Robert A. Fink

What Bruce Lack offers in the poems in Service is truth—complex, ambiguous, paradoxical, contradictory, impossible—about the experiences of a Marine fighting the Iraq War and the jarring transition that comes with returning home to find the war reduced to background noise for a remote civilian population. Bruce Lack’s forceful, authentic poetry confronts the human cost of sending young men and women to fight a war of questionable justification against an insurgency unbound by rules of engagement. Lack’s poems engage honestly with the frustration of fighting an elusive, ruthless enemy, the guilt of surviving when others do not, and the residual anger that may never leave the generation of veterans of the War on Terror. Written in the voice of the Marine but directed toward and accessible to the civilian, Service is a book that seeks to close the communication gap between the two.

What Bruce Lack offers in the poems in Service is truth—complex, ambiguous, paradoxical, contradictory, impossible—about the experiences of a Marine fighting the Iraq War and the jarring transition that comes with returning home to find the war reduced to background noise for a remote civilian population. Bruce Lack’s forceful, authentic poetry confronts the human cost of sending young men and women to fight a war of questionable justification against an insurgency unbound by rules of engagement. Lack’s poems engage honestly with the frustration of fighting an elusive, ruthless enemy, the guilt of surviving when others do not, and the residual anger that may never leave the generation of veterans of the War on Terror. Written in the voice of the Marine but directed toward and accessible to the civilian, Service is a book that seeks to close the communication gap between the two.

The thematic motif found within these poems is one of "knowing": the desire to know the mystery of love in its many forms and depths. Examining daily living, this book’s four-section poem sequence is one of immersion into the paradoxical life; familiar yet filled with inexplicable beauty. As it investigates displacement from family, from love, and from self, this compilation discovers that the mundane transpires in an austere and holy place peopled with angels unaware, that faith can exist in a place of stone—absolution is available daily—and that redemption is found in strange places.

vanitas: A still-life painting of a 17th-century Dutch genre incorporating symbols of mortality or mutability. —The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary Jane McKinley weaves together memories, myths, and interior worlds to create a vanitas of her own. With an oboist's mastery of rhythm and form and a painterly eye for detail, the poet retraces scenes from her childhood, allowing us to witness its shattering conclusion: the death of a beloved sister and its silent aftershocks.

Soaring across extensive terrain, from the working world of Detroit to American suburbia and pop culture; from the European landscape of World War II to the current war in Iraq, Christine Rhein opens her personal world to the world at large. In poems that explore the historical, social, and scientific, as well as the poignant and humorous, Rhein relishes life's juxtapositions. '""Wild Flight"" introduces us to an important new voice... This is a poetry of the highest imagination, and the most energetic intelligence, written by a poet with a keen eye and a large spirit. Her hard look at this life is made beautiful by her art' - Laura Kasischke. 'One of the mysteries of human life is that it is never an individual journey, a truth that Christine Rhein discovers over and over in this remarkable first book. In ""Wild Flight"", she walks us artfully through the histories she comes from and those she is witness to in our time... The personal is political in these large-minded poems, and the political personal' - Roger Mitchell. From ""Tuning"": I try to tune out the boom! boom! boom! from the shooting range two miles from my house, and think of the people who live next door to the targets, or in the din of London and Berlin where nightingales now sing fourteen decibels louder to be heard by mates, quintupling the pressure in their lungs . .. Imagine if we could hear bread rising, dew forming, the budding of raspberries, the tear of a cocoon, a minnows pulse, our own cells growing, dying. When my husband kisses my ear, I love the swoosh, the quiver, his breath sand driven by wind, my whispered name.

"Linked thematically and by recurring motifs, these essays explore perishing and available means of grace--faith, love, friendship, work, and joy. For Fink, work is his craft--poetry--and teaching writing and literature. He finds joy in running; in the beauty, order, and grace of baseball; and in laughter"--Provided by publisher.

The twelfth volume of poems in the ""Walt McDonald First-Book Series"", Gregory Fraser's ""Strange Piet"" is a compelling exploration of illness and family life, memory and desire, friendship and loss. A major focus of the collection is the poet's relationship to his brother Jonathan, who was born with spina bifida, a disease that rendered him both physically and mentally disabled. In rich and often wrenching detail, Fraser describes the emotional turmoil, familiar dysfunction, and complex social responses arising from the birth of a handicapped child. The book examines cultural standards of normalcy, and uncovers those aspects of the self and others that are often considered freakish, unnatural, or 'monstrous'. What emerges is a poetry of poignancy and intellectual rigor, of private discoveries and larger philosophical questions about faith, beauty, and the redemptive power of art. The various other poems in the volume frequently take up disturbing subjects from domestic abuse to violent global conflict, from the death of a parent to the breakup of a close friend's marriage. By turns urgent, tender, skeptical, and wry, Fraser's work displays a complexity of thought with a clarity of language and imagery. A two-time finalist for the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, ""Strange Piet"" is, according to Robert Phillips, 'an important debut'. Phillips also writes, 'This book, from beginning to end, shows the hand of one who has mastered his craft and lived long enough to have something to say'. James Olney of ""The Southern Review"" describes ""Strange Piet"" as 'a resounding triumph of strictly ordered emotion'.

