Having a bad language day? Exhausted by the flatness, the banality, the weighty tedium of so much infospeak, e-mail speak, t.v. speak, and yes, even much contemporary poetry-speak? Fret not... A brighter fate awaits you, at least while you immerse yourself in this sublime book. Holmberg is not a plainstylist, and those intimidated by baroque syntax may, at first, find this extravagant cocktail going to straight to the head. We have lost our edge for such intensity. But knock back the full glass and feel the fire temper your neurons. Holmberg is the real thing. Welcome to the scintillant galaxies of English.

I came across this book quite by accident and upon flipping through the first few poems, I was stunned by the richness of language and image. Holmberg levels a penetrating gaze at the world; a gaze which seems to peel back one layer of significance after another. From the microscopic details to the macroscopic musings, these poems are a tour de force. They affirm for me that a combination of beauty and intellection continues to thrive among America's younger poets.

A Protocol For Touch was awarded the Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry and secured Constance Merritt as a truly gifted poet with a recognition richly deserved. Exile: The air is dry in the much-promised land,/And mountains whisper "this is not your home":/Still nights entice me like a knowing hand,/And strangers' hands have sometimes brushed my own./Yet milk, so sweet, turns rancid in my mouth,/And I can name no answer to desire/Since God is everywhere and I'm without./I taste the stone's sleek kiss, lie with each hour/And the dream of taking up my staff and rod,/Or no longer lingering weary at the door/My hands heavy with holy tears for God/Or some woman who always fails to come./But it's hard to leave the vigil once begun,/And waiting soon becomes much more than for.

These poems reward the first reading with immediate joy, and reward each subsequent reading with continuing provocation and power. I love this book. I'm giving it to all my friends. Any woman (or any man, for that matter) who has wrestled with the troubling intersections of individual spirit and received authority will find in these poems a wealth of comfort and wisdom, as well as shocking realization!

Vassar Miller's work will grow on you. Her poems are beautiful and deep. Sometimes difficult but always melodic, her words draw you back again and again. Experience reinforces the reader to believe that there is a depth in her work that deserves to be fully understood. You will want to read these poems over and over. This is an excellent collection from a masterful poet.

Jeanine Hathaway, The Self As Constellation (University of North Texas, 2002)

Wow. This stands with Deborah Digges' Vesper Sparrows as the best collection of poetry I have read so far this year. While it is inconsistent, especially in the earlier poems in the book, it rises to some pretty amazing heights. Hathaway, ex-nun, teacher, and mother, draws on the disparate experiences of her life to come with pointed, compact parables that often do the reader minor mischiefs while affording pleasures in here twists of diction:

One April day the mad priest
approached a bakery truck and prayed
the words of consecration. The driver,
a parishioner, called the bishop to buy
every biscuit, loaf, and bun; the whole
cargo the Body of Christ.
If that priest is still loose
changing substantially everything
he knows he knows how,

what if no one overhears? Kids will
eat those sweetrolls and stop
the breakfast fight; a man slipping
the sandwich from his sack will find
his union dues; the student
over midnight toast sees life and major
work; imagine the flap and chatter aloft,
full of breadcrumbs, the birds.
("Wonder Bread")

These kinds of pleasures are liberally sprinkled throughout this volume. Well, what are you waiting for? Go get one! ****

Jeanine Hathaway won the 2001 "Vassar Miller Prize" in poetry and the collection of her verse comprising The Self As Constellation clearly documents her as having mastered the thematic and structural principal of her work. Grandmother God: You delivered land out of water, settled/radiant horizons with variety, then the need/for legs. That was when you knew time flash,/the glint of something turning perhaps away.//With evolution's ears like petals and shells,/you listen now for your early comfort,/the voice you found for necessity.//Although the dark has thinned, gone/vague with shadows, is not what/you would recall; though even your name/is quiet, you are aware of that old hum,/dissatisfaction rising again like a resource.