<DIV><I>Flying Blind</I> is Sharon Bryan's third collection of poems. The first two, Salt Air and Objects of Affection, were published by Wesleyan University Press. She is also the editor of Where We Stand: Women Poets on Literary Tradition (Norton, 1993). Her awards include an Academy of American Poets Prize, the Discovery Award from The Nation, and two fellowships in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts. She was poet-in-residence at The Frost Place in 1993. She teaches as a visiting writer, most recently at Dartmouth College and the University of Houston.<P>"Sharon Bryan's third collection reveals a clever, ironically detached curiosity about how human beings mediate experience through language. Whatever personal emotions underlie these witty, deftly-crafted poems are transcended by Byran's rationalism and her focus on how we have 'invented words to keep the world / just out of reach.'-Poetry<P>"A brilliant collection of poems, Bryan's book reveals a carefully constructed bridge of dignity between life's tragedies and its more humorous idiosyncrasies. Bryan studies the thoughts that lie hidden behind our common experiences . . . . A wise book full of the author's love of language and all its veils and party horns, the secret and the celebratory."-Amazon.com<p>"Reading [the poems of <I>Flying Blind</I>] is like watching a trapeze artist suspended between one flying bar and another, framed by the essential element of air. I found myself laughing, delighting in Sharon Bryan's original turn of mind, spinning on her surface wit. And I found myself saddened by a generalized sense of loss that incorporates my own. At the deepest level, Sharon Bryan's terrain resides in each of us."-<I>The Georgia Review</I><P>"The finely crafted, intelligent poems in Bryan's third collection concern the relationships or perceived relationships between life and death, the living and the dead, and, more urgently, our struggles to communicate on the subject. . . . These poems require bravery, compassion, and patience, for they are difficult, painful, and not always self-disclosing. Their deeply personal literary and spiritual drama is at times prayerful, at times macabre, and at times almost celebratory."-<I>poetry calendar</I><</DIV>