®

Today's poem is "Hardy Bird"
from The Secret Language of Women

The University of Evansville Press

A. M. Juster is a two time winner of the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award. His collection of Petrarch translations, Longing for Laura, was published in a hand-lettered edition by Birch Brook Press in 2001. Juster's poems and translations have appeared in The Paris Review, Carolina Quarterly, The Formalist, Michigan Quarterly Review, and many other publications.

About The Secret Language of Women:

"A. M. Juster, on of my all-time favorite satirists, it a master of the sonnet and of every other form to which he turns his hand. For a long time, Juster's admirers have been owed an ample collection of his work, and at last that debt is paid. Read it; revel in it; be enlightened moved and regaled."
—X. J. Kennedy

"Readers of A. M. Juster have long known he writes a mean sonnet and is an expert hand at the short poem. How delightful to find he also goes the distance. The title poem of The Secret Language of Women is rare stuff indeed: a verse narrative as engrossing as it is ambitious, the lyric imagination running like a gold thread through the warp of history.

By turns wry, elegiac, satiric, wistful, this collection displays broad emotional range as well as technical finesse. Juster's work is in lively conversation with the tradition and the contemporary, sometimes literally so, as with the virtuoso "Letter to Auden." I was also delighted to find a generous selection of Juster's excellent translations included — an anthology of bright flowers. Poetry fans are in for a real treat."
—A. E. Stallings

"For some years now, I have read and admired A. M. Juster's poems in magazines, recognizing him as one of the contemporary masters of the sonnet and short poem. But The Secret Language of Women reveals him as a poet and translator of wider accomplishment than I had been aware of. His versions of Petrarch are stunning, and the title poem of this collection, which speculates on the origins of "nushu" (a type of Chinese script originated by women and known only by them), strikes me as one of the finest long narratives of recent years. A poet of great clarity and intellectual courage, A. M. Juster may now reach the wider audience he so richly deserves."
—R. S. Gwynn



Support Verse Daily

    Please support Verse Daily's very generous sponsors:
Sponsor Verse Daily!

Home  Archives   Web Monthly Features  About Verse Daily   FAQs  Contact Verse Daily   Publications Noted & Received  

Copyright © 2002, 2003 Verse Daily All Rights Reserved