This review is no slender paperback; Big River Poetry Review Volume 1 is a blockbuster 9 x 12 coffee table book with 185 pages of poems. "A magnificent read," says Joan Colby. THIS IS AS GOOD AS IT GETS. Including poems by Pam Uschuk, Phillip Fried, Joan Colby, William Doreski, Sheila E. Murphy, Peycho Kanev, Sybill Pittman Estess, Larry Thomas, Robert Lietz, Martin Willitts, Jr., and many other outstanding poets, this is the first print issue of Big River Poetry Review, an on-line and print journal of fine original contemporary poetry compiled, edited, and published in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, see bigriverpoetry.com. In this issue, we are printing all the poems we published on-line between the Review's inception in late May 2012 and the end of December 2012.

The forty-eight poems in Sky Sandwiches echo John F. Buckley’s wry, paradoxical perspective, a point of view evoking both the transcendent and the quotidian, fusing a sky associated with religion and higher yearnings with the sandwiches of simpler sustenance. In his poems as in this world, people fly like crooked arrows, seeking targets both above and below. The collection describes how our desires lead us to absurd hopes and stale resignations, humble dreams and sublime despairs. It recounts the ways we may seek both eternal salvation and a half-decent Italian sub. Parts are tender. Parts are funny. Parts will get stuck in your braces.

A timely new edition of a pioneering work in Latino literature, National Book Award nominee Gary Soto's first collection (originally published in 1977) draws on California's fertile San Joaquin Valley, the people, the place, and the hard agricultural work done there by immigrants. In these poems, joy and anger, violence and hope are placed in both the metaphorical and very real circumstances of the Valley. Rooted in personal experiences—of the poet as a young man, his friends, family, and neighbors—the poems are spare but expansive, with Soto's voice as important as ever. This welcome new edition has been expanded with a crucial selection of complementary poems (some previously unpublished) and a new introduction by the author.

Over the past three years Alice Oswald has been recording conversations with people who live and work on the River Dart in Devon. Using these records and voices as a sort of poetic census, she creates a narrative of the river, tracking its life from source to sea. The voices are wonderfully varied and idiomatic - they include a poacher, a ferryman, a sewage worker and milk worker, a forester, swimmers and canoeists - and are interlinked with historic and mythic voices: drowned voices, dreaming voices and marginal notes which act as markers along the way.

2009 Caldecott Honor Book An ALA Notable Book A New York Times Best Illustrated Children’s Book A Charlotte Zolotow Honor Book NCTE Notable Children’s Book When he wrote poems, he felt as free as the Passaic River as it rushed to the falls. Willie’s notebooks filled up, one after another. Willie’s words gave him freedom and peace, but he also knew he needed to earn a living. So he went off to medical school and became a doctor -- one of the busiest men in town! Yet he never stopped writing poetry. In this picture book biography of William Carlos Williams, Jen Bryant’s engaging prose and Melissa Sweet’s stunning mixed-media illustrations celebrate the amazing man who found a way to earn a living and to honor his calling to be a poet.

After many years of publishing journalistic and scholarly articles, Gert Niers decided to break away from this format and to apply to his writing a more personal style suitable for autobiography and memoirs. Arrived at Last is the story of his life in Germany after World War Two and then in America, the country of his choice. He tells his autobiography in an uncomplicated, colloquial fashion the way one would talk perhaps at a bar table surrounded by friends. This approach allows him to comment on many experiences and aspects of life. He also reminisces about his excursions into France, Belgium, and the Netherlands and later on about the many people he met in the German and German-Jewish community of New York City. Everything is seen from a very personal perspective, confession-style. Still the author has rendered historical facts as precisely and correctly as it was possible to him. His descriptions and conclusions are those of an experienced observer. His book is a contribution to minority and immigrant literature, but also a cultural commentary about life in Europe and the U.S.

The poems in CL Bledsoe's fifth collection are at turns funny and tragic, self-deprecating and deeply personal, as readers have come to expect from the author of the autobiographical collection Riceland. In Trashcans In Love, Bledsoe continues to write about the Arkansas Delta of his youth, where "we were...all looking for a place/to stick our hearts for safe-keeping" while "the boarded-over windows/of our mothers' eyes watched from graves half dug/but not full yet." Ultimately, "we aren't looking/ for tomorrow, only an eternal today."

A classic anthology of Minnesota literature, with selections from novels, short stories, essays, and memoirs, that conveys the diversity of the Minnesota Experience.