At once a highly suspenseful psychological thriller and an ambitious literary work told from multiple points of view, Rivers Last Longer takes its turns, sometimes satirically, through the New York literary, art, and film worlds as it tells its story of friendship, ambition, murder, and love.

Maker of Shadows finds regions on the map-Mumbai, Cape Cod, the Midwest, the Middle East-and in the mind where violence alternates with laughter, and despair gives way to desire. Tropical islands soon to be submerged plead for tourists, and Sun Belt cities beckon those who would deny death. Yet these poems find humor and solace in daily life, from irreverent looks at banks, dogs, and gods, to glimpses into the inner lives of a rat exterminator and a father bathing his child.

Lyrics for Old Lovers conjures up couples walking down a beach holding hands, smiling contentedly into the setting sun, but old love is not like one of those three-mast sailing ships in a bottle with no waves and no wind. Old love tests the heart.

These poems are about living a lifetime together, happy, funny, familiar years of growing old with the one you love, but they are also about tough years of caregiving and heartache, of loss and survival, of regrets and loneliness.

The poet has lived these poems, finally discovering a need in herself to accept life again and move on. Yes, life again, in the form of another love; and because love comes in all ages, she finds that old love "without the urgencies of youth" can be soft and sweet and easy on the heart.

Degenerate is a road trip novel out of Kerouac and Nabokov, a comedy of revenge and satire about Los Angeles that brings to mind Nathaniel West and a story of love and loss at turns lyrical, hilarious and heartbreaking.

Set over the course of one winter at a hospital in Washington, Across the River is a linked series of stories about the trials of the body and their meaning for the spirit. From the psychology of brain surgeons, to a suicide who has time to regret his act, to a college student's first encounter with blood, Across the River brings together separate voices telling the common tale of how thinking beings encounter their own mortality.

The title poem, for Anthony Hecht "a truly great success in its knitting together of the modern scene, recent history, and Homeric myth," finds a wizened Penelope hawking embroidery to tourists. Another recalls the death of Marilyn Monroe--how it awakened the sexual consciousness of a boy for whom her spirit became the scent of cured tobacco. An odyssey whose settings range from the Carolinas to Crete, from the Romsdal Fjord to the Buffalo River, Penelope's Design also pays homage to such geniuses of place as Thomas Hardy and A. E. Housman, in whose Shropshire a 50-year-old literary pilgrim meets his own lightfoot ghost. Often elegiac, these richly allusive poems smile at the diminishing returns of aging and capture glimmers of a numinous Otherwhere.

These are poems that range in subject and setting from the profane to the sacred.

Rooted in the life and culture of the South and Southwest and employing a variety of forms and voices, they address the mysteries of the past, personal and collective, and survey the possibilities and liabilities of the present.

Whether conversational or incantatory, each strives to approximate music, in keeping with the author's insistence that dancer and dance be one.