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Melissa Kwasny's work serves as a brilliant tonic, reminding us of the essential gravitas of poems of distinction. Hers present a richly textured surface and a deeply thought interior, and have a compass that deftly mingles the scholarly page with beauticians' hopes and tobacco pouches; a naturalist's tight focus with the wide gaze of a woman of the world; a lyricist's gifts with a philosopher's understandings. This is the real-deal stuff. --Albert Goldbarth, author of The Kitchen Sink, on Reading Novalis in Montana <br> In The Nine Senses, Melissa Kwasny follows the path of amor mundi beyond the 'senses five, ' never parting the real from the dreamt, the dead from the living, the lost from the loved, the solitary from the communal. In a book of prose poems, she makes her turns internally. As with my favorite words, rooms, faces, and flowers, I feel that light is sewn up into them. Between their lines moves an ethics of embodied becoming, like the tree, 'whole and shining, 's
