From villages in Crete to Carolina farms to San Francisco pavement, the women in these poems struggle to live by their own lights, despite pressure for them to serve as mere appendages to men.  Aphrodite’s Daughter tells stories of women in myth, history, art, and contemporary life.  The goddess’s daughter, fed up with her role in her mother’s story, says to her:  “i’m leaving – i’m walking out/ of your myth finally – i need a mother not a love goddess. . .”  This volume springs from the sense that, as Adrienne Rich reminds us, under patriarchy women often feel “wildly unmothered.”

“Aphrodite’s Daughter is a stunning and absorbing collection of poems.”                                                                                                         —Pam Bernard

“Gibson has given us a rich and expansive collection, brimming with everyday mysteries, set against the background of ancient myth and ritual.” —Kathryn Stripling Byer, North Carolina Poet Laureate and author of Coming to Rest

Winner, 2005 X.J. Kennedy Poetry Prize:
Deborah Bogen
Landscape With Silos
ISBN: 978-1-881515-93-7 (1-881515-93-1) paper
$12.95
5 1/2 x 8 1/2 80 pp.

Landscape with Silos, with its dual reference to North Dakota farmlands and the unseen missile silos beneath them, is an exercise in how submerged truth can be revealed when a poet's talent for imagination and a slanted attention are brought to bear on what's ordinarily represented as the whole story.

"Deb Bogen writes poetry that is naked and necessary, unadorned and political, intelligent and generous. The book brims with intelligence. And reality."—Carol Frost

"Deborah Bogen's poems have a kind of unpretentious authority, sometimes ruefully realistic, sometimes quietly mysterious; the whole of Landscape with Silos goes to make something stronger and greater than its parts."—Jean Valentine

"Here are poems of a lively intelligence, agile, wounded, and wise. Landscape with Silos is a well-crafted, beautifully imagined, and transforming work. It is free verse that conjures form, and the poet reveals a range of mind and emotion that holds the reader entranced. This is, quite simply, a marvelous book."—Betty Adcock, Series Judge

"Lee Rudolph is among the least boring poets I know. His bold, inventive work keeps handing us fresh surprises, from the surreal hilarity of the title poem to the moving 'Little Prayers.' Master of many instruments, Rudolph can deliver fat-free free verse as well as song lyrics ('Lullaby'), experimental forms ('Escape Reading,' 'Scraps from the Dream Newspaper'), and tightly rhymed lyrics ('Beauty,' 'Weather Report'). You never know what to expect from him, except that each poem will be powerful, arresting, and original."—X. J. Kennedy

"I love these strange, witty, passionate poems, so rare in their range of far and near, here and there, light and dark. 'A singing lamp,' 'lamp skull.'"—Jean Valentine

Lee Rudolph was a founding member of the Alice James Poetry Cooperative, which published his first two books of poetry, Curses (1974) and The Country Changes (1978). He is also the author of Calculus of Elementary Functions (1969) and many research papers on "low-dimensional topology," the field of mathematics in which he has earned most of his living since 1974. He lives in southeastern Massachusetts.

"Clarity and honesty make many of these poems accessible and attractive."—Maxine Kumin, Final Judge

"Eric Nelson writes poems that (to alter one of his own constructions) put off their crowns and 'resume their ordinary lives.' Refusing any lyric note that might embellish or patronize or misrepresent the people and landscapes he loves, he achieves an art whose democratic vistas are an absolute delight to behold."—Sherod Santos

"These poems, though deeply rooted in family and our conflicted world, will get into your head, and fly."—Peter Meinke

Eric Nelson currently teaches in the Department of Writing and Linguistics at Georgia Southern University. He is the author of three other collections of poems: The Interpretation of Waking Life, The Light Bringers, and On Call.

