Jessica Lamb

JESSICA LAMB walks the night rounds of the spirit in this first, unflinching collection of poems, keeping her accounts of desire and disappointment, loneliness and kinship, fertility and decay. The book is animated by a fierce, imperfect love–a mother's love for her young son; a woman's love for her long-time husband; a human's love for this afflicted earth. In poems of gratitude and lament, Jessica Lamb explores the private, and often silent, negotiations a woman makes between the longings of the solitary heart and the demands of marriage and parenting. In the midst of hunger, plunder, and surrender, she finds small stubborn signs of promise and renewal.

Raised in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, Jessica Lamb received a master’s degree in Italian literature from Stanford University before settling in Portland, where she has taught writing for many years through the Northwest Writing Institute, Portland Community College, and Literary Arts’ Writers in the Schools program. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Poetry, The Southern Review, and Willow Spring.

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John Witte

JOHN WITTE's poems have appeared widely, in publications such as The New Yorker, Paris Review, and American Poetry Review, and been included in The Norton Introduction to Literature, among several anthologies. He is the author of Loving the Days (Wesleyan University Press, 1978), The Hurtling (Orchises Press, 2005), and Second Nature (University of Washington Press, 2008).

John is also the editor of The Collected Poems of Hazel Hall (Oregon State University Press, 2000), and a former editor of Northwest Review. He is the recipient of two writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a residency at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. He lives with his family in Eugene, Oregon, where he teaches literature at the University of Oregon.

For more info:

http://www.washington.edu/uwpress
http://poems.com

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