Poetry of both the mind and the heart, Plato's Breath embraces the power of imagination to transform the ordinary into an extraordinary affirmation of life.

Ms. Fargnoli's heartening, disturbing, mature first book is rich with two things poetry can never have enough of: energy and wonder.

"An accomplished poet with credits in such literary magazines as APR, Paris Review, Ploughshares, and many others, Stephen McLeod is the 2001 recipient of the May Swenson Poetry Award. Judge for the competition was Richard Howard, internationally known poet and winner of the Pulitzer and many other poetry awards. Formerly of Dallas, Mr. McLeod lives in Brooklyn, where he is an Assistant District Attorney. He was educated at Southern Methodist University,...

May Swenson Poetry Award Volume 7, with foreward by Alicia Ostriker. Nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize, Ms. Bishop's credits include publications in Antioch Review, 13th Moon, Eratica, Aries, The Little Magazine, and many other literary journals. As a poet and writing teacher, she gives many readings, as well as workshops for gifted children, seniors, and other writers on the US-Mexico border; she has worked with at-risk youth and with the rural...

Frances Brent's poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Notre Dame Review, Yale Review, and in many other journals. She was born in Chicago and was educated at Barnard College. She studied poetry at Columbia University and the University of Illinois, Chicago. From 1984-1991 she co-edited the literary journal Formations. In 1987 she co-translated Beyond the Limit: poems by Irina Ratushinska-ya She has taught at Yale, Northwestern, Loyola University,...

Neck of the World is the eleventh volume in the prestigious May Swenson Poetry Award series. In it, Daniel Rzicznek offers poems that, in quick angular language, capture the natural world and at the same time extend it into a surreal vision, sometimes dream-like, sometimes dark. Alice Quinn, judge for the 2007 Swenson Award, says this of Rzicznek's work: "Throughout, the language pulsates, always vigorous, by turns knotty and crystalline. ... In Neck...

Volume 13 in the Swenson Award Series, Tomorrow's Living Room offers a pleasantly disorienting verbal territory. The collection is alternately wry and dark, hopeful and bleak, full of unexpected light and laugh-out-loud incongruities. We begin to see that the shape and the furniture of Jason Whitmarsh's world reflect our own (they may in fact be universal), but we're considering them through completely new terms of engagement. Selected by, and with...