Harsh and highly accomplished, these poems redeem the people from the paint, plaster and piety. They pull victims and perpetrators alike out of the history and myth of the treasures of Great Arts into the arena of our ongoing moral dilemmas, our struggles for survival as well as for the preservation of compassion and decency in a perennially fallen human world. After reading these poems, we will never again be able to stand before these mysteries of life and death and then, like too many tourists, merely check them off our guidebook's must-see list. Stephen Gibson has created a sequence of poems with the same sweep and dimension as the art that inspired them. --Carolyne Wright<p><b>About the Author(s)</b><p>Stephen Gibson was born and raised in New York City where he met W.H. Auden, who became an important influence on his work, and studied at Syracuse University with W.D. Snodgrass, who became another important influence. His previous poetry collections are <i>Masaccio's Expulsion</i>, selected by Andrew Hudgins as winner of the Robert E. Lee and Ruth I. Wilson Poetry Book Award from MARGIE/IntuiT House, <i>Rorschach Art</i> from Red Hen Press, and the chapbook <i>Bodies in the Bog</i>, published by Texas Review Press. A past Individual Artist Fellowship recipient from the state of Florida in both poetry and fiction, his poems and short stories have appeared in numerous journals, including <i>The Georgia Review, The Iowa Review, North American Review, The Paris Review, Poetry, Prairie Schooner</i>, among others; and in the anthologies <i>Don't Leave Hungry, Fifty Years of Southern Poetry Review</i> (Arkansas) and <i>High Five: An Anthology of Fiction from Ten Years of Five Points</i> (Carroll & Graf ). Mr. Gibson lives with his wife in Florida.