The stages in Cary Waterman's career as a poet and teacher have been mile posted by the publication of a succession of fine collections dating back to 1975. She has now gathered together the best individual poems from each of these books along with a robust sampling of her most recent work into one attractive book. We meet up with a tension between the wild and the domestic again and again from a graphic scene of butchering pigs to decades later a lengthy poem sequence recounting Persephone's descent into the underworld. There are moments to set the reader on edge-a marriage blender set on chip-and plenty of quiet moments too and spots of sheer silliness. Making elderberry jam becomes both a heroic and an erotic experience an acupuncture treatment is transformed into a spiritual ordeal. Perhaps Robert Bly said it best: "As an artist she insists that she will not let a descriptive line stand unless an inner concern of her own has broken through it..."

Cary Waterman is the author of six books of poems including The Salamander Migration (University of Pittsburgh Press) When I Looked Back You Were Gone (Holy Cow! Press) and Book of Fire (Nodin Press). Her poems have been included in numerous anthologies and have been awarded prizes in the Federico Garcia Lorca Poetry Contest the Rash Awards the Common Ground Review Poetry Contest and So To Speak the feminist journal from George Mason University.

She has been awarded fellowships by several foundations and has also received the Loft-McKnight Award of Distinction in Poetry. She has taught at many colleges and universities most recently in the MFA Program at Augsburg University. She lives in St. Paul.