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.

A captivating, no-holds-barred collection of new poems from an acclaimed poet and novelist with a fierce and original voice Dothead is an exploration of selfhood both intense and exhilarating. Within the first pages, Amit Majmudar asserts the claims of both the self and the other: the title poem shows us the place of an Indian American teenager in the bland surround of a mostly white peer group, partaking of imagery from the poet’s Hindu tradition; the very next poem is a fanciful autobiography, relying for its imagery on the religious tradition of Islam. From poems about the treatment at the airport of people who look like Majmudar (“my dark unshaven brothers / whose names overlap with the crazies and God fiends”) to a long, freewheeling abecedarian poem about Adam and Eve and the discovery of oral sex, Dothead is a profoundly satisfying cultural critique and a thrilling experiment in language. United across a wide range of tones and forms, the poems inhabit and explode multiple perspectives, finding beauty in every one.

Sister Mary Appassionata has been talking herself into David Citino's poetry collections for many years. Charming when she wants to be, pushy by nature and by vocation, determined to say what she has to say, Sister Mary has evolved into a recognized literary personality, very popular with readers of Citino's poetry. She has now persuaded both poet and press that she is ready for her own breakthrough book, arguing that everything she has said in the past is still true and that she also has important new observations to make. The Book of Appassionata presents Sister Mary's new poems and brings together in one volume all her poems from Citino's previous collections.

In Corey Van Landingham's Antidote, love equates with disease, valediction is a contact sport, the moon is a lunatic, and someone is always watching. Here the uncanny co-exists with the personal, so that each poem undergoes making and unmaking, is birthed and bound in an acute strangeness. Wild and surreal, driven by loss, Antidote invites both the beautiful and the brutal into its arms, allowing for shocking declarations about love: that it is like hibernation, a car crash, or a parasite. It soon becomes clear that there is no antidote for grief or heartbreak, that love can, at times, feel like violence, and that one may never get better at saying goodbye.

The poems in Bat Ode speak to the way we live today and how it feels to occupy such a mongrel, fast-changing, postmodern world. Yet rather than breaking with the linguistic or poetic past, these poems seem to renew it with a fresh vision. Jeredith Merrin's sense of humor, her formal poise, her heart and wit, situate her as one of our most convincing social poets.

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

When William Heath began writing poetry in the 1960s, James Wright hailed him as "one of the most brilliantly accomplished and gifted young poets to appear in the United States in quite some time." Now after an award-winning career as a novelist, historian, and literary critic, he has returned to his first love. Night Moves in Ohio vividly captures his memories of growing up in Poland, Ohio, a suburb of mobbed-up Youngstown, the city at the heart of the thriving Steel Valley but notorious as Little Chicago for its numerous gang-land bombings ("Youngstown tune-ups"). Heath's poems, by turns raunchy and poignant, evoke via his unblinking eye, ironic asides, and acute ear for the American idiom, the dangers and delights of a by-gone era.