My Painted Warriors is a book of sensual poems about the character of enduring love. Borrowing metaphors from nature, Penn probes the frailty of human life and connection. These poems are a celebration of ritual and an observance of season and the passage of time.

"Here is experience lived profoundly and distilled into a wise and brilliant ease. Though I have known Peggy Penn’s work since she egan writing twenty years ago, these poems astonished me. Penn’s subject is age: winter and funerals, yes, but also brassieres, orgasms after sixty, flourishing gardens, and four boys, her painted warriors. 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 companion and a sagacious guide."
–Molly Peacock

Baron Wormser's incandescent, exacting, generous intelligence never allows him the luxury of detachment. Like all real subversion, his poetry hinges
on responsibility. If there's irony, it's the irony of reality, of tragedy: the only animal that claims to know itself cannot save itself. Wormser can show you what's inside those emotions—hope, desire—whose outsides have names. Behind the playfulness, formidable technique and erudition; behind that, a mind that does not compromise. IMPENITENT NOTES
is essential work.
—D. Nurkse

The tradition from which Robert Cording’s poems emanate is the rich borderland between spirit and religion, between nature and God, between suffering and redemption, between Wordsworth and Eliot. The wonder of Cording’s work is how off-hand it seems—art-as-modesty and modesty-as-art. The humility at work here is genuine yet the dark questions about our time on earth remain. The answers are the poems themselves—equivocal yet powerful, resonant yet casual, calm yet fraught. To look human failing in the eyes and not blink is an achievement, to join praise in the same breath is very special.
—Baron Wormser

One takes an immitigable journey reading Walking With Ruskin by Robert Cording: the distance not far—a room, a neighborhood, a pond a mile off, a wood—but the sphere, the scope, is staggering. This is Dickinson meets Hardy meets Frost meets Yeats: vast emotional range; a deeply loving, empathetic gaze; stubborn exactitude and rigorous thought; and scattered everywhere about, the great contraries: life and death, light and darkness, song and silence, presence and absence, terror and ecstasy. While these traits of some of Cording’s precursors are visible, the liquid ease with which the tier of material flows concordant with the tier of manner is his own doing. Like slipknots being pulled taut, richly varied sentences always break concisely across the line: the reader never falls, and, when each poem concludes, he or she is left in a clearing with more, not less, to think about. To achieve, consistently, such resonant last chords, is true mastery—and generosity. Cording’s years chasing fleet-footed Eloquence have paid off: again and again, he catches her.
—Gray Jacobik

Oh Jack.  What can I say?  What can anybody say about Divina is Divina?  it's like you have all the words—for life and death, and every grungy and gorgeous, sweet and stupid reality in between.  Plus love, and plenty of it.  Who wrote the book of love?  You did, and the clang of your voice is food for all of us dogs, bacteria, and "lunatics coming in from the cold."
—Alicia Ostriker

Jack Wiler knows what it’s like to lose things. Like the sun. Like the moon. Now we know what it’s like to lose Jack Wiler. But we don’t. Because his poems are here. Like the sun and the moon. And some of them are perfect. “We Are Monsters.” “How to Succeed in Pest Control.” “Talking With Nat. The title poem, “Divina Is Divina.” And “My Beloved City,” maybe the best 9/11 poem ever written. Reading the poems is like having Jack back. With this book, his best, maybe more people will read his perfect poems and get it, that Jack Wiler’s voice is essential to US poetics. Like sex, and love, and food, and cockroaches. Like the sun and the moon. Keep talking, Jack. We’re listening.
—Bob Holman

This poet's relationship to language is nearly physical in its intensity. Fearless and headlong, these poems sing in service to love, loss, pity, and hope. Whether a story of Keat's last days in Rome or a B-team basketball game in a small New england town, or a poem that joins the Red Sox, Oedipus, and the sphinx and the Devil Rays and Grendel's mom in the same breath, this poet's ambition is large and her authority clear. In "Litany for J," a poem in memory of a dead friend, the poet recounts the list of things they had planned to get done: "sing like angels on moonshine, like fire, like sin." And she does.
—Ellen Dudley
 
John Keats might have been writing to Dawn Potter when he said, "There is nothing stable in the world; uproar's your only music." With a chant from the bad boys on the back of the bus and a honk of the gymnasium buzzer, these poems tackle the commotion of life: flip-flopping love (constant only in its thorny complications); glorious yet ignoble parenthood; and pitiless death, robbing us of our finest poets and closest friends. Here, "In our Troubled Sea, Mire and Mud heave up apace" and "America is stocked with Rattle Snakes," yet the earth is so beautiful even the devil hesitates before unleashing his havoc. All that's left to do is revel in the uproar--and read How the Crimes Happened. 
—Meg Kearney 

Over the past half century John Haines has become as a powerful independent voice in American poetry. An outsider to both academia and bohemia, surviving at a subsistence level on the margins of society, Haines has achieved a startling and often disturbing clarity about contemporary life and literature. He has brought existential passion back to poetry criticism, a field now so often permeated by languid politesse and pedantry. In equal measures brilliant, original, disruptive, and irascible, Haines is one of the major poet-critics of the age.
—Dana Gioia

