"You will be impressed by the intelligent, arresting poems in Burned House With Swimming Pool. They are so finely crafted their language shapes the public voice of personal experience with both clarity and complexity. In the poet's coming to grips with the successes and failures of middle age and middle America, she views life with the microscopic intensity only great writers can achieve." - AiLisa Lewis's books include The Unbeliever (University of Wisconsin Press, Brittingham Prize), Silent Treatment (Penguin, National Poetry Series), and Vivisect, (New Issues Press). A chapbook titled Story Box was also published as winner of the Poetry West Chapbook Contest. Her work has appeared in numerous literary magazines, including Kenyon Review, Washington Square, Third Coast, American Literary Review, Fence, Seattle Review, and Rattle, as well as a Pushcart Prize anthology and two editions of Best American Poetry. She has also won awards from the American Poetry Review and the Missouri Review. She directs the creative writing program at Oklahoma State University and serves as poetry editor for the Cimarron Review.

J. P. Dancing Bear is the winner of the 2001 Slipstream Prize. His poems have been published in New Orleans Review, National Poetry Review, Verse Daily, and many others. His work has been ten times nominated for a Puschcart Prize and once for a Forward Prize. He lives in Northern California and is the editor of the American Poetry Journal and Dream Horse Press, and hosts Out of Our Minds a weekly poetry program on public radio.

Love is a Burning Building is the second collection of what are also known by insiders as "the birthday poems," written as homage to friends, family, colleagues, associates, acquaintances, and contemporaries. In these works, Bear employs a hybrid form of the prose poem, relying on colons to break up phrases, refrains, and ideas, as well as to tear down some of those very same things. This combination results in a masterful balance in which language is exalted. Dancing Bear never loses track of his theme: cycles-renewal, rebirth, regeneration, change, growth, and hope. These poems are refreshingly positive in their outlook but are not ignorant of the negative facets of cycles that can age all of us too quickly. While the poems were written for individuals, they bear a deep, undeniable universality.

Jason Bredle is the author of Smiles of the Unstoppable, Pain Fantasy, and Standing in Line for the Beast, as well as the chapbooks Class Project and A Twelve Step Guide. He lives in Chicago.

TNPR contributors: Alexandra Eldridge, Aaron Anstett, Douglas Basford, Jaydn DeWald, Alice B. Fogel, Dorine Jennette, Les Gottesman, Elizabeth Hughey, Gerry LaFemina, Erika Lutzner, Elizabeth McLagan, Lynne Potts, R. T. Smith, Maggie Smith, Tony Trigilio, Emily Wolahan APJ contributors: Alexandra Eldridge, Jennifer Boyden, James Cihlar, Taylor Collier, Lorraine Doran, Rebecca Farivar, Paul Hostovsky, Jessica Jewell, Rustin Larson, ireann Lorsung, Stephen Massimilla, M. B. McLatchey, David Moolten, John A. Nieves, Doug Ramspeck, Lucas Scheelk, Elizabeth Harmon Threatt, Joshua Ware

Mark Conway is offering us a long letter to the dead, an appeal for a connection beyond the grave ("The Romans had a way / to talk to the dead: bring them / a bowl of blood . . ."). In poem after remarkable poem, Conway -at once sublime and profane-conjures, resurrects, cajoles, addresses, pleads with, and finally accepts, a lost (or imagined?) brother; heaven is invoked, redemption sought and rejected. We are all lost, these poems remind us, and yet "How beautiful was the city of the living this afternoon . . ." - Nick Flynn Reading these poems, I hear the clatter of my own footsteps through cities of hieroglyphs and pinball machines-a paradise run-through with ghosts, whom Conway conjures with grit and grace. Dreaming Man, Face Down hits me in the head and heart with image after stunning image, and the hard true language of love and regret. - Tracy K. Smith Someone dies - it's an anti-miracle. He was here and now he is gone. How is this possible? Deep, persistent and comic too, Mark Conway wrestles with the phenomenal entity of absence without giving an inch. - Fanny Howe These poems are electric with indignation and holy rage and love for the "hyper-beauty" of what and who is doomed to die: everything we know and every one. Oh Lord, read this book. It made me laugh out loud and put my head in my hands. It made me look out the window and be glad. - Marie Howe About the Author: Mark Conway is the author of Any Holy City which won the Gerald Cable Book Award and was short-listed for the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry. His work has appeared in The Paris Review, Slate, American Poetry Review and Ploughshares. He lives in Avon Minnesota and directs the Literary Arts Institute at the College of Saint Benedict.

