Patricia Abbott won the Writer's Voice of Detroit's 1997 chapbook contest with The Serengeti Ballroom (Writer's Voice, 1997). The poet writes about what she sees in her everyday world: graveyard rubbings, art fairs, a spray-painted underpass, Little League games, or the homeless, and she does it with grace, fine imagery,:and compassion.

In her chapbook Below the Waterline (Pudding House, 2005), MJ Abell starts and ends with wonderful poems of connection, the yin and yang of loving a mate. In between are delightful yet profound poems of family, both as child and parent, written with a delicate pen.

Everyday Still Life (Persephone Press, 1999) by Lavonne Adams is a prize-winning collection of graceful, often formally rigorous poems, lyrically rich yet subtlely nuanced. Underlying the surface tranquility, Eros informs these poems with its tenderness and ache.

River Effect, by Linda Allardt (State Street Press 1998) is a 56 page collection of well-wrought lyrical free-verse, gentle and elegaic in tone, abounding in nature metaphors. There are many truly fine pieces here.

Maureen Alsop’s Apparition Wren (Main Street Rag, 2007) was also a semi-finalist for the 2007 Walt Whitman Award. Tony Tost describes the book as consisting of prayer book, prophesy and inner almanac. These are strange poems as to content, sometimes confusing, but always a deeply lyrical combination of erotic and meditative. And there is a charming vulnerability to them that makes us return to reread, to parse their subtle message couched in unique language. Added 12/07.

Catherine Anderson is the author of two award-winning books. In the Mother Tongue (Alice James, 1983) dates from 25 years ago but its concern with the immigrant poor and disadvantaged still resonates. The poems are clear and compassionate in their understanding of the complexity of each persons life. In her second book, The Work of Hands (Perugia, 2000), she continues with her theme of the individual in community, again in wise and compassionate lines which are rich with vivid imagery and details that bring all our senses to play. (new 9/07)

Dorothy B. Anderson's Light Filling My Bones (Hobblebush, 2006) is a feast for the senses. The fine-tuned narrative poems, spanning the true-life experiences of the poet including her childhood in China during the 1940?s are further enlivened by the colorful cut-paper collages of artist Donna Bruhl. This book is wise and human and light-filled, as its title suggests. An earlier chapbook, By the Yangtze (Pudding House 2000) collects the poet?s narratives of her Chinese childhood alone. (updated 9/06)

In The House of Time (Chicago Spectrum Press, 2005) and Where Music Lives (Chicago Spectrum, 1999), Louisiana poet Therese Arceneaux gives us two chapbooks of 30 pages each of the lovely rich lyricism we have come to expect from her pen.

Carol Alena Aronoff has produced two books of poems and photographs: The Nature of Music (Pelican Pond, 2006) and Cornsilk (Pelican Pond, 2006). Her poems are lyrical meditations reflecting Buddhist spiritual traditions and, in Cornsilk, the traditions of her adoptive tribe, the Hopi as well as her own native Hawai’i. The poems are imagistic and reverential of nature and the photographs are a perfect accompaniment. (added 4/1/07)

Pale Ramon (Zoland Books, 1998), by Rane Arroyo, speaks of the exile, forever separate from his companions, in these absorbing narrative poems, some set in his native Puerto Rico, others set in a variety of other places.

Rowlock (Junction Books 2000) is an 18 page chapbook by Toronto poet James Arthur filled with excellent imagery and metaphor.

Charles Atkinson's The Best of Us on Fire (Wayland Press, 1992) is a somewhat older chapbook that contains 16 terrific poems, including a personal favorite of mine, "Anger."

Amanda Auchter's debut collection is the fine thirty page chapbook Light Under Skin (Finishing Line, 2006), with its spare and elegant poems shining in their luminous, mythical language. The voice is strong and original. Recommended. (added 9/06)

*** Lana Hechtman Ayers writes about love and the experiences of both herself and her neighbors in the world with spirit and energy in Chicken Farmer, I Still Love You (D-N Publishing, 2007) and the 30 page chapbook Love Is a Weed (Finishing Line, 2006). She mixes the erotic with humor, giving us poems of "sheer lyrical joy " (to quote poet Ilya Kaminsky), occasionally using form to advantage; she is especially adept at the sestina. These poems are brave and truthful, spiked by dry wit, and range from Queens, (New York City) to Seattle by way of New England.  (added 4/08)