In her fifth collection of poems, Ellen Doré Watson lends her supple voice to a multiplicity of characters, each with his or her own particular dilemma, distraction, or disarray: Junie biking home to find a new mom, Edur wondering whether he’s anyone’s father, a pregnant teen starving herself to lose the fetus, or the widower Lew buoyed by a vision of his wife after her death. With a novelist’s finesse and a poet’s details, Watson creates lives that resonate with poignancy and urgency.

In Dogged Hearts Ellen Doré Watson demonstrates a capacious talent for invention and empathy and, with her incomparable linguistic brio, gives us an unforgettable look at how loss and disconnection can usher in chance-to-change reverie and unexpected veerings towards life.

“Adélia Prado’s most recent collection of poems, once more in Ellen Doré Watson’s superbly energetic and natural English, is nothing like any poetry I know in our present moment. Her humor, her dancing solidity, her joy in being alive — I think back to Chaucer, and the poems of Grace Paley. Prado is similarly voluble, playful, down to earth, and cheerful; and she seems to have an uncannily easy-going, even merry relationship with God and all his family. She has given us a perfectly crystalline ex-voto.”—Jean Valentine. Ex-Voto is the second collection of Prado’s poetry translated by Ellen Doré Watson. Their previous collaborative volume, The Alphabet in the Park: Selected Poems (Wesleyan University Press, 1990), was abundantly praised: “The life captured in Prado’s poems is convulsive: from a dark corner of despair she can rocket to pure joy in one line… This is poetry at its hottest and most naked…”—James Tate