Rick Campbells journey from the banks of the Ohio to the beaches of Florida is a rhapsody, and the music he makes in ordering his world takes us with him, to the headwaters of a new river. 'Rick Campbells poems leave some sweet dirt under your fingernails proof of hard, honest work when the longing of small-town America is not enough. ""Setting the World in Order"" eloquently plots our geographically impossible trajectories. On the way, Campbell can lay down a narrative as spacious as the range of a blues harmonica, every gritty riff dissolving into compassion' - Dionisio D. Martnez. 'Rick Campbells poems move with grace and muscle and music from the Catholic working class of his youth, its factories and foundries, along the rivers of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Florida, and through the lives of the flesh-and-blood characters of contemporary America. Part prayer, part song, part gritty story, they always dance with meaning and significance; they always wholly embrace the idea of individual presence in a terrible, beautiful world' - Frank X. Gaspar From ""Harmonica Lesson"". Go with the rhythm till you cant get off the track. Like this. Tight-belly staccato, hands cutting and freeing the air, one hard-held bottom line. Play between trains. Keep the wheels in mind. Catch the next one and play all night. In the morning try the whistle. Youve earned it. It should sound like Kansas. ""Setting the World in Order"" is the tenth winner of the Walt McDonald First-Book Prize in Poetry, selected by Robert Fink of Hardin-Simmons University, editor of the ""Walt McDonald First-Book Series"".

Miriam Vermilya was a retired grade school teacher and a well known painter and writer in Greenville, Ohio, where she lived. When she died unexpectedly in January of 1999, the Greenville Writers Group, of which she was a founding member, collected these poems into what became the winning manuscript of the 1999 Walt McDonald First-Book Competition in Poetry. The poems sum up Vermilyas reflections on her life, love, and marriage; the deaths of friends and family members; and, most poignantly, her own aging and death. Her voice is calm, practical, even humorous; never morbid, always generous. By her example she encourages us to feel, while we have time, the beauty of our own joys and sorrows from ""Consider Socrates"". We all say we want it to be sudden: a lightning bolt to the brain, a stutter in the arteries, then sleep, or something like it our hands still clutching the rake or an atlas turned to a map of Afghanistan but wouldn't it be better to know a three-month warning would be nice; you'd want to burn those letters nestled in a shoe box on the closet shelf, finish up the pint of Seagrams hidden in the desks third drawer and trash the butt-sprung underwear a derelict would be ashamed to wear to any accident. Do not go gentle? Miriam Vermilyas poems are indeed gentle in their grappling with the great mysteries of love and death, but they are also tough, sharp, warm, and beautifully shaped. 'These poems leave us with our own terrible, sweet division, caught between regret that their author did not live to see this first book published and gratitude that she left it to nourish and delight us' - Jeff Gundy. '""Heartwood"" is full of poems that convey a fine sense of immediacy as if Miriam Vermilya were thinking the poem through as we are reading it. Her voice is sometimes witty, other times plangent, but always sharpened by a curiosity about what lies ahead. This is a rich collection, packed with fresh, stimulating lyrics' - Billy Collins.

In the bone-dry land of mesquites and drought, Janice Whittington has found images that allow her to explore womans place in West Texas and the world from the perspectives of daughter, wife, friend, and mother. Filled with fear and fire, joy and sorrow, dust and water; the poems risk stepping into air, striving to glide like hawks on thermals. '""Into a Thousand Mouths"" is the account of Eve after the fall, after she follows her husband out of the garden and of tilling yield... It is the account of one woman, of all women that female secret of wombs/the ache that folds into the chest/and stays, a wound/nursed into a jewel (""Daughters"")... The connections between women and a needy world seem to be infinite, as the five sections of the book suggest, orchestrating and developing the connections of women to their fathers, their mothers, their grandparents and great-grandparents, to their heritage of pioneer women, to their displacement from the fecund East and their alienation in the seemingly barren West, to their daughters, and to their husbands...[ Whittington's] Eve has planted her jungle west, not east of Eden, and like the trumpet vine that shares orange buds (""Rain Forests"") and the desert plants that put down roots (""The Roots of Desert Plants""), her jungle just might flourish' - Robert Fink, from the Foreword. ""Woman of the Sea"": Did she caulk the cabin cracks with bread dough, the dirt too hard to chip into mud? Did wedding quilts drag the floor, capes for one who had packed away her veils? Did her hands bleed from lye scrubbed into shirts, from breaking manure and cactus into chunks for fire? Did she turn her back to the wind or lift her chin and dream of oceans, wearing her hair loose, bits of coral catching wisps in a red comb, inviting men full of salt to sail through dangers to her arms? Did she one day slip pins from her hair and step into waves of the prairie, searching for shore and singing?

This probing book of poetry is structured around one man's quest for healing and salvation. From his high school years in Texas during the early 1960s through his college teaching career 30 years later, the male persona of these poems searches for his lost father, for forgiveness and faith, for love and family. Throughout the collection, seven poems trace events from Saint Paul's quest for healing, proving a complement to the struggles of the contemporary man. The miracle that is life is chronicled here in terse and moving poems. The Vietnam Vet Looks for His Sons at Summer Basketball Camp Basketballs drum the floor. A hundred hearts race up and down the court. Intent as salmon leaping up the falls, these middle schoolers drive for backboards, spin lay ups through the hoops. Young men on the evening news slam chunks of metal down a pipe they aim toward towns where other boys draw circles in the dirt, spill out their bags of marbles. 'Vivid and touching...from Vietnam to North Hollywood, from Abilene to Damascus [Fink] lay[s] permanent claim to a wide territory' - X. J. Kennedy.