This long-awaited book is the first to offer a complete and clear presentation of the therapy of the Milan Associates, Luigi Boscolo and Gianfranco Cecchin. Based on cybernetic theory, their work has had dramatic success in helping families change behaviour. This practical and enlightening book uses clinical cases and the fascinating conversations among the four authors to examine the relationship between Milan theory and practice.Transcripts of sessions conducted by Boscolo and Cecchin,which include a family that is hiding a history of incest and one dominated by an anorectic girl,provide vivid examples of family interaction and therapeutic imagination. In the accompanying conversations with Boscolo and Cecchin about these sessions, Hoffman and Penn take us behind the scenes to show how the therapists think through and conduct their therapy. These highly readable conversations clarify the essentials of the therapy, including hypothesizing, circular questioning, positive connotation, and crafting interventions. Like Milan therapy itself, the interviews are recursive new ideas about the therapy feed back into the conversations and stimulate further revelations. A lengthy introduction sets the Milan approach in historical context, and introductions to the individual cases highlight the main ideas.

Writing with deceptively straightforward language, and finding much of her imagery in the equally deceptive simplicity of nature, Peggy Penn recalls those moments that can shape or shatter our comfortable perspective of life, and she transforms these encounters, finding in them both questions and answers. A late-night scavenging of a ravenous bear in "Dancing in the Dark" is about the other as intruder, invoking sexuality and fear.

Penn probes the character of enduring love and the frailty of human life. These poems are a celebration of ritual and the passage of time.
"Penn's subject is age: winter and funerals, yes, but also brassieres, orgasms after sixty, flourishing gardens, and four boys, her painted warriors. The images of these poems, both tender and bright, are as surprising as the sudden ruby of blood from a cut. Their sensibility is as understanding of humanity as any reader could hope for. Penn encases the double helix of love and loss in the ordinary, whether that is a cantaloupe or the hair on a wrist. Worlds into worlds open up in My Painted Warriors, transforming this book of poems into a collection of miracles. It is the kind of poetry I can turn to when I wake in the night, the voice of both a fellow companion and a sagacious guide." - Molly Peacock