Spell

A new collection of provocative work from the author of Or To Begin Again, a finalist for the 2009 National Book Award in Poetry Ann Lauterbach is one of America´s most inventive poets, acclaimed for her fierce, sensuous, and intellectually charged work. In her tenth collection, Spell, Lauterbach activates the many meanings of "spell": her sense that the world is under a spell from which it must awaken, to spells of passing weather, to her desire to spell out life´s difficulties and wonders, and how sin-gle words (and their etymologies) might inform and enlighten our contemporary condition. In short poems, poem sequences, and a series of "Conversations with Evening," Lauterbach calls upon all her imaginative resources to locate a new hybrid poetics of reality, with wit, urgency, and candor.