<DIV><p><B>Winner of the National Poetry Series.</B></p><p>The poems in Kristin Hatch's debut collection ooze with the viscus of shattered reality. Bodily, almost animalistic, they flirt with apocalypse, accumulate like diary entries from a madman's kitchen where knife blades hover near the jugular. "This is a documentary," writes K. Silem Mohammad, who selected this book for the National Poetry Series, "or these poems are promotional cartoon avatars, installations of a longer, live-action Emmy-winning series in which glee and melancholy, revulsion and beauty, lyric and satire, living flesh and chopped-up meat combine in sinister gurlesque fantasia." A terrifying and necessary first book.</p><p><B>From "annunciation":</B></p><p><I>bent, he talked me through all my tied, big like i was kansas or a diagram sketched with arrows pointing to my special parts with "trick" and "murder" spelled out in clean, legible type. his documentary voice uncled at my ankles.</I></p><p><I>my legs folded back for him & he'd say my mouth was a hauntbag. he could take the willows from my lungs. i hated himbut i begged for it in the underhang & the bad would bang into bird shapes & every time my ugly became less ugly, ours. for a while, the mirrors were too thick with it to see through.</I></p><p><I>after he left, i picked at my at my toes & tried to get ancient. stungdumb, & gnarled against that autumn, i sat barefoot to imagine his arm hair?all of it shuttering like wheat in a stormfield?featherlight little marys?a legless army, aghast at god & beginning to show.</I></p><p><B>Kristin Hatch</B> has an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her poems have appeared in various journals including <I>Black Warrior Review</I>, <I>Colorado Review</I>, and <I>Indiana Review</I>. Her chapbook, <I>through the hour glass</I>, is forthcoming from CutBank and is about the soap opera <I>Days of Our Lives</I>.</p></DIV>