Luke Karamazov is the true story of two brothers who were convicted of serial murders. In 1964, Luke Karamozov (nee Ralph Searl) confessed to killing five men over a three-month period; following in his grisly footsteps was his younger brother, Tommy Searl, who was sentenced for the rape and murder of four young women in or around the brothers' hometown of Kalamazoo. The events described in the book have the drama of fiction, but are very real events. Conrad Hilberry based his account on interviews with the two men, their friends, the woman whom they both married, and prison officials. Choosing to focus more on the texture of the men's lives than on the crimes themselves, Hilberry explores the movement of their thoughts and the ways in which they have each dealt with their brutal childhoods and their lives in prison. Luke Karamazov is an unusually vivid and detailed study of two contrasting psychological types. Drawing on Ernest Becker's Denial of Death, Hilberry presents Karamazov and his brother as extreme instances of behavior and states of mind that, surprisingly, are not uncommon. The result is a story that is at once bizarre and psychologically interesting.

In 1976, Wayne State University Press published The Third Coast: Contemporary Michigan Poetry, an anthology that offered a sampling of the best poetry written by Michigan writers. A second Third Coast anthology was published in 1988 with many new poets and a wider range of styles. New Poems from the Third Coast continues that tradition with fifty-six writers from across the state sharing their poetic glimpse of trout streams, schoolrooms, and restaurants, as well as portraits of friends, families, lovers, and life in Michigan.

Although this collection is only a sampling of the rich literary culture alive in Michigan, New Poems from the Third Coast is a lively, and carefully-crafted collection of poems from a variety of Michigan voices. Michael Delp, Conrad Hilberry, and Josie Kearns have balanced the old and the new and combined them in a strong contribution to contemporary poetry.

Readers will find in this collection a glimpse of the preoccupations and passions that are moving these American poets is at the end of the century. Lovers of poetry and students and scholars interested in regional literature will find an exhilarating range of styles in this volume.

The poems in Until the Full Moon Has Its Say were inspired by the loss of poet Conrad Hilberry's wife of fifty-six years, Marion. While the poems in this volume delve into the initial emptiness and hopelessness of grieving, the poet's connections to the natural world, music and other people ultimately bring him back into the present while still acknowledging and honouring the past. The work of a skilled poet with a lifetime of experience, this collection displays Hilberry's mastery of form. The book's three sections include a sonnet, five villanelles and a variety of stanza structures, all written in his signature tone, which is contemplative, tender and moving. The elegant poems of Until the Full Moon Has Its Say arise from the consideration of ordinary, even humble, subjects - a bowl on a table, a blackout, mosquitoes, garlic mustard, algae on the local pond. Hilberry's relaxed voice is wise and measured even in the depths of grief, as he muses, "How can I draw dead branches / in a poem?" Part of the answer to that question lies in the use of form, which gives shape to experience. In his formal virtuosity, Hilberry even writes a villanelle - a notoriously difficult poetic form - about writing a villanelle. Written by the poet in his eighties, Until the Full Moon Has Its Say is a powerful reflection on mortality and on the art that has been his lifelong practise. All readers of poetry will treasure this powerful volume.