Robert Standish pimps it up for the last summer sizzle of 2009.

New from the author of "Nervous Systems," winner of the National Poetry Series.

William Stobb has won acclaim for wide-ranging poetry that features tender realism, jazzy dissonance, luminous descriptions, and, in the words of Donald Revell, a "strange and elegantly accomplished serenity of tensions attenuated to their uttermost." The poems in his second collection, "Absentia," see the big picture-the sweep of history, the ongoing evolution of consciousness, evidence of geological time in the landscape. Humbled by scales beyond comprehension, Stobb is nonetheless seduced and stricken by the present in its many manifestations. Whether dealing with family, friends, or nature, the poems in "Absentia," with their rich emotional palette and vivid, precise language, respond and transform, calling us to attend to the wide skies above and inside us.

Featuring the latest in art and contemporary poetry.

Selected for the 2006 National Poetry Series by August Kleinzahler
William Stobbas poems attend calmly to a dynamic world. Nature, family, and friends are among the shifting systems where Stobb finds poems. His fluency in a variety of formsafrom the measured tenderness of Jay Meek to the oceanic surrealism of Donald Revellaenacts the tension between order and entropy in the physical world we live in. aStobb has nerve, talent, and engages this madly accelerating, and often nearly indecipherable, world in whatas called real time, a writes August Kleinzahler, aand he manages it without sacrificing emotional truth.a