Authors - W

To Live on this Earth (West End Press, 2002), poet Ken Waldman has turned his personal life into music, as he writes movingly of frozen streets, plane wrecks, back country dance halls, fiddling, love letters : all the sights and sounds of the Alaska he lives in and loves.

Witter Bynner Fellowship Recipient Martin Walls brings us a fresh, audacious voice in his first book, Small Human Detail in Care of National Trust (New Issues, 2000). Intelligent, graceful, patient and surprising, these meditations show how "small human details" enlarge the world. His second book, Commonwealth (March Street, 2005), celebrates the abundance of the world, delving deeply into nature: flowers and trees and insects, including his favorite pillbugs. The language is rich and glorious and this is altogether an outstanding collection. (updated 8/05)

Thom Ward's Small Boats with Oars of Different Size (Carnegie-Mellon, 2000) is, to quote poet Stephen Dunn, "an impressive debut by a poet who makes his language thump while it names and probes." These high-spirited, good-humored yet romantic poems enchant the reader as will the prose poems that are collected in The Matter of the Casket (Custom Words, 2007). These poems manage to be macabre and droll at the same time. Their goofy humor and absurd premises keep the reader both engaged and rewarded. Romance is out the window! Tumblekid (Devil's Millhopper, 1998) and Greatest Hits (Pudding House, 2001) are two earlier chapbooks that continue to enchant.. Amended 11/07.

Charles Harper Webb is the author of Tulip Farms and Leper Colonies (BOA, 2001) and Hot Popsicles (University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), dazzling satirical poems, some in free-verse poetic form, others as intelligent and biting prose poems. Sassy and candid and ultimately very successful, this is one poet to watch. (New 4/09)

Three books: An Otherwise Perfect History (Ithaca House, 1988), Wheeler Lane (Igneus Press, 1998), the new Dark Track (Word Tech 2005) and a chapbook Scared Money Never Wins (Finishing Line, 2004) contribute the powerful and direct poems of Julia Wendell. She combines worldly and domestic histories with the intimate and familial. Highly charged lyrics of elegance and power rub shoulders with engagingly light-hearted poems that toss their manes like the horses she often writes about. Personal loss, learning to define our passions, indeed define the person we are becoming, are themes that dominate and enchant the reader. www.wordtechweb.com

Marlys West, in her Notes for a Late-Blooming Martyr (University of Akron, 1999), dismantles old answers " religion, love, family, material things " and offers them again as skewed solutions, the wary possibilities of transformation. Naomi Shihab Nye says, "(her) poems do jazz with our brains"...the stunning dazzle-dance of her lines and these spiky twists of wit" as she struggles to maintain hope in the midst of darkness, and does so with grace and humor. (posted 12/05)

In The Price of Everything (Mellen Poetry Press, 2001), Gail White's first full-length collection, we find the hallmarks that have made this poet so widely-published over the years: humor, warmth, intelligencc, a perceptiveness about the human condition, and touches of irony, all couched in precise language, many set in formal prosody done so skillfully that the reader may be unaware of its use. One of the best to come out in 2001.

Julie Herrick White's Greatest Hits (Pudding House, 2001) focuses a number of her dozen poems on the Midwest landscape from which she springs, especially the Kankakee marsh, and on her forbears. My personal favorite was "Beach Cottages, Etcetera" but there's a lot to admire here.

Kelley Jean White brings her knowledge as an inner city pediatrician to bear in her searing chapbook Against Medical Advice (Pudding House, 2004). There is empathy as well, and fine writing. We are transported into the lives of her patients, usually poor, often courageous, always moving.

Longs Peak (Chestnut Hills Press/Brick House, 1998) by octogenarian activist Chester Wickwire, casts a rueful and affectionate eye at his own history. These poems embody courage, conviction, humor and simple grace. The Wonder Horse (Chestnut Hills, 2000) continues the saga.

Jill Williams' The Nature Sonnets (Gival Press, 2001) is a set of twenty-four winsome sonnets. A mixture of the poignant and cheeky, these well-crafted sonnets are refreshingly ironic. See also: http://www.jillwilliams.com/

Vermonter Robert Carl Williams brings us Low Sweet Notes (Thomas Mellen, 2003),a generous and wise collection of the poet's observations of the natural world and a celebration of family love clad in their natural lyric form. To quote Bruce Weigl, this is poetry that has the potential to help us endure our mortal lives. (updated 2006)

Adonis Garage (Nebraska, 2005) won the second Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry for poet Rynn Williams. Her distinctively brash yet lovely voice could come from nowhere but New York City with its mix of disillusionment and desire. Details are urban, often raw, sometimes with tender edges. In this terrific first book, the subject is survival. (added 11/05)

Alive Beyond Blue (Mellen Poetry Press, 1996) is Thomas B. Williams' collection of gentle, finely-etched and often mysterious poems of the natural world told with a clear singing voice.

Mary Winters has a chapbook, Grace Itself Invisible (Pudding House, 1994) and a book, A Pocket History of the World (Nightshade Press, 1996), both filled with her wry and trenchant observations of the world and its doings. These slightly surreal poems have a sting to their wit but are never without compassion as well.

Epicenter (CustomWords, 2004), Wendy Wisner's assured first book, contains poems in love with the world. It is interior and sensitive to the nuances of feelings,, finding tenderness and unease at the core of family. This is a woman at moments of discovery, surprised at what she has found, says poet Donna Massini. (added 8/05) Visit poet's website here: www.wendywisner.com

Desperate Acts & Deliveries, by Scott Withiam, won the 2004 Two Rivers Review Chapbook competition. These are quirky poems and prose poems ranging in subject from dental anasthesia to Ariadne myths, Ovid, Mary Cassatt paintings, ducks, missing hikers, and more. Intriguing.

Carolyne Wright 's first collection, Stealing the Children (Ahsahta, 1978), are poems of imagination, landscape and faith. From A White Woman's Journal (Water Mark 1985) ccollects some poems of her Peace Corps experience. Her Blue Lynx Prize winning Seasons of Mangoes and Brainfire (Lynx House, 2000), explodes into a multiple reflection on cultures, flesh and mind in surefooted narrative poems of imagistic precision and keen clarity, a compelling documentary of the human spirit brilliantly seen and passionately rendered. Carolyne also has a chapbook of Greatest Hits (Pudding House, 2002)

Nancy Means Wright's fine chapbook, Walking Up Into The Volcano (Pudding House, 2001) gives us warm poems of home and family, the first section dealing with childhood memories, the second part with more recent events, poems about her own daughters.

The Snake Charmer's Daughter, by Pittsburgh-based poet Michael Wurster, contains the motional joy, pensive dreaming, and lyrical denunciation of violence for which this poet is noted. This is a book of wonder, urgency and grace.