Readers of new poetry have come to expect a certain amount of wonder in the work, a certain receptivity (here and there) to the non-rational, preternatural undercurrents which ordinarily reveal themselves to us with full force only every now and then. For some, poetry might even serve, in part, as a conservancy for that receptivity, a protected place for it to run free beyond the reach of all the paperwork and chatter. Rumored Animals is one such place. By turns ecstatic and grief-stricken, Quinn Latimer's poems-distinctive, audacious, elemental, and unyielding-render the world with all its strangenesses intact and vitality restored, asserting the legitimacy of another, more primal vision at odds with the agreed-upon, one where mountains / surround us with their animal / prowl, throw back // their black capes / and are done. This is a thrilling, defiant, and heartening body of work. --TIMOTHY DONNELLY QUINN LATIMER was born in Venice, California, and educated at Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University's School of the Arts in New York. Her poems have been featured in Boston Review, The Last Magazine, The Paris Review, and Prairie Schooner, among other journals, and have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Recordings or performances of her poems have also been included in exhibitions at Art Basel Miami Beach; New Jerseyy, Basel; Galerie J, Geneva; and Kunsthaus Glarus. Latimer lives in Basel, Switzerland, where she is a regular contributor to Artforum, Frieze, and numerous artist monographs and critical anthologies. Rumored Animals, which was awarded the 2010 American Poetry Journal Book Prize, is her first book. In her debut, Latimer draws on sources from contemporary photography and art--Diane Arbus, Francesca Woodman, Donald Judd--to develop a complex engagement with constructions of self and prevailing cultural determinations of the female and feminine. In rich, robust sounds and rhythms, the poet strives to recognize herself within surface and image (silver mirrors of ice, a water pale body miming my own), attempts to identify with the object of an outside gaze, figured as the looming presence of a brutally defining camera, and a discomfort at the fraught relation between herself as body and represented sign. More often than not, illusory, elusive reflective surfaces prove dangerously isolating (Blue mirrors/ of lakes linger like glittery apprentices.... In their reflection, I stumble...) while the poet's consciousness of being seen and fixed by another is spiked with mistrust: all borders are defined by/ a body and the water lapping against it./ Whose hands hold this picture?/ Whose eyes? Negotiating contradictory urges to conceal and reveal identity, Latimer allows a quiet refusal to come fully into view. This is an impressive debut. (Mar.) --Publishers Weekly

In Maggie Smith's Disasterology the poems lie down and make angels in the fallout as a tide of fire drags everything away. Whip smart and darkly funny, Smith chronicles how disaster proves itself time after time, film after film, yet another doom after doomsday. But everything is not one red phone ringing away from ruin. There is a future still waiting to be said, a hope that the pear trees will outlast us, bright, unending, maybe even sweet. -Traci Brimhall As with the Hollywood hairdos of her poems' heroines, no strand is out of place in Maggie Smith's fraught and funny new chapbook. Smith brings her characteristic crispness and smarts to questions of disaster, large and small, with poems that expertly snake through iconic films, color-coded terror alerts, and the bleakest of daydreams. Read it, and read it fast-tomorrow we might all be gone. -Natalie Shapero

Queer Fish is an original and daring book, crossing the boundaries between human and animal realms to transport us into the world of natural wonders where the poetry of deeply felt sensory experience is the key to inner truth. In this book of stunning metamorphoses, written with both precision and exuberant abundance, the conventional hierarchies disappear, and we are called upon to rejoice in our affinities with a horseshoe crab, an anglerfish, a condor, a tortoise, a damselfly, and squid. Intricately crafted and shrewdly observed, her poetry is participatory, coaxing readers to acknowledge their potential for both love and empathy: tonight I wake as an anglerfish, / ringing my world with light (The Anglerfish Finds her Muse) and for hate and destruction: We are all poison and poisoned / slick with oil / and its rings of dark pearl (When a Horseshoe Crab Grieves). In this
anti-fable world, animals discard their merely symbolic nature and become true agents, inviting us, human creatures, into dialogue and communion with them. These encounters redefine the poetics of Eros, as the scientific
blends with the magical, the mundane with the eccentric, and a human lover can inhabit the hermaphroditic soul / of love or become the long-eared hedgehog girl. The poet, like The Decorator Crab, is an eclectic collector of nature's ordinary miracles, but is also a creature being collected by other creatures - immortalized, loved and accused by the chorus of voices that usher us into the world of mysterious and joyful correspondences between human and nonhuman. --Lucyna Prostko Infinite Beginnings (Bright Hill Press, 2009)

