Measure Press

"... Not to be too 'catmatic' about it: this seriously playful collection belongs in your beach bag, summer hammock, or bedside reading stack."
— Julie Kane

"Ned Balbo is a wizard of the workaday, revealing in a 'parcel of suburbia' signs of our humanity and of the beauty that ennobles it. Some of these poems remind us 'that awe is possible, today, / and should be shared, or taught.'"

 — David Yezzi

"William Baer has gathered what we know about 'the tender passion' and conveyed it in all its guises. Like Lucretius in the fourth chapter of his masterpiece, On the Nature of Things, Baer moves from vivid description to humor (often dark), to despairing honesty, and finally to praise of this most universal human experience."

— Rhina P. Espaillat

Interviews with some of the most influential poets of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

"At once a handbook of forms, a poetry writing text, an anthology, and a succinct history of English verse, William Baer’s clear and elegantly-conceived Writing Metrical Poetry is a rich resource for all teachers and students of poetry, indeed for all practitioners of the art, both in and out of the academy." 
— Rachel Hadas

2007 WINNER OF THE DONALD JUSTICE POETRY PRIZE!

In the Extreme would be a considerable achievement for its simply being a flawlessly realized sonnet sequence; when you factor in that every poem is inspired by an entry in The Guinness Book of World Records it climbs to the level of tour de force. 

--R.S. Gwynn

"... Her words never subside into shopworn sounds, each poem displaying her rare and enviable genius for making verse sing, which is to say croon, caterwaul, belt, syncopate, wail."
— David Yezzi

"... A Modern Herbal is a stunning virtuoso performance, one of the best first books I’ve seen in a very long time."
— Alan Shapiro

Honeymoon Palsy throws one hell of a shindig. On the reception’s dance floor, you’ll find Claudius waltzing with Lizzie Borden, Hamlet jigging and ambling with Ophelia, and a wry 21^st-century smirk in step with genuine grief. Here a wholly contemporary voice is wed to the stateliest and oldest forms of the tradition.

— Dan Albergotti, author of Millennial Teeth

"Gwynn is a comic genius with a tragic sensibility."
— A.E. Stallings

"Rachel Hadas’s remarkable new book treats the Aeneid as a commentary on our times. Just as Virgil wrote against the backdrop of the self-conflicted, imperial turbulence of Rome, Hadas examines our republic as it veers off into possibly irreversible disorder."

— Timothy Steele

2015 WINNER OF THE DONALD JUSTICE POETRY PRIZE!

Though the surface tone shifts from poem to poem, almost all of them glow with a kind of inner honesty that is both their strength and their beauty, “refracting silvered flashes out of reach” as the poet says.

—Dick Davis, Judge

"Tough-minded and precise, Ernest Hilbert’s lyrics, like his old mirror left out at the curb, turn an unflinching gaze on pieces of inner and outer landscapes we often push to the periphery."

—Rachel Hadas

"A.M. Juster’s comic verse is a national treasure. It ought to be locked up in Fort Knox — but no, every reader deserves a crack at it."

 — X.J. Kennedy

"Krisak writes with a metrical and formal eloquence. His voice is both learned and colloquial, demonstratating a careful attention to language and its power to move us."

The Dark Lord of the Tiki Bar is like a late-night bar conversation, full of humor and regret, landing like a punch or prayer. Highly recommended.

— Susan Millar DuMars

2006 WINNER OF THE DONALD JUSTICE POETRY PRIZE!

It’s hard to think of a poet so aptly named as Kate Light, except, of course, for Wordsworth. The step of her poems is light, and plenty of that luminous stuff is shed here.

--Billy Collins

"These last poems of Wil Mills reflect the life he led, a life filled with joy, wonder, and gentle wit. His carefully crafted meditations on keenly observed details of the everyday serve as urgent reminders that we should live our lives more intensely and kindly."

— A.M. Juster

"As a man, a carpenter, and a poet, Wil Mills was always a craftsman, a maker of the truest sort. These poems, wrought from the places and persons of everyday life, depict the near misses and occasional collisions with what Flannery O’Connor called 'grace.'"

--R.S. Gwynn

"The poems in Scarsdale are a series of shocks, like a defibrillator applied to the body of an American family whose heart has somehow died.”
— John Poch

WINNER OF THE 2016 DONALD JUSTICE PRIZE!
“Ryan Wilson’s mastery of traditional forms serves a fresh, distinctive poetry of candor and meditation: soulful rather than brittle, more observant than performative.”
— Robert Pinsky

"What more could any reader want than the memorable poems found in Solitary Bee? One feels her confident voice, her touch — and thinks this, too, is my life."

 — Dave Smith