Vlasopolos, Anca