With curiosity and wonder, Sarah Giragosian deftly crafts enchanting lyrics of menageries and memories, of mimic octopi and ostriches. Marianne Moore allegorized through pangolins and paper nautiluses. Elizabeth
Bishop interrupted the world in the strange gaze of a seal staring up from the bay, near the fish houses. Whether recalling girlhood memories of snails mating in the woods or imagining swimming beneath Portuguese men of
war's tentacles, Queer Fish pays loving attention to the honest signals all of life emits. These poems double for those calls, drawing us outside ourselves toward queerer imaginaries and more expansive intimacies.
--Eric Keenaghan, Queering Cold War Poetry: Ethics of Vulne

PressVisceral, physical, and powerful, Sarah Giragosian's poems unmoor us in landscapes both otherworldly and familiar, as we inhabit the fierce brains and bodies of other creatures and of those who admire them. Giragosian's language is lush, uncanny, haunting. Queer Fish is a book of passions intellectual and animal, crafted by a poet of unmatched compassion and talent. --Jennifer Whitaker, Winner of the Brittingham Prize in Poetry, The Blue Hour (University of Wisconsin Press, 2016)

What is Wen Kroy? It is New York spelled backwards, and when people come to the city in their youth, how can it be anything but? Through these poems, we come to love and understand the hardships of being young and the difficulty of building a self. Sheila Black uses the city as a character in the discovery of a self through love, passion, fear, and, in the end, empathy. -Jennifer Bartlett Some poets blindfold themselves to better see in the dark, others bravely face the day. Sheila Black is one of those. Big-hearted, generous, all-embracing, the poems in her stunning new book Wen Kroy awake us to a world where the ordinary is radiant, transfigured and at the furthest frontiers of experience pain shines like pleasure. - L. S. Asekoff Enter here Black's ghost-city held up to a mirror, her heart (your heart) on her lap like a terrible red baby. From the velvet, smoky hush of a room the moon is in and straight out into the streets and vacant lots and snow, Black spares us no thing. or Here is ruin and the blue-edged shadow we cling to, Lou Reed or Billy Bang playing the darkness. How I love the rage and tenderness in this voice. Indeed, nothing but simple aria and/ the glass breaks. -Joni Wallace This is a fantastic book. Sheila Black is a master of metaphor. In First Love she transforms loneliness into a raincoat pricked with so many holes. These poems speak expertly of desire, difference and danger. Wen Kroy captures all the motley messy details / of daily life with spontaneity and verve. - Jillian Weise Sheila Black is the author of House of Bone and Love/Iraq (both CW Press). She co-edited with Jennifer Bartlett and Mike Northen Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability (Cinco Puntos Press), named a 2012 Notable Book for Adults by the American Library Association (ALA). In 2012, she received a Witter Bynner Fellowship, for which she was selected by Philip Levine. She lives in San Antonio, Texas where she directs Gemini Ink, a literary arts center.

If you were to splice the DNA's of Walter Mitty and Salvador Dali, or Cuisinart together the collected works of Louis Simpson and Dean Young, you might get the poems of Bruce Cohen. His suburban speakers are often cleaning the garage or steaming off wallpaper in the bedroom, but secretly they are involved in criminal adventures of the imagination, in subtle and hilarious cultural critique, in fantasies of quiet desperation. These are rampages of irony, tenderness and wit, furnished with the verbal wizardry and bravado of a quiet maniac.-This is terrific work from start to finish, by a bright new poetry star in the American sky. --Tony Hoagland Bruce Cohen's Disloyal Yo-Yo is not a collection of poems so much as it is a full-blown surreal but humane visionary account of what it means to be alive in the 21st century. His imagination sweeps across his experience like the Super Doppler he hopes might hover over our lives to transmit intimate newscasts. And what gets transmitted in Cohen's poems is not only the intimacy of human relationships but the strange, quirky, unpredictable transformations, a tornado of patio furniture, that refreshes and reinvents our world. --Michael Collier Like the paintings of Rene Magritte, the songs of Tom Waits, and the Coen brothers' films, Bruce Cohen's poetry offers observations that are simultaneously razor-sharp recognizable and arrestingly askew. His poems are haunting and hilarious, coolly surreal and stingingly poignant. As the best literature always does, his poems knock me off-balance as they expand my understanding of the absurdities, challenges, and dividends of modern life. Cohen sits at the top of my short list of favorite contemporary poets. ---Wally Lamb Bruce Cohen's poems, which I have known for years, keep coming back to me in some askew way that leads me forward. He is one of the most loving and unpretentious humorous poets I know, and the incisiveness of his craft is always guided by awareness. He means poetry to be quick--bared, vital, bold, original, alive--and he pulls all this off again and again. Finally, a whole collection to begin to do Bruce Cohen's poetry some justice. --William Olsen

