Alison Stone
Perfectbound paperback, ISBN:  978-0-9888279-3-6, 80 pgs., $15.95

Alison Stone presents us with forty-two poems of struggle and redemption.  Her style is crisp and unencumbered by literary pretense.  Stone evokes the raw emotions that inspired her poems with a rare honesty and clarity.   Although her main theme is femininity and maternal love in a dangerous world, she takes her readers into the shared common experiences that bind us together as humans.  The torment of AIDS, memories of drug abuse and the loss of loved ones provide imagistic mirrors to all human suffering in her poems.  Simply put, they connect to real experience transfigured into language as experience in itself.  These poems saw original publication in the best literary magazines, including Barrow Street, Poet Lore, Poetry, The Paris Review and Ploughshares.  Stone’s work has received the 2003 Many Mountains Moving Poetry Award, Poetry’s Frederick Bock Prize and New York Quarterly’s Madeline Sadin Award.

“Stone understands that poems, as Robert Lowell encouraged, must be events in themselves and not merely records of events.  Whether psychological or philosophical, or advancing the intensity of raw emotion, Stone’s poems are urgent and dramatic, put themselves and by extension the reader, at risk.”                      -Thom Ward

“Stone is not a ‘literary’ poet (there are enough of them).  Her text does not depend on other texts.  She is interested in a woman’s truth, and has something hard won (but won) to give her readers.  This is strong poetry.”                      – Allen Grossman

“Stone offers lean and sparkling poetry that invites us to join with it – poems that are, in their way, multi-faceted spaces to explore, discovering what we may, and grafting what we bring.”                                               -Timothy McLafferty, Verse Wisconsin

Now available in ebook