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The poems in this collection have a level gaze. We smile at the foibles of people and relationships exposed here-the church organist, Snow White, the carefully balanced "un-couple"-yet finally we're sympathetically implicated with them. Spare, quick-moving narratives carry us along for a day at the beach, a family reunion, a last ferry ride, each of which is more-is a key to the meaning of a life. Foos is particularly appealing when writing about flawed but loving families. These are deeply compassionate poems. Even a searing political poem-and it's a knockout-gets its power as much from sorrow as from anger. After all, as Foos says, we're just happy mutts, "looking for crowns for our efforts." "These poems open with the relentless push of small flowers. They grow in a tight corner plot bright with iris, marigold, and brave truth." -Michael R. Brown, author of The Man Who Makes Amusement Rides "I simply can't resist a poet whose prayer is 'Give us this day our daily bread/in the form of toast'-or who gives drowned virgins a second chance to 'tread the mucky earth.' Ellen Foos' work combines startling candor with effervescent wit. She makes being human seem breathtakingly easy, a difficult task in a world as complicated and cluttered as our own. Read her and you can't help but be refreshed. This is a book of small, big, and offbeat pleasures." - Elaine Equi, author of The Cloud of Knowable Things

I Should Have Given Them Water is a sensual and heartbreaking new collection of poetry by San Francisco-based poet Eileen Malone. With a maximalist style, Malone's hard-edged poems make the most of grammatical ambiguities and compel the reader to fully engage with her unique sense of the incongruous. Offering feminine as well as feminist testimony to the experience of being a woman in the 21st century, Malone is a widely published poet, mental health activist and the host of a television series on the arts in California.

Miss Plastique, the fourth full-length poetry collection by Lynn Levin, invites the reader into a world of female bravado in which Miss Plastique and her many selves rant, fret, joke, fall in love, dress up, and do their hair. Poems inthis collection first appeared in Boulevard, Artful Dodge, Hunger Mountain, Connecticut Review, Knockout, Nerve Cowboy, and other places.Lynn Levin, a poet known for her eclecticism, humor, and range of poetic styles, is the author of the previous poetry collections Fair Creatures of an Hour, a Next Generation Indie Book Awards finalist in poetry; Imaginarium, a finalist for ForeWord Magazine's Book of the Year Award; and A Few Questions about Paradise (all from Loonfeather Press). Her craft of poetry book, Poemsfor the Writing: Prompts for Poets (with Valerie Fox) is forthcoming from Texture Press in 2013. Lynn Levin is also a writer and literary translator. She has received nine Pushcart Prize nominations, two grants from the Leeway Foundation, and Garrison Keillor has read her work on his radio show The Writer's Almanac. Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Levin has lived in thePhiladelphia area since 1980. She is the 1999 Bucks County, Pa. poet laureate and currently teaches at Drexel University and the University of Pennsylvania.Advance praise for Miss Plastique:Miss Plastique is a busy girl: giving it to her enemy in stiletto heels, giving it up to an Elvis impersonator, thumbing a ride across Texas. She has turned from the mirror and can't look back. She's sexy and seductive and refuses to be pinned down; she's silk so fluid you could drink her-read her instead, but watch she doesn't explode in your hands. -Meg Kearney, author of Home By NowThe poems in Lynn Levin's Miss Plastique hold their tension between fantasy and devastation. -Jill Alexander Essbaum, author of NecropolisThis book is just as explosive as plastique and packed as tightly and with the impeccable craft you'd expect from a good detonation expert. Lynn Levin has the perfect timing and sensitive touch of one who works with volatile materials-an Elvis impersonator, the Beav and Eddie Haskell,Gaspara Stampa, Eve and Lilith at Macy's. We are better for the aftershocks of this verse. -Christopher Bursk, author of The Improbable Swervings of Atoms

An original collection of poems by Luray Gross. "Luray Gross' Lift represents the work of an accomplished poet at the height of her powers. Assured and lyrical, with no word wasted, Gross' poems are precisely observed while containing multitudes. On subjects that range from childhood, adulthood, and family life to religious faith, war, and social justice, the stories Gross tells are united in their power to move us toward a new recognition of our shared humanity. Gross assures us, 'Language will not abandon us/ will say what needs to be said, enough/ to make the world a burden we can bear.' Thankfully, we have this graceful poet to lift us out of complacency and despair and to elevate our understanding." -Ethel Rackin, author of Evening