David Starkey's A Few Things You Should Know About the Weasel is a far-ranging and fearless collection, of great humour, intelligence and sympathy. Ranging through philosophy, art and history -- both global and domestic -- these poems skillfully chronicle the darkness that is our current age and condition, and the pinpricks of light thta may show us the way out.

From North Dakota, where "emptiness / takes up a lot / of space," to Alabama, where a mother offers "nothing / Less than plenty," David Starkey's poems mark him as nothing less than a "fool / For life." His book gives us a fireworks display of creativity as varied and strange as the states it conjures. We scoot along here in a word-RV bound for just about everywhere, from North Carolina, which possesses, so Starkey claims, an atomic peanut (while Texas doesn't, but provides blowing sage) to D. C., memorable for kids in the backseat who won't shut up, to Connecticut centered on "publish or perish" at Yale. The wonders here depend on constant shifts of focus: sometimes the poems inhabit personae-Thoreau, Sojourner Truth, Elvis (not in Tennessee but in Wisconsin)-sometimes they speak for the poet as memoir; always they surprise and thrill with their oddity of attack, their tart-voiced fearlessness, their range of subject as vast as the great country they so fully evoke. -Barry Spacks, Santa Barbara Poet Laureate The book is illustrated by Rafael Perea de la Cabada

In the wake of George W. Bush's reelection, a provocative study looks at the goals, values, and attitudes of politically progressive writers living in so-called conservative "red" states, featuring contributions by Jonis Agee, Stephen Corey, Robin Hemley, Lee Martin, David Morrell, and David Romtvedt, who offer an insightful look at American politics and issues. Original.

How can students with widely varied levels of literary experience learn to write poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and drama -- over the course of only one semester? In Creative Writing: Four Genres in Brief, David Starkey offers some solutions to the challenges of teaching the introductory creative writing course: (1) concise, accessible instruction in the basics of writing poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and drama; (2) short models of literature to analyze, admire and emulate; (3) inventive and imaginative assignments that inspire and motivate. In the third edition, in response to reviewer requests, the literature and writing prompts have been significantly refreshed and expanded, while new treatment of getting published and the growing trend of hybrid creative writing have been added.