Baron Wormser has pulled off a miraculous feat—he has written a collection of stories that reveals the absolute necessity of poetry in our lives. His prose style is riveting, and his characters are as diverse as a phone book. Each voice conjures up a passionate portrait of inner life, telling us—through episodes both comic and tragic—that the world of the deceased poet remains eternally relevant to our own.
—Clint McCown

“Poetry,” Baron Wormser writes, “is about generosity.” So too are these ten stories you hold in your hands. They are about generosity. And mystery. And loneliness. And life. They are about how poetry helps us “stay in our skins.” You will fall in love with these stories and with the ten poets who appear in them. What Baron Wormser says about William Carlos Williams, I say about him here, “He nailed it.”
—Ann Hood

A book of stories not about poets but driven by the presence of poetry and the shadows of poets: madness undoubtedly. But the best kind of madness! With this book, Baron Wormser invites us to reconsider the connection between poetry and our lives, to remember that we really do live hungry for inner vision, for small insights that can save us from the slag heap of goofdom and pointlessness. It’s a wonderful book. It’s the kind of stuff that makes you want to stay in the world.
—Tim Seibles

About Kazimierz Square:

Among other instructive pleasures in this new collection, Karen Chase’s Bear poems are an innovation. I recommend them to the reader—with caution, please!
—John Haines

Chase is fearless when it comes to the articulation of the imagination. Her work echos the philosophy of the dark romantics who advocated that the imagination is limitless and that art is the right place to share our best as well as darkest wanderings.
—The Berkshire Eagle

Often in reading Chase’s work I find myself commenting on how true a statement is. She has a great way of illustrating experiences we can all relate to . . . Chase sums up many emotions and images . . . we are right there with her . . . through the singular emotions, a scent or touch can bring to life, and along with Chase, we are able to marvel at the phenomenon that often something is closer once it is gone . . . Chase’s collection is sure to engage and challenge anyone looking for an awakening of lyricism and emotion.
—Another Chicago Magazine

Jack Wiler's poems are rock-bottom genuine, totally direct, and disarmingly moving. He's the Nazim Hikmet of Hoboken; his poems are full of great love for the broken world, great love for his fallen fellow human beings, and great rage at the inequity of things. And, somehow, hope, here in this world where "gorgeous rains of light / on?a cold August night . . . / might mean god is watching. / Not well or close, / but watching."
—Mark Doty

Jack Wiler thinks his life is not fun so he invites the reader to have fun . . . It is the glint of real that sparks every line in his new book . . . Wiler is one of our most underrated poets, and if you haven’t read him yet, here you go. In this book he even broaches his time with AIDS, a topic till now verboten for him. Fun Being Me is one of the best ten books of the year!
—Bob Holman, AboutPoetry.com

An aficionado of American absurdity, Jack Wiler writes poems that are droll, harrowing, angry, and disarming as they refuse mere consolation. A moralist in the tradition of Lenny Bruce, Wiler delights in the hypocrisies we blithely call normality. He is—happily—not above name-calling and he calls himself most of those names. His poetry is a perpetual wake-up call, a joke that won’t quit, an intuition about human nastiness that refuses to make nice, and, sometimes, an exultation about how this stupid world is too good to be true.
—Baron Wormser

Yehuda Amichai once divided poets into two categories: those with kishkas (guts) and those without. The latter type, he said, usually devised some justifying theory for their work, though they seldom touch the human heart. There’s no question which group fits Robert Cording, who is as much amused, baffled, and enchanted by the spiritual world as by the physical one he knows so intimately. Among scores of nonpareil poems here, there’s an especially brilliant one called “The Weeper.” And so full of kishkas is Common Life that its author might be dubbed “the weep-inducer.” Here is not only stunning poetry, but also poetry linked to things that matter.
—Sydney Lea

Robert Cording has a profound sense of the fissure that separates self and soul in present-day America. He doesn’t point or gloat; rather, in poem after poem he makes us feel the spirit that is lacking and the spirit that is brimming, that spills over the cup of existence each blessed day. To impart such feeling is poetry’s distinctive province and Robert Cording is a crucial poet, one who shows that our unflinching love can withstand our abiding fear.
—Baron Wormser

Rosen is at it again, at it still—“a life of appetite and anger, whittled / to this unintelligible, corpulent point” is one projection of what he’s at—but he’s hardly still (if he ever was); so much farther along the Via Negativa now, he’s gained a purchase on pursuit;  who else would have the authority to ask, “watching the night dissolve—how could it all be nothing?” Feasting on this copious poetry of and for the unbridled imagination, we neither need nor know the other kind.
—Richard Howard

Ken Rosen writes muscular, noisy poems that send the reader careening down the page. They are also engaged with the world and the very palpability of life, as well as being rich in emotional commitment. And they are a pleasure to read: packed with surprises, humor and an exact control of language. Rosen is a master.
—Stephen Dobyns

Alive and full of surprises, Kenneth Rosen’s poetry is like no one else’s. Tender, genuine, bawdy, ironic and seriocomic, he has the heart of a lyric poet, the mind of a philosopher, the complex soul of a clown. If there is such a thing as “outside” poetry, Rosen dares to write it. He is an American original, and his new book, The Origins of Tragedy, is one of his best.
—Elizabeth Spires

Mary Ruefle is one of the brilliant American poets of our time. Her work combines the spiritual desperation of Dickinson with the rhetorical virtuosity of Wallace Stevens. The result (for those with ears to hear) is a poetry at once ornate and intense; linguistically marvelous, yes, but also as visceral as anything you are likely to encounter.
—Tony Hoagland