Hero: A Podenco's Tale depicts the experience of many Spanish hunting dogs in a tender, honest fashion that respects the intelligence of younger readers. While it refrains from graphic, gratuitously upsetting vignettes, it also refuses to condescend to its reader by hiding important truths, instead allowing the parent, not a publisher, to decide what depth of content is appropriate for each individual. For parents and others who want their children's education to include an understanding of the plight of animals and the need for increased compassion for animals, Hero: A Podenco's Tale provides a solid beginning with a light touch.

Dan Rosenberg drank all the great masters, took them inside, dead and alive, all alive. He explodes them and then he says: I want the sun to be potent and kind. The sun listens. Or: The heavens are bleached out with streetlights and we all feel larger. The reader's body reacts. Only the power of true poetry can make this happen. Here. In this book. - Toma alamun At once tranquil, blighted, and ravenous in a time all its own, The Crushing Organ leaves no room for allegory, prophecy, or symbolic disclosure of any sort. Dan Rosenberg has a new kind of system where things already apprehended are things already agreed upon, which is to say filthy, annoying, and complicit in the horror these poems both survive and indict. But it is also a system for learning new joys, wakefulness, and physical kingdoms which have not yet begun. yellow my finger in the lily. It doesn't keep to itself. Nor will the liberties in this striking book. To read it is to feel volition do its work on you. -Peter Richards Quick, immediate, and deeply compassionate, Rosenberg's poems cover the vast range of the immanent quotidian. Through all their impossible turnings, we're nonetheless convinced that we're in the presence of the concrete, even the documentary. And while they recognize pressing catastrophe when they see it, yet they also see a way out-in a burst of flame, in storms with eyes, in a wire hanger bent to the shape of a human heart. Rosenberg has given us a tour de force of hope achieved through, rather than despite, a clear view of the current world. -Cole Swensen Dan Rosenberg holds degrees from Tufts University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He is a Ph.D. student at The University of Georgia in Athens, GA, and a co-editor of Transom.

What I can't figure out about Gregory Lawless's new collection of poems, Dreamburgh, Pennsylvania, is how he did it. This is a book about family, about sorrow and love and joy and people and fun. It's a community book. A book about community. You open this book, to any poem, and are faced with this question: How do I put it down? Because you can feel and see yourself in the work. Dreamburgh, Pennsylvania is hard to put down. Honestly, I don't know if this place exists in the real world but Lawless is such a tremendous poet that it's difficult to think that it doesn't. Actually, it doesn't matter. Somewhere in that space between a dream and not-a-dream is the place where these poems take root, where the buses are powered / by the collective goodwill / of the people the litter / is beautiful most everyone recycles / and we think about death / only once in a great while. I couldn't put this book down. You won't be able to put it down either. --Matthew Lippman

Dreamburgh, Pennsylvania is a world both hilarious and heartbreaking, familiar and utterly new. Here, we meditate upon family, mortality, agency; we come to recognize the vivid and the absurd as harbingers of truth. Here, we are human, which is bewildering and beautiful; we would not trade places with the angels, bored to death by everything / they understand. I notice / all the birds and things not noticing me, // but I'm too half brokenhearted not / to notice them back, writes Lawless, and we are grateful that he notices and that he shares Dreamsburgh's terror and tenderness with us. --Dora Malech

Taciturn, hilarious, strange and true -- Gregory Lawless's poems are funny like Jack Handey and big-hearted like Denis Johnson. I'd trust no one else to take me to Dreamburgh and steer me through the traffic. --Jack Christian

Written with the layperson reader in mind, Such Small Hands explores how our current pet culture exists in a state of contradiction and dissonance, how this condition fuels an underlying feeling of despair across the culture, and what can be done to remedy the situation in order to achieve safety and well-being for animals and the humans who care for them. Seeking a cultural shift in the treatment of companion animals, Certified Canine Behavior Consultant & Certified Professional Dog Trainer Rain Jordan provides a brief history of aversives and a primer on the philosophy and practice of anti-aversives in animal training, handling, and care.

