Books in the Johns Hopkins: Poetry and Fiction series

Along the way, master poet John Bricuth treats readers to a sly, sarcastic-and sometimes deeply moving-look at storytelling, old-time religion, and the American way.

A collection of stories that features: "Memorial Day", "Memo and Oblivion" and "The Interview". In "Memorial Day", an aging man at a public swimming pool recalls a brief but momentous affair he had with a young British woman in London thirty years ago and the paradoxical role his recently deceased father played in it.

" Funny, raw, and colorfully musical, "Nod" plays what teeters, like a tuning fork.

Magnolias, water, mescal, stars, and fire return again and again in these seven sparse-yet tightly written-vignettes.

Kennedy, and Mark Strand and marked him as "a writer who has mastered his craft, [a] poet [who] can look at the life most of us take for granted and show us what is most real, most precious in it(The Commercial Appeal).

This unique geographic location, with its unpredictable waters, its sinking swamps, its bayous and sloughs, provides a haunting landscape for Glenn Blake's characters.

They blend imaginistic detail and reflection and bring to contemporary subjects what Steele calls "the preservative virtues of formal care".

The author of "Eelgrassand "The Kentucky Storiesnow offers a collection of "mysterious and beautiful(Lee Smith) stories, "as subtle, syntactically graceful, and beautiful as any I've seen(Toby Olson).

His purgatorial mock-journal--dwelling on loss and gain, on difference and effacement, on places and the place of writing--leads into a sequence of captivating prose poems, where imagination centers on the word and language celebrates its own creation.

This poem is an attempt to make sense out of what was apparently in them."

The third section, "nipples rise to spirit", traces a child's growth to middle age, with particular reference to sex and family, while "the presence of Presenceredefines the religious experience.

Ballyhoo offers a sobering examination of the tragicomic nature of the world.

Belli, Octavio Paz, and Euripides, Future Perfect further establishes Charles Martin as a master of invention.

They attain an assurance and stability rare in contemporary poetry, while their careful balance of sadness and joy reminds the reader of the difficult negotiations we make in life.

Renowned for his translations of Ovid's Metamorphoses and the poems of Catullus, Martin brings the perspective of history to bear on the stuff of contemporary life.

Words by the Water is particularly varied and unusually youthful and fresh.

Now in paperback, In the Crevice of Time brings together 176 new and previously published poems by one of the most accomplished and most widely acclaimed poets of our time.

Sunflowers drenched in early evening sun; icy blue, explosive waves along the rocky shores of Maine; September cotton "like strange anachronistic snowin Tennessee-Anderson forges these images into deep ruminations on love, shame, delight, loss, and estrangement.

But most of all it is a highly entertaining series of all-too-plausible vignettes that shows off Stephen Dixon's remarkable talent at its best.

It is a book that can be in turn frightening and funny, touching and tough-and one that is, on occasion, all these things at once.

They may be sad too, but it is a dry-eyed melancholy that is no relation-or perhaps just a poor relation-to the air of "Danny Boy."

From the author of "Frog", these short stories are about loss: culture, allurement, reliability, continuity, potency, companions, skill, child, parent, footing, prize, collection; as well as the flip-side of loss: imaginative recreation, creative refutation and self-destructive creation.

From the author of "Airs of Providence", "The Very Rich Hours", and "The Courage of Girls", this book brings together a dozen new stories.

As much as they ponder, they celebrate in exact, careful, and loving terms the haunting and bracing stimuli from which they originate.

Family pleasures, marriage, the essential moments and mysteries of a seemingly ordinary world that break into magical territory before we can brace ourselves-Jean McGarry puts us in life's rough seas with what the New York Times has called a "deft, comic, and devastatingly precise" hand.

His sharp, bright imagery affirms the unique beauty of our world and explores its invisible mysteries.