"Irresistible," wrote Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott when he selected Kathleen Ossip's The Search Engine for the Honickman Prize from more than 1000 manuscripts. "You feel like quoting her," Walcott continued, "because she is . . . so fresh and so open." Ossip's poetry is word-rich and music-lush, infused with fastidious hilarity and a genuine intelligence. It is a poetry of nerves, with a hunger for subtlety. She admits her influences easily, using pop songs and academic quotes in a self-confessed, even parodic search for her voice. As Richard Howard remarks: "An astonishment, this first book, and what a comfort!"

"Kathleen Ossip "teaches at The New School. Her poetry has appeared in "Best American Poetry "and "The Paris Review." She lives outside New York City.

In her groundbreaking and most politicized collection, Kathleen Ossip takes a hard look at the U.S.A. as it now stands. She meditates on our various responses to our country-whether ironic, infantile, righteous, or defeated. Her diction is both high and low, her tone both elegant and straightforward. The book's crowning achievement, its anchor, and its centerpiece is the poem "July." In a generous fifty pages, Ossip recounts a road trip from Bemidji, MN, to Key West, FL, with her daughter riding shotgun. Inspired by images that flick across their car windows and nurtured by intimate conversation and plenty of time to think, the poem has an entertaining cinematic sweep. There are poems based on bumper stickers, the names of churches, little shops. Traveling tests her beliefs, and Ossip fully discloses her doubts and confusions. Ossip is an unconventional, mighty magician with words.