Compulsions of Silkworms and Bees hums with attention to the act of creation. These poems are like watches that show their inner workings …. We see Poetry and Fiction (cast as sisters) presenting their different versions of events; an author's elegy for an orphan poem; poetry as mother and poetry as lover. When Baggott writes, "Everything is talking, / even the rooted irises tonguing air," we want to be able to hear it too. —Matthea Harvey

Compulsions of Silkworms and Bees, Julianna Baggott’s buoyant tour-de-force on the subject of poetry, addresses poems themselves, readers, critics, other poets, and her own creative life. Her answer-poems to student questions waltz in through side doors, saucy and light on their feet: “How is it that poems can just fail?” one asks. Among her litany of possible reasons: “The poem can marry Yoko Ono.” Witty and surprising, surprisingly serious, this collection has perfect pitch.    —Susan Ludvigson

Compulsions of Silkworms and Bees is a kind of instruction manual, a witty how-to that sometimes reads like a skewed update of Lu Chi’s Wen Fu, the ancient Chinese text on the art of writing. Teaching by example, Baggott’s poems ask the reader to pay attention, to observe and remember, to trust that “There is a wheel rut for each of us somewhere” wherein we might experience, and if we’re lucky, express, a truly poetic vision.     —Kim Addonizio

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Brian Swann's poems have been whittled from the tree of life and the acuity of his imagination into shapes and stories lovely and wise. They are full of "blades of light," affirming the visible beauty and the invisible mysteries of our world. He is, as he says himself, 'dazed by the everyday'. I have not read a book of poems so reverent and so delicious for a long time.     —Mary Oliver

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Kathleen Jesme's Motherhouse. $18.95 paper. ISBN 0-8071-3044-3. Selected by Thylias Moss.

This remarkable book-length meditation is part memoir, part spiritual diary, but first and foremost, pure poem. Set in and submitted to the rigors of convent life, these lyrics shine with winter light. Jesme writes: "my flexible voice / my ecstasy / I learn that prayer / is either silence / or song." Few writers are as adept as she is at listening to both.     —Elaine Equi

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Nils Michals has a marvelous knack for putting unexpected words in unexpected places‚—and for composing whole poems of such surprises. In these dense, rich lyric poems, he touches a wide range from the mythical to the quotidian with the same gleamingly precise sensibility. This is a striking collection that's not afraid of beauty or emotion‚—nor of the difficulties they have always presented to poetry. —Cole Swensen

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"While art is never a wholly adequate antidote to sorrow, its consolations can be enormous, as they are in John Blair’s beautifully nuanced and perceptive poems. Even as he leads us back through our own disenchantments, his “minor ecstasies of will” remind us of all there is in the world to love. The Green Girls is luminous in its language, a collection that rewards the reader, as in the title poem, with “whispers soaked / with the rooted strumming of trees, as light / and as muted as bare green bodies breathing in.” —Susan Ludvigson

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"Colloquial, cerebral, and deeply felt, the poems in A Sacrificial Zinc are an absolutely compelling mix of formal adventurousness, dazzling diction, and good story ... Matthew Cooperman is a very funny poet who is chronically interested and interesting. When he risks straightforward sweetness, he can also break your heart." —Maggie Anderson.

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"This book dares to forego the heavy-handed irony and satiric wink that are so often the chief characteristics of newer poetry...  Al Maginnes can be dark indeed, but his gaze is finally steady and straight ahead. He is aware, awake, amazed, and alive—all the things we want from a poet—and in language that ultimately blesses with the old lyric joy."     —Betty Adcock

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"In poems remarkable for their unflinching wisdom, for a maturity of vision too rarely seen in a first book, Kevin Prufer reminds us of that space beyond lullaby, of the fragility of life in a world where 'everything's / the chance for flying / failing somehow,' and of loss as inevitable, the hardest truth of all--how 'the body blooms, unfolding, / then is gone.'"    —Carl Phillips

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