I belong to a private online poetry group, and I turn again and again to these poems to share them with my friends. Nothing can substitute for having the collected or selected poems of a single author, but this anthology is unlike any other I've ever seen. Philip Dacey and David Jauss have selected, within the strictures of their chosen subject, an incredible emotional range, from the outright camp of Miller William's Rubaiyat for Sue Ella Tucker (Sue Ella Tucker was barely in her teens./ She often minded her mother. She didn't know beans/ About what boys can do. She laughed like air./ Already the world was crawling up her jeans...) to the hair-raising Rapist's Villanelle by Thomas M. Disch.

I would think this book would be extremely useful to a student of traditional poetry for exploring different forms; the appendices offer very clear explanations of each form and include a mini-index of the poems in the book that use a particular form. There are, for example, seven poems that qualify as hymnal stanzas, five pantoums, and all kinds of quatrains of various sorts: envelope quatrains, Sicilian quatrains, etc.

I see that Amazon charges $48 for this book. Sometimes it's hard to pass over a chunk of change that large for a book, but you've got to believe me, this one is worth it.

Being aware of the craft of writing heightens the appreciation of it. Poetry is a powerful, condensed form of writing, and traditional forms of poetry create a framework that this power presses against. Strong Measures is a fine anthology of modern American poets who work within these forms. Beginning with an accessable introduction to the history of poetic form, followed by examples by over 150 contemporary poets, and ending with an appendix explaining meter, scansion, form definition, and a classification of the poems by form, this is a wonderful reference book for anyone who wants to know where that resonance in what they just read came from.

Quite enjoyable collection - the final story in the collection is so gripping that it takes hold and stays with you long after you finish reading Jauss's work.

"Glossolalia" is one of the best short stories of the last 30 years. Jauss is a writer of importance; read this book!

Vollmer obviously loves Pittsburgh, and readers familiar with the city will probably enjoy this good-natured book. It works best as a set of sociological, journalistic and personal sketches. It's less successful, though, as book of poetry; the artlessness of her approach, the shapelessness of many of the poems, the frequent clumsiness of line, the congested diction and the predictability of the language, together with an overbeholdenness to several unconcealed and imperfectly assimilated influences, give much of the book a disappointingly slapdash quality. Many of the pieces read like works in progress rather than finished poems. It will be interesting to see whether Vollmer will explore similar material again, but with much more artistic control and without as much overdependence on her models, which puts her at a remove from her subject matter. Overall, VOllmer is a promising writer who may emerge with a voice uniquely her own. The blurb comparing the book to O'Hara is unfortunate and irresponsible; any lover of "The Day Lady Died" or "Second Avenue" is going to be disappointed by this book.

Judith Vollmer is perhaps the greatest Pittsburgh poet that ever lived. Like a character, the city is both memorable within moments and devestatingly ugly at its worse. As a Pittsburgher, I know these places Vollmer writes about, and more importantly, understand what it's like to be surrounded by city. She also touches on many of the things that shaves so close to most Pittsburghers: ethnicicity(perhaps not the safest subject to write about by a white woman in todays academy). Her family and her history rolls along the book like so many of the city's hills. The narrative poetry stretches, swings and challenges readers with its dark music the same way Marina Tsvetaeva managed to do. Vollmer can take me on a tour any day -- I know I will come out both exhausted and revived in the end.