"There is an extraordinary lightness to this collection of poems-it is as if they are floating just above the surface of the earth or in dream as they celebrate love marriage family friends-the small accidents and genuine delights of everyday life. The poems are filtered through a sweet and deeply thoughtful sensibility. You will grow to love the narrator of these poems as she leads us bravely and with caritas to the threshold of things frightening or heavenly 'that might be about to happen.' Christine Poreba's debut collection is radiantly lovely." -Sidney Wade

Christine Poreba's work has appeared in The Southern Review, The Sun Magazine, Subtropics, The Pinch, and other publications. In addition to the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry she is the recipient of a Florida Individual Artist Fellowship and a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize. A native New Yorker she currently lives in Tallahassee Florida with her husband son and dog. She teaches English as a Second Language to adults.

"Poreba winner of the 2014 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry maximizes the effects of visceral language in this fine-tuned debut. She understands how to manipulate traditional poetic forms effectively and uses dissonance and discord to underscore the possibility of the impossible becoming real. Her ability to expand a seemingly simplistic or inconsequential event or snapshot into a weighty mini-movie is evident in the opening poem Toward Home. Setting the tone by focusing on a horseshoe crab's struggle to turn upright which is used as a metaphor of rebirth against the odds a victory over what appeared to be inevitable: what I thought was dead becoming alive again. When she s not contemplating the pastoral Poreba examines the nature of identity and human institutions using metaphors of construction (building a house doing renovations etc.). In Rebuilding a House the subject takes on the personality of a conventionally feminine woman one dressed to kill in stilettos and straightening out her pleated skirt. Similarly in A Knob, a Post, a Scattering she uses home renovation as a lens through which to observe the ins and outs of a domestic relationship. Guided by a quiet determination and clear-eyed self-awareness Poreba knows how to find stability in moments of tumult." --Publishers Weekly Jan. 2016