John Keats was of the belief that a life of any worth is a continual allegory. A.E. Watkin's debut collection takes on the notion with a lovely seriousness. The brilliance in these poems isn't simply in their lyric surety-a music so unfailing it turns image melodious-but in using lyric for a purpose often neglected in contemporary poetry. The poems here become a space in which the grain of the personal is held within the furrow of the allegorical, and over the course of a year, we witness the speaker's identity suffer into symbolic sympathy. That sympathy is erotic and agricultural-that ancient twining-and allows Watkins to invoke the world of Orpheus and Eurydice into his own, all while showing his readers, as a poet must learn to do, the reciprocal consequences of having one's own life called back into the forgotten one. Well, the forgotten world save only for poems such as these, which refuse to accept the post-modern condition as a separation from our allegorical one. These are poems of wonder and nostalgia, and a reminder that such conditions are not easy, but are instead evidence of the very wound that wondered this world green. -Dan Beachy-Quick Herein, a poetry that takes its time, forgoing pyrotechnics for a low, slow burn. Other elemental activity's here as well-the wind flogging the prairie; the mind dirtying itself; a glass of water having its way with a stick. Dear, Companion is a definitive bewilderment, a bountiful catalog of thought and observation and loss. Read it and reap. -Graham Foust A.E. Watkins is a graduate of the St. Mary's College of California MFA Program and currently attends Purdue University, where he is pursuing a Ph.D. in nineteenth-century British literature. Dear, Companion, his first collection of poetry, was runner up for the 2011 Amercian Poetry Journal Book Prize. His poems and reviews have appeared in Barrow Street, Copper Nickel, Denver Quarterly, Hayden's Ferry Review, Ninth Letter, Sycamore Review, and elsewhere.

Midway through James Cihlar s splendid Rancho Nostalgia you ll find some advice: Keep reaching into the past / to grab something new. One of the great wonders of this book full of wonders is that Cihlar follows his own instruction so brilliantly. Whether invoking scenes from classic movies or from the poet s own life, the results are poignant, complex, and full of bracing insights. These poems feel like they re being projected from a beguiling, not-quite-familiar place somewhere behind us, close to the border, where / the light is good.
Mark Bibbins

James Cihlar s poems in Rancho Nostalgia contain the twisted love of a stage mom and the nervous energy of an Oscar Show producer. Here s a cinephilic poet who can pretty much direct anything, even the transformation of Sherlock Holmes into a wharf rat. Of course, Cihlar can t shut off his camera. A woman s face is the Wrigley building lit at night. Teddy Roosevelt and Winston Churchill are rag dolls in the future s toy box. And Cihlar s alter ego parades down Wall Street wearing a diadem of wheat. At one point, he flatly says, Inspiration comes when we don t want it. Lucky for us he has the conviction to be willfully misguided. Every page in this book possesses at least one tiny miracle.
Steve Fellner

You know the marquee, the one above that closed and chained movie palace you still pass every time you visit your hometown, hoping it has been resurrected. If you managed to get inside, you d feel as if you were drifting in and out of someone s noir scrapbook, which also housed scratched glossies and faded lobby cards from Hollywood s golden age. Rancho Nostalgia s title should be spelled out with an achingly incomplete alphabet on that dark marquee. In this engagingly surreal collection of poems, Jim Cihlar has produced what we ve been secretly yearning for. He s located the keys to that movie palace, shaped the absent letters, replaced the projector bulbs, and polished the lenses clean but not too clean. When you take your seat and watch the smoky images begin to move on screen, you ll feel the bittersweet tug of our collective irretrievable pasts.
Eric Gansworth

