In her highly cultivated, intricately crafted collection, The Fact of the Matter, Sally Keith explores the conflict between empirical facts and the emotional matter comprising all things. Keith shows the self as a crucible of force--that which compels us to exert ourselves upon the world, and meanwhile renders us vulnerable to it. With poems remarkable in their clarity and captivating in their matter-of-factness, Keith examines the impossible and inevitable privacy of being a person in the world, meanwhile negotiating an inexorable pull toward the places we call home--one we alternately try and fail to resist.

Turning between the political and personal with astonishing ease, the poems in Peter Campion’s book The Lions  show us at one moment of his disturbing connection to the public political structure, symbolized by Robert McNamara, then in the next, of a haunting reverie beneath a magnolia tree. Campion moves through various forms just as effortlessly, as confident in rhymed quatrains as in slender, tensed free verse. The Lions achieves a fusion of narrative structure and lyric intensity that proves Campion to be one of the very best poets of his generation.