Left to right, back row: Andrea Mayfield, Valerie Mayfield, Chuck Meier, Ken McCaffrey, John Rodgers, Mary Petrich, Ruth Hale, Maureen Johnson, Veronica Schell, Barbara Crotts. Left to right - Front row Mary Ann Fear, Dreama Powell, Shirley Securro, Floriana Hall, Sparrow Kelley, Linda Grazulis POEMS OF BEAUTIFUL OHIO - Then and Now is a compilation of poetry by twenty members of THE POET'S NOOK. It was written to be a source of inspiration and information for people who live in Ohio, to attract people who are thinking of moving to Ohio, and to encourage visitors to Ohio. Ohio is a state of great beauty and one of the safest states to live in the United States. Ohio is one of only several states which can boast of the four seasons....

Winner of the Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry, 2008. Ohio Violence starts with scandal: the narrator leads the high school football coach into the cornfields, but as she promises, "nothing happened." In the fields, in the woods, in the dark water of Ohio, something is happening. Girls disappear, turn on each other. Men watch from the rearview as the narrator hedges, changes her mind, then shows all in this break-out collection of bittersweet and cataclysmic lyrics. "Alison Stine writes, 'Believe me.' I am telling you a story, ' and the story she tells us we believe as it unfolds. The poems are moving--beautiful, tragic, death-haunted, and uncanny--like old folk songs and murder ballads--lovely on the tongue, heavy on the heart. As a narrator, Stine does not and will not swerve when faced with the brutal, the adamantine and the ordinary damage that equals a life."--Eric Pankey, judge and author of Reliquaries ALISON STINE is a 2008 winner of a Ruth Lilly Fellowship. She was born in Indiana and grew up in Ohio. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, she is the author of the chapbook Lot of My Sister, winner of the Wick Prize. Her poems have appeared in such journals as The Paris Review, Poetry, and The Kenyon Review. This is her first book. She lives in Athens, Ohio.

In The Poetry of James Wright the author traces Wright's formal evolution and concentrates on his consistent themes: the artist's role in society, the artist's search for poetic and personal identities, the power of poetry as fortification against the onslaughts of time, and the definition of a good and humane action. Charting the poet's evolution from his first book, The Green Wall, to the last collections, This Journey, Elkins discusses one major book I each chapter, explicating the more important poems in detail and explaining how each volume is part of a progression from youthful imitator to mature innovator. Wright's individual struggle, taking place as it did in the last half of the 20th century in America, dramatizes the central problems of the creative individual in a late industrial society who is trying to turn a life into are. Wright worked in the great tradition of the adamant individualists in our literary heritage, and, like all of his formidable ancestors, he refused to trust the socialized self he found attached to his soul, refused to be diminished or circumscribed by any society's definition of himself. The effect of reading and studying his complete work is the recognition that Wright is a major 20th century American poet whose apparent simplicity and occasional sentimentality can obscure the complexity and maturity of his courageous confrontation with the problems of living and writhing in contemporary America.

Collects the finest critical writing on one of the masters of American poetry

Featuring “Good Bones”—called “Official Poem of 2016” by the BBC/Public Radio International. Maggie Smith writes out of the experience of motherhood, inspired by watching her own children read the world like a book they've just opened, knowing nothing of the characters or plot. These are poems that stare down darkness while cultivating and sustaining possibility, poems that have a sense of moral gravitas, personal urgency, and the ability to address a larger world. Maggie Smith's previous books are The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison (Tupelo, 2015), Lamp of the Body (Red Hen, 2005), and three prize-winning chapbooks: Disasterology (Dream Horse, 2016), The List of Dangers (Kent State, 2010), and Nesting Dolls (Pudding House, 2005). Her poem “Good Bones” has gone viral—tweeted and translated across the world, featured on the TV drama Madam Secretary, and called the “Official Poem of 2016” by the BBC/Public Radio International, earning news coverage in the New York Times, Washington Post, Slate, the Guardian, and beyond. Maggie Smith was named the 2016 Ohio Poet of the Year. “Smith's voice is clear and unmistakable as she unravels the universe, pulls at a loose thread and lets the whole thing tumble around us, sometimes beautiful, sometimes achingly hard. Truthful, tender, and unafraid of the dark....”—Ada Limón “As if lost in the soft, bewitching world of fairy tale, Maggie Smith conceives and brings forth this metaphysical Baedeker, a guidebook for mother and child to lead each other into a hopeful present. Smith's poems affirm the virtues of humanity: compassion, empathy, and the ability to comfort one another when darkness falls. 'There is a light,' she tells us, 'and the light is good.'”—D. A. Powell “Good Bones is an extraordinary book. Maggie Smith demonstrates what happens when an abundance of heart and intelligence meets the hands of a master craftsperson, reminding us again that the world, for a true poet, is blessedly inexhaustible.”—Erin Belieu

A lyric narrative that celebrates the struggles, the joys, and the dignity of working-class life in the Rust Belt cities.