About the Author:
James Cihlar s previous books include Undoing and Metaphysical Bailout. His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Awl, Court Green, Smartish Pace, Prairie Schooner, Lambda Literary Review, and Forklift, Ohio. He lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Like a man who might go fishing as a diversion only to catch somethingextraordinary, maybe Gary L. McDowell didn't set out to write a big fat hymnto the human condition. But he did. The brilliant American Amen wrestles, body and spirit, with our belligerent world. It's a tensile poetic line McDowellcasts, in the many senses of the word: this poetry throws, sheds, exhales, reckons, sows, shapes, bestows. Part gristle, part faith, American Amen is abeautiful book, reeling in something baffling about adulthood as it glintsand flexes, alive, into the air.- Amy NewmanGary L. McDowell's poems shimmer with masterful variety-long sinuoussequences and short intensifying lyrics; personal narratives and prayers tosteel, wheat, and corn; family poems, of a father and of a son, yet poemscapable of rich otherness: I found my history in the tiny / bones of ahummingbird. For all this productive range, the center of McDowell'simpressive first book, American Amen, is love, whose abiding act is acceptance.That's what the word amen means-whether in Jewish, Muslim, or Christianusage-and that's the deepest gift among the many gifts of these poems. Ashe writes himself, out of loss and gain, out of terror and awe, after all, incase of fire, any god will do.- David BakerIn this age of new-didacticism a reader of poetry might sometimes wish toask poetry to delight first, then worry about instructing. Gary L. McDowell'sAmerican Amen does just that, line by gravid line, one dazzling momentafter another, in poems that are wholly true. A romance of place andperson continually undergoes scrutiny and comes out from disillusionmentto wonder, manifold mysteries, and joy-honest, stunned, self-forgetfulglimpses of the illimitable. An unsettling yet steadfast vision obtains, of origin, longing, creation, and departure-all revealed as inevitable yetunpredictable forces of grace. This is an astonishing collection, a poetry ofresoundingly human and natural marvels.- William OlsenAmerican Amen is a moving and remarkably mature debut. In it one finds aMidwestern Robert Hass-impeccably tuned to birdsong, the whisperingtrees, the erotic and broken heartbeat of the every day. The collectionwrestles the unbeatable ghosts of family and manhood; what kind of manam I, these poems ask, What does love mean? Hiking through a forest offamilial apparitions the poems yearn to understand fathers and grandfathers.In gutting a fish they can find the sublime. Gary L. McDowell's bigshoulderedpoems house both self-doubt and a bottomless well of kindness.American Amen wondrously pushes into the dark with its heart in its fists.- Alex Lemon

A sensual, lyrical journey into modern day mythos.

There is a splendid intercourse between the dream and the conscious life in Matthew Guenette's poetry, a constant mental eventfulness that never rests, never surrenders to the old, dried up poeticisms or the stereotypes. A Guenette poem feels ongoing, flung, a creation in the absolute keep of the imagination, a moving revelation where nothing is forbidden or held too precious. Like every good funny poet, Matthew Guenette is to be taken seriously because he is deeply sane, a writer who cleanses us of pretetention and restores our wonder. Sudden Anthem is a brilliantly inventive debut.-Rodney Jones; Sudden Anthem is a raucous, boisterous, song of praise. Matthew Guenette's outrageous poems romp across the page then make a beeline for your gut, your heart, and your intellect. Guenette is both a nimble purveyor of pop culture and a singer of the most intimate of songs. Sudden Anthem is a deliriously witty collection.-Denise Duhamel

Juliana Gray . . . is a beautiful and keen poet. My word, a gifted vision, almost egoless and yet fullhearted. -Barry Hannah Juliana Gray finds abundant inspiration in the sudden turn within the everyday- in family, Hitchcock, poetry itself. Pointing into the view, she moves nimbly between voices playful at times and darkly serious; Roleplay is wildly imagined, flawlessly crafted-a stunning collection. -Claudia Emerson To find such wit and canniness about self and sex in American poetry, we have to look back to Dorothy Parker. Of course, we can look across the Atlantic to Wendy Cope. Juliana Gray has their sense of style but something else, too, which is all her own. She has located the ferocious tension in the undercurrent of society, which comes out as slapstick in comedy and violence in tragedy, but in either case is the same thing: human desire in conflict. Gray's inimitable humor is dark, indeed, but brilliant. -Mark Jarman In her second collection, Roleplay, Juliana Gray continues to dazzle with deft language and dark humor. The agenda of The Devil Plans His Day begins Up at daybreak with the crows. Starbucks. / Tell the anorexic goth barista / how beautiful she looks, and overtip. In Psycho, from a series inspired by Alfred Hitchcock, we remember the three rules of homicide location location location. An aging Nancy Drew lists herself on Match.com with Turn-ons: lightning, crosswords, antique clocks. Pop culture is just a stepping-stone for the poet, who wears her formal sensibilities lightly; playing wife to Philip Larkin, the safe word is Ted Hughes. Gray has the rare blend of confidence and deprecation needed to navigate themed sections (Casting Call, Method) that question identity, acting, and the inner life. This book is important-without seeming self-important-and each page an unexpected delight. -Sandra Beasley

