Books in the Johns Hopkins: Poetry and Fiction series

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

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.

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

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.

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).

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

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

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).

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

Like the other characters in Tracy Daugherty's masterful collection, he moves through spaces at once sacred and spoiled, within cities, deserts, and other strange environments, reckoning, taking soundings, trying to find firm footing in the world.

Together, the nine stories in Don't Think illuminate the astonishing fact of existence itself while justifying the Philadelphia Inquirer's assessment that Burgin is one of America's most distinctive storytellers.

The characters who inhabit Blake's haunting landscape-awash in their own worlds, adrift in their own lives-struggle to salvage what they can of their hopes and dreams from the encroaching tides.

This wise and clever book is rounded out with adept translations of work by Charles Baudelaire, Stephane Mallarme, Arthur Rimbaud, and others.

"With humor and verve, Subcortical's dynamic stories delve into the mysteries of the human mind as these haunted characters struggle with economic disparity, educational divides, and the often-contested spaces in which they live.

" With Catch, Release, Harun upends the world once more.

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.

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.

Emotionally taut and infused with poetic imagery, Cake is a bold debut and a portrait of the crisis of the modern relationship.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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."

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.

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.