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To See The Earth
By Philip Metres

Set in landscapes ranging from Russia to Kentucky, from Ephesus to the Murder Capital of the World (that's Gary, Indiana!), from Cleveland to Hiroshima, Philip Metres's superb poems explore the confusion and complexities that ordinary people face in talking to one another - in the slippery language of everyday speech, or across the secured borders of grammar and history. Words are not abstractions to Metres - they're as physical as fifty women making PEACE with their bodies, as mysterious as a bat soaring to unheard music, as illuminating as an ash tree 'burning into its name.' These poems echo in the mind long after the book is closed.
-- Maura Stanton

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A Martyr for Suzy Kosasovich
By Patrick Michael Finn

In a Martyr for Suzy Kosasovich, Patrick Michael Finn writes of the disappearing Midwest, of Joliet, Illinois, and its factories and assembly lines and rail yards leading out of town. The tension and violence that mark this fierce portrait of urban decay are tempered by Finn's insistence that the people in this world endure. Finn's voice is striking, rich with the poetry of lives measured by time clocks and fistfights, and his novella seethes with dark and fascinating magic.
-- Michael Jaime-Becerra, author of Every Night is Ladies' Night

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A Momentary Jokebook
By Jayson Iwen

I've never read anything quite like A Momentary Jokebook. It is wonderfully intelligent, terribly funny, thought provoking, often wise and always compelling. Think Milan Kundera meets South Park. What unifies this wide ranging work is Jayson Iwen's fresh approach to form and language, and his ability to surprise us and turn us on our heads.
-- Tom Barbash, author of The Last Good Chance

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Duo: Novellas
By Eric Anderson and Ruthanne Wiley

Pushcart nominee Ruthanne Wiley was the 1999 winner of the Ohio Writer Fiction Award for her story "Rain Silver on Me." Ms. Wiley earned her MA in English with a concentration in Creative Writing from Cleveland State University, where she studied with Sheila Schwartz, Tim Sandlin and Karen Joy Fowler, and was fiction editor of "Whiskey Island Magazine". Her short story, "Things That Cannot Be," was published in "The Berkeley Fiction Review" (University of Calafornia Press), in February, 2001. A former concert violinist with a bachelor's degree from the Eastman School of Music, Ms. Wiley lived in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, with her husband Eli Epstein, and son, Adam. On January 31, 2001, Ruthanne passed away suddenly and unexpectedly from heart complications.
Eric Anderson lives with his family in Elyria, Ohio. His poems and fiction have appeared in "The Sun", "Prairie Schooner", and "Whiskey Island Magazine". A chapbook of his poetry, "Confederate Season" was published in 2002 by Lorain County Community College.

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Sunflower Brother
By Sam Witt

Sunflower Brother pairs a pastoral setting with images of fire, explosion, irradiation, and burning; both sets of images are equal parts creation and destruction. Witt's voice always feels fresh from, and flushed with, loss and his elegies - poems written for the dead - not only acknowledge death and limitation buy try to reinvest the mourning self with life. The result can be both beautiful and direct, whether the poet addresses a deceased relative, or speaks more generally to what he percieves as our decaying world. Often it sounds more like Witt's been reading Keats than anything from his own century.
-- Katie Peterson, New Orleans Review 33:1

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Piece Work
By Barbara Presnell

One does not know which to admire more in this collection - its fierce documentary honesty, or the perfect pitch of its imagined speakers. The two come together memorably in poem after poem, giving us a deep and abiding insight into industrial and post-industrial America. This, too, is part of poetry's task: to tell what happened, and why it still matters.
-- Jared Carter

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