"Katie Ford's is a finely-wrought lyrical beauty, a poetry of detail and care, but she has set it within an epic arc." --"Poetry
""I lie still, play dead, am delivered decree:
our daughter weighs seven hundred dimes,
paperclips, teaspoons of sugar,
this child of grams
for which the good nurse
laid out her studies
as a coin purse
into which our tiny wealth clinked,
our daughter spilling almost
to the floor.
"--from "Of a Child Early Born"
In Katie Ford's third collection, she sets her music into lyrics wrung from the world's dangers. "Blood Lyrics" is a mother's song, one seared with the knowledge that her country wages long, aching wars in which not all lives are equal. There is beauty imparted, too, but it arrives at a cost: "Don't say it's the beautiful / I praise," Ford writes. "I praise the human, / gutted and rising."

The visceral new work by Katie Ford, whose poems "possess the veiled brilliance of stained glass windows seen at night" ("The New York Times Book Review")
If you respect the dead
and recall where they died
by this time tomorrow
there will be nowhere to walk.
--"Earth" With gravity and resplendence, "Colosseum" confronts ruin in the ancient world and in the living moment, from historical accounts and from firsthand experience. Displaced from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, Katie Ford returns this powerful report attesting to the storm's ferocity and its aftershock. Ford examines other catastrophes--those biblical, obscured by time, and those that play out daily, irrefutably, in the media. "Colosseum" is an essential, moving book in its insistence that our fates are intertwined and that devastation does not discriminate.

Sigourney Weaver stars in this made-for-TV drama as a mother trying to come to terms with her son's sexuality. Mary Griffith is a Christian who is devoted to following her church's rigid interpretation of the Bible. When Mary learns that her son Bobby (Ryan Kelley) is gay she refuses to accept his homosexuality and believes that through psychiatry and religion he can be 'cured'. At first Bobby goes along with his mother's plan but he soon becomes deeply depressed and eventually commits suicide. In the aftermath of his death, Mary begins to question her faith. Will she finally be able to accept her son for who he was?