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In Sunday Houses the Sunday House, Elizabeth Hughey embraces the possibility that we can learn as much from objects as we can from other people, from the inanimate as much as the animate. Each poem descends upon a place and a time, takes a few notes, and then leaves quietly without slamming any doors. Sunday Houses the Sunday House reveals what the world is like when your attention is focused elsewhere, when your head is turned the other way.

In ineffably beautiful verse, Hughey captures moments in time and place with confidence but without being judgmental. Although it may seem that the scope of these poems is rather small—a good party, a couple of eggs, a housekeeper's daydream—they reveal both a deep intelligence and a spirit of whimsy. Gertrude Stein wrote that she wanted to be "drunk with nouns," and in a sense that is what Hughey has accomplished here.

From a cartographer who wrote to a writer who mapped, the literary significance of surveying is revealed in this study of human relationships to the landscape. From the very beginning, American literature was closely intertwined with surveying. In Surveying the Interior, Rick Van Noy explores the ways that four American literary cartographers—Henry David Thoreau, Clarence King, John Wesley Powell, and Wallace Stegner—concerned themselves with what it means to map or survey a place and what it means to write about it. In the process, he helps define the ways by which space enters the human psyche as definable place, as well as the ways by which physical landscape is transmuted into a sense of place as an intimate, personal manifestation of both physical and existential realities.

Suture and Narrative: Deep Intersubjectivity in Fiction and Film by George Butte offers a new phenomenological understanding of how fiction and film narratives use particular techniques to create and represent the experience of community. Butte turns to the concept of suture from Lacanian film theory and to the work of Merleau-Ponty to contribute a deeper and broader approach to intersubjectivity for the field of narrative theory.

Butte’s approach allows for narratives that represent insight as well as blindness, love, and loss, locating these connections and disconnections in narratological techniques that capture the crisscrossing of perspectives, such as those in fiction’s free indirect discourse and in the oblique angle of film’s shot/reverse shot convention. Butte studies the implications of this chiasmus in the novels and film adaptations of later Henry James works, Barrie’s Peter Pan tales and film adaptations, and the films Silence of the Lambsand Nothing But a Man. Suture’s story in the twentieth century, according to Butte, is a story of the loss of immediacy and community. Yet in concluding this, Butte finds optimism in the Coen brothers’ Raising Arizona as well as in Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson and Marc Webb’s film (500) Days of Summer.

In his convincing and highly accomplished fifth book, Ralph Burns draws on his deep practice and experience. His tones, forms, and subjects are various and striking, and the work of a poet mature and courageous enough to range through the full spectrum of his emotions.

Sometimes Burns is haunted by the strength and fallibility of the Christian tradition, and in many of his poems he explores the conflicts between individuals and the larger world—the mystery and responsibility of choice, consequence and inconsequence, “the terror of being taken.”

Ann Flesor Beck's charming personal account recreates the atmosphere of her grandfather's candy kitchen with its odors of chocolate and popcorn and the comings-and-goings of family members. "The Store" represented success while anchoring the business district of Gus's chosen home. It also embodied the Midwest émigré experience of chain migration, immigrant networking, resistance and outright threats by local townspeople, food-related entrepreneurship, and tensions over whether later generations would take over the business.

An engaging blend of family memoir and Midwest history, Sweet Greeks tells how Greeks became candy makers to the nation, one shop at a time.

Tony Hoagland captures the recognizably American landscape of a man of his generation:  sex, friendship, rock and roll, cars, high optimism, and disillusion.  With what Robert Pinsky has called “the saving vulgarity of American poetry,”  Hoagland’s small biographies of destruction reveal that defeat is a natural prelude to grace and loss a kind of threshold to freedom.

“A remarkable book.  Without any rhetorical straining, with a disarming witty directness, these poems manage to transform every subject they touch, from love to politics, reaching out from the local and the personal to place the largest issues in the context of feeling.  It’s hard to think of a recent book that succeeds with equal grace in fusing the truth-telling and the lyric impulse, clarity and song, in a way that produces such consistent pleasure and surprise.”—Carl Dennis

“This is wonderful poetry:  exuberant, self-assured, instinct with wisdom and passion.”—Carolyn Kizer

“There is a fine strong sense in these poems of real lives being lived in a real world.  This is something I greatly prize.  And it is all colored, sometimes brightly, by the poet’s own highly romantic vision of things, so that what we may think we already know ends up seeming rich and strange.”—Donald Justice

“In Sweet Ruin, we’re banging along the Baja of our little American lives, spritzing truth from our lapels, elbowing our compadres, the Seven Deadly Sins.  Maybe we’re unhappy in a less than tragic way, but our ruin requires of us a love and understanding and loyalty just as deep and sweet as any tragic hero’s.  And it’s all the more poignant in a sad and funny way because the purpose of this forced spiritual march, Hoagland seems to be saying, is to leave ourselves behind.  Undoubtedly, you will recognize among the body count many of your selves.”—Jack Myers

Swimming at Midnight collects the short and middle-length poems from John Matthias’s earlier books together with twenty poems that have previously appeared only in magazines. It is published simultaneously with Beltane at Aphelion, which includes all of Matthias’s longer poems. The two books together represent some thirty years of his work.

The poems in Swimming at Midnight range from early lyrics written in American during the late 1960s to meditative poems dealing with historical, geographical and cultural themes deriving from Matthias’s years in England in the seventies and eighties; they include the epistolary poems from Turns, “Poem for Cynouai” from Crossing, “A Wind in Roussillon” from Northern Summer, and the formal experiments engaging issues of poetics and metaphysics for which Matthias is well known. The book concludes with a section of new poems and translations dealing both with the public world of modern history and the private experience of life in the century’s final decade. The last poem of all connects the work in Swimming at Midnight with the last of the long poems in Beltane at Aphelion.

Critics have been warm in their praise of Matthias’s work. Robert Duncan called his early poetry “the work of a Goliard—one of those wandering souls out of a Dark Age in our own time,” and Guy Davenport has said that his recent work makes him “one of the leading poets in the USA.” D. M. Thomas in the TLS admired the “virtuosity” of Turns and the way “life presses into the poems,” while John Fuller in the same journal found the poems in Crossing “bursting with a masterful intelligence.” In a long essay on Northern Summer, Jeremy Hooker wrote: “In his combination of lyrical and discursive voices, as in subject and concern, Matthias has an exciting range…He writes in some poems from a tension between a scribe’s respect for the integrity of his materials and a magician’s freedom to transform them, and in many poems he brings together the contrasting gifts and is fully present as himself, both scribe and magician.”