Apparition Hill . . . dates from a 1989 sojourn teaching in China . . . These jolly poems about disappointment, irrelevance, and peripheral experiences give the willing reader a feeling not unlike that delivered by a tumbler of armagnac . . . If hers is sometimes a literary, knowing poetry, she gives it bite. In "Diary of Action and Repose," she destabilizes an already nonstandard nature scene (bullfrogs inflate in "some small sub-station of the universe," the speaker can smell jasmine being fertilized, that is, and an unseen flute player isn't setting a contemplative mood, but rather "asserts his identity / in a very sweet way") with the quip, "I'll throw in the fact it's April in China," . . . Ultimately, this is a poetry that craves, pursues, and secures the extra—the roux, the crema, the patina—that indicates the presence of beauty . . . —Jordan Davis, The Constant Critic

from Against Consolation

Connecticut Book Award Finalist 2004
Arlin G. Meyer Prize 2005

So much to praise in this lovely book: the grave, sweet, considering tone of the poems, that makes so much room for seeing things so clearly and for thinking about people’s lives, his own and those of others, so generously and without forcing conclusions on them. The skill with which Cording works, the subtle plainness and directness of his writing, opens the poems unconstrictedly to a wide range of emotions, sometimes elegiac, sometimes full of pain, sometimes registering experiences of unexpected joy, ”the plenitude of the unintended.”
—David Ferry

What I admire about Robert Cording’s latest collection is the way the poet keeps transforming his naturalist’s scrutiny of the world into moral interrogation, bringing to our attention, in poem after poem, “the strangeness we were born to.” Whether examining the dusty disintegration of moths, the death of a spoke grace, are indeed “against consolation.” . . . Exact in their language, balanced in their formal properties, these poems can finally celebrate “the plentitude of / the unintended,” and call us to a deeper, more complicated, more inclusive understanding of what “simply living” means.
—Eamon Grennan

from Breath of Parted Lips,
Volume 1

Book of the Year, Gold Award, 2001

This book collects the poems of 24 prominent American poets selected to live in Robert Frost’s Franconia, New Hampshire, home: Julie Agoos, Sharon Bryan, Robert Cording, Mark Cox, John Engels, Kathy Fagan, Christopher Gilbert, David Graham, Mark Halliday, Robert Hass, Denis Johnson, Cleopatra Mathis, William Matthews, Gary Miranda, Stanley Plumly, Katha Pollitt, Pattiann Rogers, Mary Ruefle, Mary Jo Salter, Sherod Santos, Jeffrey Skinner, Luci Tapahonso, Sue Ellen Thompson, Rosanna Warren.

Frost wrote, “Young poetry is the breath of parted lips. For the spirit to survive, the mouth must find how to firm and not to harden.” In Franconia’s Frost Place, young poets learn to firm their mouths without hardening their hearts . . . Great poems were written in this house.
—Donald Hall

from Breath of Parted Lips,
Volume 2

Voices in Breath, Volume I were more numerous and various than a single volume could suggest. This volume, edited by Frost Place poet and essayist Sydney Lea, collects the work of faculty, participants at the annual poetry festival, and resident poets who have visited after the appearance of Volume I. Contributors include Marvin Bell, Hayden Carruth, Amy Clampitt, Stephen Dunn, Dana Gioia, Donald Hall, Galway Kinnell, Maxine Kumin, Sydney Lea, Thomas Lux, Paul Muldoon, Grace Paley, Molly Peacock, Charles Simic, Jean Valentine, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Baron Wormser.

“An anthology of beautifully conceived and artfully made verse . . . recall[ing] the tradition of writing for the mind and heart.”
—Book Magazine

from Carolyn Kizer

Contributors include Agha Shahid Ali, Michelle Boisseau, Hayden Carruth, Fred Chappell, Kelly Cherry, Dominic Cheung, Lucille Clifton, Alfred Corn, Robert Creeley, Terry Ehret, Annie Finch, Jack Foley, William Holland, Judith Johnson, Maxine Kumin, Carol Muske, Robert Phillips, Marie Ponsot, Margaret Rabb, C. L. Rawlins, Ruth Salvaggio, Terry Stokes, Henry Taylor, Barbara Thompson, Kim Vaeth, Jackson Wheeler.

Carolyn Kizer was a feminist before the word came into vogue. Her famous poem “Pro Femina” legitimized a new generation of women writers’ attention to the undisclosed fact of their lives . . . The work of the last fifteen years has grown more political, more worldly, while at the same time preserving the candor and tenderness that illuminate such poems as “Gerda” and Pearl,” in which she writes from the point of view of the child she was . . . Carolyn’s mind has the broad range of a predator, the vocabulary of a lexicographer, and the rich lyricism of those song writers of the forties whom we both adore.
—Maxine Kumin

from A Gradual Twilight

Contributors include Rick Bass, Wendell Berry, Jody Bolz, Raymond Carver, Matthew Cooperman, Robert DeMott, Mike Dunham, Helen Frost, Tess Gallagher, James A.Griffin, Donald Hall, James Hopkins, Carolyn Kremers, Joel Kuritsky, M.D., Michael H. Lythgoe, David Mason, Jack Matthews, Thomas McGrath, John McKernan, Wesley McNair, Miles David Moore, John Murray, Sheila Nickerson, Greg Orfalea, Birch Pavelsky, Tamlin Pavelsky, Donna R. Sandberg, Nancy Schoenberger, Robert Schultz, Tom Sexton, Marion K. Stocking, Henry Taylor, Clark Waterfall, William Carlos Williams, Marcella Wolfe.

Haines is not merely a fine writer but a necessary one—a poet and essayist who enlarges his readers by challenging their unexamined assumptions. More important, he challenges their assumptions not only about art and literature but about life and the physical world. His vision is large, comprehensive, and earnest—ranging from poetry and painting to politics and the environment . . .
— Dana Gioia