Winner of the 2011 Dream Horse Press Chapbook Prize Ariana-Sophia Kartsonis's book, Intaglio, was published by Kent State University Press in 2006. Her collaborative chapbook, Emuseum, written with Caleb Adler was published in 2009. She currently works at Columbus College of Art and Design where she is the facuty adviser for Botticelli Literary/Art Magazine. Kartsonis lives in Powell, Ohio with cats Cricket and Guthrie and cool-cat, Mitch Lear. Cynthia Arrieu-King is an assistant professor of creative writing at Stockton College and a former Kundiman fellow. Her books include People are Tiny in Paintings of China (Octopus 2010) and Manifest (Gatewood Prize, Switchback 2013). This year she served as a Dodge Poet. Her poems will have appeared his year in Offending Adam, Everyday Genius and American Books, Steck Editions. Her collaborations with Sophia have appeared in Boston Review, New Orleans Review, Black Warrior Review and many others.

Spinoza is rubbing my glasses again, leaving / the middle range blurred for a reason. / Any truth is a blur, Barbara Carlson begins one poem, then carries us to Spinoza's periphery with Miro, Chekhov and Jesus in quick order. Truth is not only a blur, but what we find in the unexpected. It is the haunting music in all that is unmusical, but out of which this essential book of poems creates an essential music. Ranging from Hungary and Slovenia, across the US continent, from Orpheus and Schubert the everyday world of love and death, Carlson gives speech to the unspoken. Yes, we are driven up a Fire Road that is rarely travelled except by hikers and emergency vehicles and we find ourselves in the uncanny position of both wondering and mending, of discovering that the light of dead stars / is full of gusts and grace. All of which is to say this is an amazing first book, a wonder, a book I dearly cherish. -Richard Jackson Carlson evokes blindness, deafness, and muteness over and over in Fire Road. Speechless yet compelled to speak, she works to articulate the surreal, kaleidoscopic world around her. In the process she discovers that If the words make you mute your soul will be fed. A soul is seeking - and not always finding - its mate in the universe but Carlson's courage pushes her on. Reading this sojourner's book the boundaries of my own world dissolved and another universe was revealed. -Tam Neville The poems of Barbara Carlson follow in the now-quite-venerable tradition of surrealism. They are poems where the world of dream and of the world of our quotidian lives comingle and coexist. But Carlson is never interested in the easy pyrotechnics and associative glibness which so often characterize poems that nod to the surrealist tradition. Instead, she offers her mysteries in a voice that is quiet, humble, humane, and the best of the work recalls certain moments in the lyrics of Bishop, Ritsos, and Follain, poets whose greatness lies in making what is homemade seem strange, and what is strange seem matter-of-fact. These are bracing and durable poems, and their delights and insights are many. - David Wojahn

Richard Garcia is the author of Rancho Notorious and The Persistence of Objects, both from BOA Editions, and a chapbook of prose poems, Chickenhead, from FootHills Publishing. His poems have appeared in The Georgia Review, Crazyhorse, Ploughshares, Pushcart Prize XXI and Best American Poetry. He teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Antioch University Los Angeles. He lives on James Island, SC. His website is www.richardgarcia.info.

In The Even Years of Marriage, Ash Bowen bravely explores the difficult mysteries of human relationships. In this powerful book, a new American voice, honest and forthright, probes without flinching the depths of love, hope, disappointment, failure, and regret. These sharply honed poems are like daggers in the heart. -David Bottoms Ash Bowen's debut poetry collection carries its readers from the bedroom to the heavens in order to define what it means to be alive at this moment. The world seen in The Even Years of Marriage teems with promise while echoing strains of loss, with a constant awareness of personal mythology and universal longing. Bowen's poems are home to an eerie intimacy where desires mingle and clash, as in The Last Known Love Letter of Poseidon, where the speaker states, My power can pull down any stubborn star / my finger chooses but cannot draw you back. / I wonder at the clatter coming from the dock: / Is someone knocking my name from off your boat? This collection trusts the reader with secrets, and Bowen's voice inspires our own notions of what makes us whole. -Mary Biddinger In The Even Years of Marriage, love is barely enough to hold a relationship together, jealousy is terminal, and movie screens mirror every attempt at affection. Bowen's gifts with wit and image offer all the things I want from poems-intelligence, self-awareness, humor and empathy. In this book, the radioactive troubles of the universe arrive on earth like collect calls from outer space, reminding us that life requires an extravagant amount of forgiveness, and It's the gravity of Earth that makes letting go so hard. -Traci Brimhall Ash Bowen holds an MFA and PhD in creative writing. He lives with his partner and step-children in Alabama, where he teaches creative writing and literature at the U of A in Tuscaloosa.