Laure-Anne Bosselaar's poetry captures the lives of "lost souls roaming" -- be they young girls in convents, merchants, whores, widows, soldiers. Old Europe still lives in Bosselaars's rich language: Entre chien et loup, as it's known in Flanders -- the time at dusk when a wolf can be mistaken for a dog.

In "Small Gods of Grief," Laure-Anne Bosselaar explores her childhood in post-war Belgium and her later struggles with grief, love and identity in contemporary America. Ms. Bosselaar mixes imaginative lyrics, narratives and dramatic monologues in this empathetic account of what it means to be human.

Laure-Anne Bosselaar, a native a Belgium, has lived throughout Europe and the United States. Fluent in four languages, she has worked for Belgian and Luxembourg radio and television stations. Ms. Bosselaar's first poetry collection was the critically-acclaimed "The Hour Between Dog and Wolf" (BOA). She is an editor of poetry anthologies and is translating American poetry into French. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Beginning with a harrowing account of her childhood in a Belgian convent, where she was placed at the age of four, Laure-Anne Bosselaar shows us how early emotional and physical deprivation can be overcome by intelligence, humor, curiosity, and determination. Although many of her poems are overtly autobiographical, they are never merely personal.

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Stephen Dunn wrote of A New Hunger: "There's a time in the life of a poet as a maker of poems, if she or he is going to become more than just good, when the voice of one's second self fully emerges, distilling and orchestrating the poet's concerns, while simultaneously infusing them with an inner melody-a music that reaches and satisfies both ear and mind. This is to say that Laure-Anne Bosselaar, with her wonderful third book, A New Hunger, has become more than just good. It's an occasion to mark and to celebrate."

The acclaimed author of two previous collections (The Hour Between Dog and Wolf and Small Gods of Grief, which won the 2001 Isabella Stewart Gardner Prize), Laure-Anne Bosselaar grew up in Belgium, where she worked as a talk show host, commentator, and voiceover for Belgian radio and television. Fluent in four languages, she moved to the United States in 1987.

Belgium's leading poet for many decades, Herman de Coninck has never been translated in English and collected in a single extended volume until now. Witty, tender, trenchant, wise, de Coninck's poems range from playful, terse love lyrics to darkly ironic, somberly truthful observations about human experience. The ability to compress huge subjects into small, formally sculptured poems is a hallmark of his style; conversely, what might seem too small to write about is often transformed by his imagination into his understanding of war, and of how psychological imperatives and social roles may trap us in self-destructive fates.