“In Reliquary, Jan Lee Ande has created a steady, contemplative, and sometimes playful voice, often melding perfectly the factual and the fanciful, the hallowed and the sensual. These poems bring new perspectives to the commonplace—a stone, an avocado, a sea urchin—as well as celebration to the mysteries of human experience and the cosmos. Many lines, many images, many cadences of Jan Lee Ande’s poems will remain alive with the reader long after this book is closed.”—Pattiann Rogers

Jan Lee Ande’s first book, Instructions for Walking on Water, won the 2000 Snyder Prize from Ashland Poetry Press. Her poems appear in New Letters, Image, Nimrod, Notre Dame Review, Mississippi Review, Poetry International and the anthologies Place of Passage (Story Line Press) and Jubilation (Beat Books). She teaches poetry, poetics, and history of religions at Union Institute & University. Ande is from the Pacific Northwest.

"Jorn Ake's poems delight in the raw energy that words possess when they are given the necessary space and context in which to perform their magic. We read his poems a little breathlessly, with a delighted, uneasy wonder, ushered into a world where details stand out, good and bad, with a clarity and force not soon forgotten."—David Young

Adds Eleanor Wilner, "Here is a poet of candor, vigor and daylight vision, who loves without illusion. . . whose ear is unerring, and whose startlingly fresh images push up like 'wild mint . . . through sidewalks.'"

Posing questions about the making of art ("Is chaos / counterpoint to art, or instead, / its tuning fork?"), marriage ("How little is enough?"), faith, family, and selfhood ("Where does she begin / and I end?"), Lau explores "how life announces itself" at our uneasy turn of the century.

Her poems witness both the horrific the loss of a child, the greed of the impoverished, the motives behind child prostitution and common pleasures "so dense they sedate you."

Barbara Lau currently teaches creative writing, composition, and literature at Cornell College in Mt. Vernon, Iowa.

"In his magnificent poem 'Momentum,' as throughout Good Friday, the poet Philip Heldrich, like the late W. C. Williams, demonstrates audaciously how, while 'pulled and tugged in the swirl of rush hour traffic,' we can, out of the American quotidian, locate and frame that which is beautiful."—Jonathan Holden

"Philip Heldrich writes shapely poems that go places and share some wisdom with us. . . . He can capture a good deal of territory in a limited number of well-crafted words."—X. J. Kennedy

A recipient of the Council on National Literatures Award, Philip Heldrich directs the creative writing program and Bluestem Press at Emporia State University in Kansas. His poetry, prize-winning fiction, and essays have appeared in The North American Review, Connecticut Review, South Dakota Review, Southwestern American Literature, Chariton Review, Poet Lore, Weber Studies, The Kerf, Potpourri, Midwest Quarterly, and others. He currently co-edits Flint Hills Review and is vice-president of the Southwest American Culture Association.

"The Surface of Last Scattering is a brilliant book. From beginning to end, I felt my attention gripped by a true poet. A maker of stunning metaphors, Gray Jacobik revels in that swift and burning thought "like a line of sparking gunpowder wending toward a cache of dynamite." Here are poems of keen intelligence and disarming candor, ranging through a universe of feelings, from the barbed wit of ‘West of Tucson' to the poignancy of ‘Emily' and ‘Death Is a Material Flower.' There are splendid love poems (‘Sleeping In,' ‘The Beloved's Body') and astonishing meditations on everything from apples to the custom of foot-binding to the nature of genius. To read Gray Jacobik's work is to be pleasurably illuminated—to live in a wider and more finely comprehended world."—X. J. Kennedy

Gray Jacobik, winner of the 1997 Juniper Prize for her book of poems The Double Task (University of Massachusetts Press, 1998) has published three other collections of poetry: Sandpainting (1980), Paradise Poems (1978), and Jane's Song (1976). An NEA fellow, her work has appeared in Kenyon Review, Ontario Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Midwest Quarterly, Connecticut Review, Prairie Schooner, Southern Humanities Review, North American Review, and Georgia Review, among others, and her poems have been in a number of leading anthologies, such as The Best American Poetry, 1997 and Anthology of Magazine Verse and Yearbook of American Poetry.