In the poem that gives Angela Patten’s new collection its title, the fossilized tongue of St. Anthony sits under glass, a reminder of “the numinous particulars of flesh.” As it takes on a meaning beyond words, the severed tongue is a wry exemplar for these eloquent memories and telling details.... Read more

I'd bet anything that James Sturm is a picker of scabs. The part-time Vermont resident and director of White River Junction's Center for Cartoon Studies specializes in graphic novels chronicling historical wounds, from scrapes to gashes. Like humorist and National Public Radio commentator Sarah Vowell, Sturm is interested in the personal stories that combine to make up a big historical fact. But Sturm's fictional tales, in their particular tragic absurdity, give us more than social history — they give us art.... Read more

Paige Ackerson-Kiely is a brilliant bad-ass. The Lincoln poet won the 2005 Poets & Writers Writers’ Exchange prize and the 2006 Sawtooth poetry prize and is on the faculty of the New England Young Writers’ Conference at Bread Loaf this summer. Her first collection of poems, In No One’s Land, introduces a poet with razor-sharp insight and a voice at once seductive, reckless and sad.... Read more