Reading Night Diver is the literary equivalent of having sex for the first time: frightening, blissful, transcendent, addictive, bejeweled with flashpoints of experience never to be forgotten. For my money, Bucky McMahon is the greatest -- also the most underappreciated, underrated and overlooked -- adventure travel writer working today, and one of the best on the team in that long scrimmage of yesterdays. Think of the spawn of weird marriages -- Sir Richard Burton and Barry Hannah; Twain and Krakauer--and you'll begin to get a fix on McMahon, a master essayist and luminous spokesman for the ineffable metaphysical moment lurking at the vortex of knee-buckling danger and heart-stopping fun. -- Bob Shacochis

In Unraveling the Bed, Mia Leonin invents a remarkably specific and vertiginous world of veils and magic, blood and azul thinning to translucent, a frightening and tender portrait of a woman who is sometimes barely breathing and, at other times, rising fully into her opaque human self. What is most remarkable to me in these poems is Leonin's craft -- language that is mouth-wateringly rich, whether in line-breaks or prose -- and the way the poems seem to paint themselves before the eyes. I am grateful for this feast of words and for the enormous spirit behind them, and for the complex stories that changed me as I read. To quote Rukeyser... there is an exchange here in which our lives are met, and created. Mia Leonin offers us a work that raises and transforms energy from a deep, wise, and holy place. -- Maureen Seaton, author of Venus Examines Her Breast

Love, sex, marriage, children, birds, animals, the moon and stars, books, history, myth, life, life, life. These are what the reader finds in this abundant book -- but more, so much more that one feels these poems accrue to the sum of a life, a life lived with absolute attention and fierce presence. Nothing is left out. We range from Bismarck, North Dakota to Heraklion; we suffer the plagues of Biblical Egypt, and we dream of apple pie before a kitchen stove in winter. The scope here, both in formal and open verse, is astonishing. We are fabulous beasts, Bishop declares. And she is the fabulist who ranges far and wide over the earth. This is Bishop's Last Door. She has walked bravely through it, and -- how lucky for us -- she has left it open to her vast and compelling world. -- Frank X. Gaspar

Patti White's new book, Yellow Jackets, is wildly ventriloquistic. Where else would you find sumo wrestlers, Izzy the cat, King Louis the Child, Jimmy Hoffa, the residents of Thicketty, South Carolina, couples at their burnt-out ends, and yellow jackets in one collection? All empathetically expressed, and without a single repeat. If you're bored with books about what the poet ate for breakfast, this one, with its refreshing lack of ego and its generously associated images is surely worth a look. -- Lola Haskins

Mark Jarman selected Kenneth Hart, of Long Valley, NJ, as the winner of the 2007 Anhinga Prize. His book is titled Uh Oh Time.

More information will be available here soon, including reviews, sample poems, and purchasing information.

Uh Oh Time will be published in 2008.