THE ABANDONED EYE celebrates J. P. Dancing Bear's poetic strengths as a master of image, oftentimes surreal, though never losing track of emotion and meaning while dazzling the senses. Dancing Bear is a ventriloquist and impressionist rolled into a clever actor aware of the audience without pandering to it. He involves the reader in the evolving landscapes, all the while asking questions and examining both the inner and exterior scenes.

This is two great magazines sharing one spine Authors in the TNPR: Larry Sawyer, Tracy Knapp, James Grinwis, Julie Danho, Gregory Lawless, John Mann, Susan Rothbard, Edison Dupree, Heather Kirn, April Manteris, Mary Biddinger, Douglas Basford, Melissa Studdard, Amanda Auchter, Gerry LaFeminaAuthors in the APJ: Andrea Henchey, Andrew Sage, Lisa Fay Coutley, Sandra Kohler, Sandra Kohler, Kate Hanson Foster, Rachel McKibbens, Jeremy Halinen, John Estes, Lee Rossi, Kyle McCord & Jeannie Hoag, John McKernan, Bill Neumire, David Dodd Lee, RT Smith, Lois Marie Harrod, Andrew Cox, Katherine Williams, Lara Candland, Katy Waldman, Wendy Xu, Scot Siegel, Lightsey Darst, William Reichard, Arra Lynn Ross, James Cihlar, Sam Woodworth, Rebecca Foust

Two separate magazines: one spine. These two essential poetry publications now available in one handsome binding. Issue ten of the National Poetry Review features works by: Mary Biddinger, Amy Graziano, Stacy Kidd, Tom C. Hunley, Sidney Wade, Melissa Hotchkiss, MRB Chelko, Cynthia Cruz, Christina Hutchins, Jessica Piazza, J. Morris, William D. Waltz, Marcus Myers, Angela Vogel, and reviews of books by Amy Holman, Emily Carr, C.K.Williams, Michelle Boiseau, Angela Sorby and Gerry LaFemina. Issue ten of the American Poetry Journal features works by: Katie Jean Shinkle, Rebecca Kinzie Bastian, Jeannine Hall Gailey, Sandra Kohler, William F. Holden, Lia Brooks, Kate Hanson Foster, Rachel McKibbens, Alan Jude Moore, Kerri French, Kevin Simmonds, Octavio Quintanilla, Christian Nagel, Phoebe Reeves, Judith Skillman, Alicia Vandevorst, Rebecca Aronsen, Mike White, Aleah Sato, David Thacker, Michael Meyerhofer, Eleanor Swanson, Matt Summers, Keith Montesano, Julie L. Moore, Lois P. Jones, Emma Bolden, Tina Schumann, Ralph Angel; and reviews of books by Kristin Naca, John Miczeski, Saron Bryan, Beth Bachmann, Cecilia Woloch, D.A. Powell and David Trinidad, C.K. Williams, Jim Reese, Grace Cavelieri and Sabine Pascarelli.

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

J. P. Dancing Bear's poems have been published in Shenandoah, Poetry International, New Orleans Review, National Poetry Review, Marlboro Review, Mississippi Review, Atlanta Review and many others. He is the editor of the American Poetry Journal and the host of "Out of Our Minds" a weekly poetry program on public radio station KKUP that features many of America's best contemporary poets.