Few poets in this country write with such abiding excellence and clarity of spirit as John Haines. His gifts, whether poetry or prose, constitute some of the best that American letters have to offer. In Descent, he writes about poetry, World War II and his many homestead years in the harsh Alaska wilderness. A rich, memorable volume, engaging and always rewarding in its revelations, it is a most welcome addition to the already long and lasting legacy of one of our nation's true literary treasures.
—Robert Hedin
 
John Haines' title essay advocates descent into the land and the corresponding rise or flight of the free imagination. The memoirs, reviews and meditations that follow develop these themes-a literary consciousness embedded in environmental awareness, the binary of descent and flight fulfilled by an eloquent and devoted man. John Haines refreshes our literature with his gentle urgency, his readings of great, often neglected writers and his unwillingness to utter cant. Important writing by a major American poet and essayist, this book is not to be missed.
—David Mason

Like snapshots pasted in the family album, these deceptively straightforward poems accrue a truly unsettling resonance in the aggregate.  Southern Comfort reads like a poetic memoir doled out anecdote by anecdote, each one tinged with an awareness of the unspoken just under the surface—the underlying ambivalence, shame and desperation common to too many of our childhoods. Long-time fans of Andrews' daring and inventive poetry will discover a different side to her aesthetic in this thoroughly compelling and moving book.
—Mark Cox

Southern Comfort has all the essential ingredients of a good southern tale: grandmas, biscuits, snakes, stringed instruments, a boy named Jimmy, ghosts, and the Lord. Nin Andrews turns her strange and wickedly accurate imagination on these predictable details and alchemizes them into a poetry of mythic proportions. Here, larger than life men and women, a “delusional” rooster named No Doze, an assortment of insects, and Elvis himself speak the language of metaphor and the gospel. “Sometimes he says/ behind every tale there’s another tale./ That’s the one he wants to tell.” That’s the one, or the several, Nin Andrews tells also in this deeply funny, deeply intelligent, truly southern book.”
—Maggie Anderson

An unmatched collection bringing to high school basketball the nuance and detail the film Bull Durham brought to minor league baseball. Poems so compelling, so varied, so familiar to anyone who has felt the impact of high school sports that they may well introduce a new genre. This is a terrific book – there’s nothing like it. —Conrad Hilberry 
 
Losing Season isn’t just a great book of poetry, for it is much more than that—it is more like the Great American Novel we have long hoped would grace our literary landscape. —Richard Jones

Laurie Lamon is an exquisite writer of lyrics…her antecedents begin with Emily Dickinson. She’s a great poet of inwardness...  Her work is delicate and pure, modern in manner, but written in her own voice…
— Donald Hall

I admire these poems – how they enact the lyrical equivalent of being in two places at one time. Lamon is drawn to edges, to that precise moment of transformation, and then, the moment after—the astonishing clarities of distinction. She does the near impossible—evoke a world at once continuous and still.
— Michele Glazer

The Red Canoe is a work of tremendous metaphoric complexity and richness, in which a woman’s pain – braided into a troubled marriage, branded upon an injured body – ultimately finds relief in the transformative power of language.  Joan Cusack Handler’s dual guises as therapist and poet merge as one in this healing book which, in the end, is an articulation of a keen intellect animated by heart and hope.
— Raphael Campo, M.D.

When I began to read The Red Canoe... I wondered about the bizarre shapes and halts of the words and ...letters on the page. Slowly, their meaning visited me. These poems invite their reader into private, hidden, unutterable spaces—the cul-de-sac behind the cervix, the gaps between adjoining vertebral bodies, the marriage bed. What courage it must take to see with this dramatic, piercing gaze. In acts not of anatomy but of vivisection, the blade of sight cuts through skin, fat, fascia, down to bone. Handler finds the most fundamental elements of that which is caught in her net—the cruelty of Catholics and Freudians in their ...unforgiving sneers at their deepest selves, the remote but tender silence of the grey-eyed husband who can only steal looks at his wife, the possession so intense of the son that it can only be rendered in prose.

Love here exceeds its bounds. Spilling over into body, food, sex, childhood, appetites, ideas, and pain, the poems achieve a brilliant fusion of the particular and the universal, the seen and the undergone, the body and the self. We are lustier, brawnier, better-fed beings for the prospects of Handler’s gifts.
— Rita Charon, M.D., Ph.D, Program in Narrative Medicine,Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons

In The Red Canoe: Love in Its Making Joan Handler brings both honesty and balance to the intricate world that is a marriage. Her means are consistently inventive as her lines enact feelings and thoughts. Her focus is unremitting as she makes the reader feel how much pain and glory can go into two people trying to accept one another. This book is unmistakably poetry but has the feel of a novel – one wants to know what will happen to these people.
— Baron Wormser

About Sam Cornish’s previous work

Sam Cornish and Folks Like Me is to poetry what Ray Charles and the song “Georgia” is to music. Both men were constructed for their art forms.
— Maya Angelou

Sam Cornish has a direct and insistent commitment to statement understood by feeling, experience, history, memory. He is a sharpener and a sander and a honer. He makes solid articulations his heart shapes with his mind.
— Amiri Baraka

Behind the clean lyric line there stands a man who is harsh and honest in his blackness, gentle and perceptive in his humanity.
— Maxine Kumin

Sam Cornish operates as a whole person He hasn’t chopped himself down into categories. The fullness of spirit in his poems proves he has somehow managed to survive clear and sane through the everlasting maze of babble and brainwash-print blasting our sensibilities every moment everywhere.
— Clarence Major

Buy the Book

Author's website

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

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