The first verb in SB Stokes' magnum opus, A History of Broken Love Things, is "wanna." He is a poet of hope, expectation, and desire, which prepare us for the erratic path of life as it is actually lived: "a large weepy beast, / a guy with some hats, / a stark-raging husband, / an ineffectual queen." In the beautifully titled poem, "dark magick / a solitude by duke," he writes, "The piano pounds its own heart into bits." But even desolation offers its glittering souvenir. Read this book and prepare to have your life lifted, your heart broken. Paul Hoover, editor of Postmodern American Poetry

Hugh Behm-Steinberg's Shy Green Fields is in company with books by poets who wrote about glorious ordinary days in extraordinary times. In a pillowbook of a hundred seven-line poems, this life, as it is written, has the shadow of Robert Creeley's A Day Book behind it, and the shadow of Federico Lorca in his famous, reiterated line, "Green, I love you, green, ." a specific, and pacific, emotional response in difficult political times. Behm-Steinberg's book is, likewise, carnal, primal, and intellectual. Shy Green Fields exults in experience, "Such versions!" --Jane Miller