Books in the Notable Voices (CHUP) series

Whether they're graveside tourists in Rome or lovelorn girls on a bus, the characters in Dawn Potter's ravishing second collection of poetry, "betray a fatal longing" for love's complications. By turns comic and melancholy, hungry and euphoric, these poems surrender again and again to the passions and panics of experience.

Wiler explores a fundamental dilemma of human experience: How to enjoy life when you are acutely aware the Angel of Death could come to visit at any moment.

Walking with Ruskin looks at the difficulty of perception, of just how hard it is to simply "see" without asserting our own self-importance, self-needs, and self-justifications

The struggle and anguish in finding meaningful work in an economically depressed city

Married life, soldiers in war, the triumph over age

Freedom and awakening of an adolescent, Bronx bred, Irish Catholic girl

In poems that range from New England to the Southwest, Without My Asking, takes its cue from Psalms 90's petition--"teach us to number our days." That biblical sense of limits--of what we can know and not know--and, ultimately, the mystery of before and after that encloses our existence is the center around which these poems turn, both seasonally and from day-to-day. In poems that attend to the events of our lives--from the deaths of parents to hummingbirds at a bird feeder--these poems work to utter "Yes" to all that happens, that "peculiar affirmative" that recognizes, as Elizabeth Bishop says, "Life's like that . . . also death."

A twenty-three part poetic sequence; a working-class mother speaks passionately of the more than four decades of personal history that binds her with her emotionally-troubled and estranged son