A House for Last Year's Summer

Terry Hermsen's new book ranges from bicycles to baseball, children to elders, Ohio rivers to the Strait of Magellan, offering "words like stepping stones" that lead us into a world gone deep and strange, redolent with memory, association, and feeling. Hermsen's mindful attention--intense yet delicate--yields crafty, loamy poems in forms from sonnets to shaped poems to riddles. The surprises--of language, imagery, and insight--are many, and the rewards are rich. --Jeff Gundy, author of Abandoned Homeland