A vast collection of poems which won "Poetry" magazine's Levinson prize."Somehow the nuances of daily experience, the warmth, humor, and reflection the poet brings to subjects are quite unlike anyone else's." - J.Parisi

Crossing the Unknown Sea is about reuniting the imagination with our day to day lives. It shows how poetry and practicality, far from being mutually exclusive, reinforce each other to give every aspect of our lives meaning and direction. For anyone who wants to deepen their connection to their life’s work—or find out what their life’s work is—this book can help navigate the way. Whyte encourages readers to take risks at work that will enhance their personal growth, and shows how burnout can actually be beneficial and used to renew professional interest. He asserts that too many people blindly trudge through a mediocre work life because so many “busy” tasks prevent significant reflection and analysis of job satisfaction. People often turn to spiritual practice or religion to nurture their souls, but overlook how work can actually be our greatest opportunity for discovery and growth. Crossing the Unknown Sea combines poetry, gifted storytelling and Whyte’s personal experience to reveal work’s potential to fulfill us and bring us closer to ultimate freedom and happiness.

Audrey Shafer observes the world with a quiet intensity, with a reverence for the everydayness of her children’s toys, the earth outside her window, and the sacred trust of her sleeping patients. Her poems reflect the seamless back and forth of her woman’s life, at one moment breathing for her patients, in the next choosing socks for her daughter to wear. “Barking orders / I stick the tube in / silently curse, pray, sell my soul for the beat of a hidden heart,” this doctor/mother reminds us all of the fluidity of identity. Stunning, truly. –Delese Wear, Ph.D., Editor, Journal of Medical Humanities Audrey Shafer’s poems demonstrate a unique blend of tenderness and steadiness that makes hers a recognizable and welcome voice among contemporary physician-poets. Her images are powerful and compelling. Consider, for example, “gardenias thick as lust” and the “gauze-choked winter sun.” Her line is graceful, yet disciplined; her language imaginative, even transcendent, yet always grounded in “flesh, arm, artery, earlobe” and always aware of “the scrape of the key in the lock.” Sleep Talker reveals that the most ordinary moment in life can also be “the glory and the answer.” –Jack Coulehan, M.D., Editor, Blood and Bone: Poems by Physicians Audrey Shafer has, in abundant measure, all the requirements for the making of fine poems–a well-tuned eye, ear, and heart. A palpable sense of discovery is everywhere in her poetry, unique, contemplative, joyful, and wise. –John Stone, M.D., poet and essayist, Where Water Begins: New Poems and Prose In her first book of poems, anesthesiologist Audrey Shafer, M.D., boldly weaves her professional and personal worlds. These poems, some previously published in journals and anthologies, provide a glimpse of the daily life, including the worries, foibles and glories, of a working mother. The book, although divided into three sections, contains many poems that interconnect the three themes (home, work, and journeys) as a reflection of the impossibility of disconnecting facets of a lived life. The first section, “that I call home”, invokes the poet’s childhood in Philadelphia, the death of her father, love and succor from family and friends, and the fierce and tender joys of motherhood. The love poem, “Home”, written for her husband, is characteristic Shafer: the influence of medical and anatomical knowledge on her experience of the fragilities of love and life. Many poems, however, are far from solemn: “Socks” intertwines humor and maternal love and “Riff” is a self-deprecating romp into drumming taken up in midlife. The second section, “not quite sleep”, delves into the world of the doctor, and in particular, the anesthesiologist. This section may be of greatest interest to those in the fields of medical humanities and pedagogy. In poems such as “Center Stage” and “Anesthesia”, the poet reflects on the nature of anesthesia and the profound gift of trust that her patients offer her. The widely anthologized poem, “Monday Morning”, describes the intimate early morning hours of a doctor / mother.

In Vanishing Acts, Brian Barker cements his reputation as one of contemporary poetry’s great surrealists. These prose poems read like dreams and nightmares, fables and myths. With a dark whimsicality, Barker explores such topics as extinction, power, class, the consequences of tyranny and war, and the ongoing destruction of the environment in the name of progress. A linked sequence of poems forms the book’s backbone, with an oracular voice from the future heralding the return—or hoped for return—of common animals. Part lyrical odes, part creation myths, part excerpts from a bizarre guide for naturalists, these poems mix fact and fiction, science and fable to create an unsettling vision of a dystopian world stricken by extinction, one where the world’s last catfish sleeps “in the shadow of a hydroelectric dam.” The imaginative language and bizarre stories of these poems are perfectly suited to capture a world that no longer makes sense: a man who wears a toupee to hide an injury inflicted by secret police, a group of villagers who make a bad bargain with a land agent. The poems in Vanishing Acts straddle the comic and the tragic. They are by turns funny and haunting and ripe with scathing satire. They draw on the genres of speculative and science fiction as much as poetic traditions, and speak to the precarious state of man and the natural world in the twenty-first century.